I did undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics. During my off-semesters, I did MRI research with Chris Bowen and Steven Beyea at the NRC Institute for Biodiagnostics (Atlantic). I happened upon this group when looking for research opportunities after my first year of undergrad, and it stuck. I loved working with the group and stayed in the lab for over 5 years. This experience seeded my interest in Biomedical Engineering, where I could work with both math and engineering, as well as human anatomy and [patho]physiology. Skipping a few steps in this story, I ended up pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, specifically in Neural Engineering.
PhD’s are tough, demanding endeavours. As I’ve had many conversations with students considering pursuing a PhD in science or engineering, I wanted to share some of points to consider. Note that these are difficult to answer without the benefit of first-hand experience and hindsight, but having them in writing will hopefully help guide and inform the prospective planning.
Overall, PhD's require a whole lot of persistence and so you want to make sure you've done your due diligence in picking a city, school, dept, lab, project that you're excited about, that you care about, that you’ll be willing to keep trouble-shooting and nudging up the Sisyphean hill day-after-week-after-month. Bring your curiosity, your willingness to explore, your persistence, and your self-management. Insights from Rob Butera, PhD (as of this writing, Dr. Butera is the VP for Research Development & Operations at Georgia Tech): "You are not a failure if you leave your PhD program! Nationwide, probably only about 50% of STEM PhDs finish. Faculty are sometimes surprised by this number -- data from my own campus supports this, and in my own co-hort of 20 first-year PhD students 30 years ago, I can only count less than 10 that stayed in our program and finished. In my experience, there is no smoking gun on why (i.e. it is NOT everyone failing their qual exam). The attrition is for a wide range of reasons, mostly for personal reasons. In some domains -- like neural engineering -- we are seeing exponential job growth in industry (and not in academia). While a PhD may be required and serve that job well, there are many other jobs where the employer may want the skills you already have obtained -- even if you did not finish your PhD." Lastly, it's ok if you don't know what you want to be "when you grow up". Remember you're not trying to find THE right option, just pick amongst many good options and try to avoid the ones that aren't good fits. Let me know if you have additional thoughts!
1 Comment
Kimberly Mitchell
2/4/2021 11:25:42 am
Hi there
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
January 2019
Categories |