“The gift of doctoral study is that you get the time and space to obsess about something you’re (hopefully) interested in…”
-Jeannie Holstein
The above is taken from the following link about returning to graduate school to tackle a PhD project and finding it fun. A very interesting read: ‘Academia is a very well kept secret’.
A part from the obvious discussion on salary, TA or other forms of support, here is a list of relevant questions you should be asking your future thesis advisor:
This topic probably happen between you (the thesis advisor) and the first author (your grad student) for almost every paper: what is the author list and order?
Daniel Wessel at Organizing Creativity has a short and very interesting post on this subject: Authorship of Scientific Articles | ORGANIZING CREATIVITY.
A worthy read and numerous useful links.
For an undergrad student, applying and getting a summer job in a research group can be a life changing experience. This is when you will get a taste of what doing scientific research, along side graduate students, feels like. For many, this is all the necessary push needed to apply to graduate studies.
As a follow up to the post “PhD project or PhD projects?“, here is a simple and effective post by Seth Godin:
The best creative solutions don’t come from finding good answers to the questions that are presented.
They come from inventing new questions.
Two of my PhD students have successfully defended their thesis in the past three weeks. For both of them, they have accomplished what constituted the biggest project (in term of scope and time) of their life yet.
However, is it really one project or a collection of multiple projects forming a whole, called a PhD thesis?
Ruminating... 