"Colleague: You're an incoming 5th-year graduate student; you're just about done!"
"Me: ...Actually, I'm an incoming 4th-year graduate student...."
"Colleague: Oh! ...well, you've got a long way to go man!"
It was a friendly joke, of course, but it got me thinking: how do graduate students measure their time on this degree (PhD) and why? I have heard it measured in terms of years left. I have heard it measured in terms of years since started. I have even heard it measured in terms of "forever-ness". I have never really put too much thought into how long I have been here and how much more I have to go -- they have been merely numerical facts and averages. But thinking about it, many people seem to attach vast emotions to these numbers. But why?
In agreement with the famous PhD comics series, it seems that nearly all newcomers to the graduate program are "full of life, hope, and dreams of fame and success." It seems to usually be accompanied by the dream of "get rich quick." Finish the program asap and publish as many papers as possible. But I never really adhered to that dream coming into the PhD program; I entered hoping for a long tenure whereby I would emerge as a "Renaissance biologist." To me, graduate school is the last frontier of studentship -- where I would be most free to study all that I wanted (excluding my retirement where I could do just that too).
High-throughput versus low-throughput
I recently had a discussion with my lab-mate about the graduate student in a high-throughput versus a low-throughput lab. High-throughput labs run large-scale (often thousands to millions of mini-experiments), systematic experiments that usually feel repetitive. Publishable data almost always take a long time, even with maximum physical exertion, due to the scale of projects. However, once compiled, the end-data is always rich with information for a very wide-range of scientists. Low-throughput labs tend to be more focused onto a few genes/proteins; they are more detailed and thorough. Intellect, hard-work, and some luck can definitely lead to a slew of publishable work although this does not have to be the case.
By the end of this discussion, I concluded that both lab types are simply just that, different in nature; thus rejecting the notion of a better or worse work type.
This discussion ties into my earlier conversation because I came to a general hypothesis:
"New graduate students tend to be overly optimistic about their future success as a graduate student
and will tend to see low-throughput labs as the best opportunity to get rich quick [in papers]."
Biology is a fast-changing field and deciding how to make moves in the field will always be difficult. I have naively separated lab types into high versus low-throughput; clearly, there is a spectrum.For me, I will try to tread the unknown forest [high-throughput focus] and leave a path of my own. Only time will tell how that turns out.
