Group meetings and advising styles

In Berkeley's chemistry program, the first-year students are strongly encouraged to have settled on a research group to join by six weeks into the semester. With that soft deadline rapidly approaching, attendance at group meetings is high. Several that I've been to have been standing-room-only, or have had to be moved to a bigger room to accommodate the expected crowd--at some meetings, dozens of first-year students have shown up for meetings of groups that are 15-20 people in size. Ultimately, probably about two people will probably join a group of that size in a given year, so I did not expect that there would be such high attendance at the group meetings.

It's interesting to see how my pre-conceived notions affect my perceptions of what's going on at a given meeting. For example, Professor A is known in the department to be pretty inaccessible and is a (personable, friendly) bigshot with a large research group. Professor B has a smaller research group and is not as well-known. I went to both group meetings this week and observed a similar dynamic: both Professors A and B didn't seem to know much about what their students were presenting on. They asked basic questions that seemed to indicate they hadn't spent much time thinking about these projects. When Professor A did this as a post-doc was presenting, I thought, of course he doesn't know what people in his lab are doing--I've heard he's hard to reach and has such a large group that it's hard for him to keep up on what's going on in the lab. When Professor B exhibited similar behavior with a senior graduate student, however, I caught myself thinking, it's great that Professor B gives his students so much space! It looks like they really have the freedom to do what they want. It must be because he trusts his students to work independently, and these students seem to have cultivated that skill well.

Really, they were doing something very similar--asking questions that they probably would have asked before or thought about had they spent time discussing their students' projects with them--but I assigned completely different motives. Really, the reasons for their apparent distance are complex but encompass both of these motives: both professors are busy, and both have observed that their students--at least late in their graduate careers--will work well and produce interesting results without having their hands held.

I've heard that Professor A meets with his students when they first join the lab to make sure things are on track, and then pretty much disappears for a couple years. During this time, the students are pretty dependent on other graduate students and post-docs for advice; meetings with Professor A are only held to discuss big new ideas or a shift in direction because things aren't working out. But once his students have been around for several years, Professor A actually talks to them more than he used to because by then they have enough experience that he trusts their intuition about their science and what ideas would be good to pursue. This model seems to work well for Professor A, but I am a little wary of entering a research group where I don't have access to the "big idea" expertise that a professor has when I want it. Ideally, my research adviser will give me all the room I want, but also be there to talk when I want to discuss the big picture.

Classes and grades

In graduate school, you're no longer supposed to worry about grades. People were kept in this cycle of worrying about their grades as undergraduates because if they applied to graduate schools they needed to impress--it was like college admissions all over again.

(This was especially true of pre-med students--I knew several who spent hundreds of hours volunteering with organizations they didn't care much about, or who decided to major in something sort of bio-related but sort of quirky, based on the hope that their applications would stand out and give them an edge in admissions. I readily admit to doing this sort of thing when I was in high school, but now that I have a little more perspective I can appreciate how silly all of this was.)

To impress upon us new graduate students the worthlessness of grades, pretty much everyone gets an A or a B. Students who do really poorly might get a C, which is considered a failing grade. But it's kind of funny how graduate schools are upfront about the fact that they're going to inflate everyone's grades so that we know they are meaningless. I appreciate it. (I wouldn't mind doing away with grades altogether, but that's a topic for another post.)

Despite our professors explicitly telling us that this is graduate school and we needn't be concerned with our grades, there has still been plenty of chatter about them. For example, after the quizzes for one class were returned there were groups of students who immediately complained to one another--this looked like a scene right out of my undergraduate organic chemistry classes--about how the quiz assessed too narrow a range of the material, the grading was too harsh, the concepts weren't properly explained, etc. These may have all been valid criticisms of the format of the class and the quiz. But it appeared to me that they were grounded in dissatisfaction with a low grade, which really no longer matters. I wonder if this will continue or if we will learn to relax when it comes to grades as the year goes on.