Professional degrees--These
give you highly specialized skills needed to carry out a particular
type of profession. Examples would be an MD (medical school), a
JD (law school) and a DVD (veterinary school). These programs
have advisors at NKU and will not be dealt with further here.
Masters degrees--These programs
range from 1 to 3
years. Some are research
degrees,
meaning that you will carry out a research project, as well as take
some courses. Most
programs require 30 semester credit hours. Most research degrees
are usually the master of science
(MS) in the physical and some of the social sciences and the master of
arts (MA) in the humanities and some of the social sciences.
Recipients usually write a thesis. This degree is sometimes used
as a final step for people who need some research skills, but not the
extensive training received in the PhD. Sometimes the MS/MA is
used as a step before getting a PhD. There are also MA degrees
offered in the sciences that do not typically require a research
project.
The other kind of masters
degree is actually a professional or
quasi-professional degree.
There is usually an "M" somewhere in the degree, but it may be
something like "MFS" (Master of Forest Science). These degrees
are sometimes called "in-course," and they are a sequence of
courses. They are similar to an undergraduate degree, although
usually more high-powered. These masters degrees often
serve as certification for professionals in various fields
of biology.
Masters degrees are often the most appropriate degree
for someone interested in
working for a government agency or industry where some research ability
is required, but the majority of the work is standard procedures, such
as monitoring. These degrees are often required as a terminal
degree
in most K-12
education systems.
Doctoral degrees--This is
usually the PhD (Doctor of Philosophy), although sometimes they appear
under other names (ED for Doctor of Education, DS for Doctor of
Science, or DA for
Doctoral of Arts). This is a research
degree
that usually takes 4-8 years to complete. This degree is
generally
required to a) teach in a college or university (a masters degree is
sufficient for many community colleges, but even there the PhD is often
preferred); b) to train graduate students; and c) conduct independent
research in academic settings and in most industrial, non-profit and
government settings. Note that the PhD can often disqualifyyou
from other kinds of work. So make sure you really want to do
these kinds of work before you invest the kind of time and effort
needed to earn the PhD.
Kinds of Graduate Programs
Both
masters and PhD degrees are awarded by schools that emphasize
research. But there are research schools, and then there are
research schools! Some schools emphasize the PhD, focus on
cutting-edge research, and are interested in turning out successors to
the Nobel-winning scientists that staff their departments. These
are also called "Research I" schools, and these included departments at
top private universities like Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford, and
large
state schools like Berkeley, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio State and
Kentucky. There are other Research I-like schools at relatively
small universities like UC, Miami of Ohio, and Ohio University.
Can NKU
students succeed in these environments? Sure, some of you
certainly can, but make sure you want to do that. That's an
important thing to do, but recognize that most working PhDs don't work
at those kinds of institutions. Most work at schools with more
emphasis on teaching and less on research (like NKU). Research I
schools will certainly give you the tools you need to succeed at those
kinds of institutions.
You may want to consider "Research II"
schools. Most of these confer both the PhD and MS, although some
only grant the MS. Many of these programs have more of an
emphasis on masters degrees, which may be attractive for students
who are not certain they want to pursue research-based careers and
intending to end their education with the masters. These can be
highly appropriate programs for students considering a PhD.
First, you may find someone who is top in their field that you really
would like to work with, and the individual advisor is much more
important when earning a graduate degree than earning a bachelor's
degree. Second, these programs may give you a better preparation
in teaching than Research I schools, especially if they have a
"Preparing Future Faculty" program or something similar.
Why Go to Graduate School?
Maybe this section should be called, "Why not
to go to graduate school." You shouldn't go to avoid looking for
a job, because you like being in school, because it looks like
professors have a cushy job (they don't), etc. You should
go
because you enjoy learning about new topics, through your research and
that of others, and sharing that knowledge with others through writing
and teaching. You should also go if you are self-motivated and
like planning out your work day, and you like to be continually
learning new things.
If you like doing all of those things, then going to graduate school is
an excellent
choice. Otherwise, it is not. Graduate school and a career
with a graduate degree is
tremendously rewarding, but it is not without costs. Many of your
classmates with a bachelors degree will end up making much more money
than you with a masters or doctorate. They will be able to get on
with some of the "adult" things in life--having kids, buying a house,
etc.--while you will still be in graduate school. At reunions, if
you didn't have kids while you were at NKU, you may find that your kids
are 10 years younger than your classmates! If you are female and
interested in starting a family, going to graduate school in your 20s
and 30s can put a real crimp in your plans. If you go on to a
postdoc and then an assistant professorship, you may find yourself in
your 40s before you feel ready to have kids, and your body may not be
as cooperative as it was when you were younger. As Emily Toth,
the author of Ms. Mentor's
Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia
states, most successful academic women have 0 or 1 kids. (By the
way, all women and most men will benefit from reading this book if they
are considering a career in academia). Unfair and not right, but
academia has still not completely gotten used to the idea of women as
students and professors yet.
How to Choose a Graduate Program
Selecting a graduate program is completely different from selecting an
undergraduate program. When you looked at colleges for your
bachelors, you probably considered the reputation of the school, costs,
proximity and whether they had the appropriate majors. You then
earned your degree by taking many courses with many different faculty,
both in and out of your program.
In graduate school, you will not be taking a lot of
courses, in most cases. You will be working primarily with one
faculty member,
your advisor. You will be conducting research on either a topic
that he or she is considered an expert, or at least something they
consider themselves to be highly competent to supervise. So, the
first thing you need to ask yourself is, "What am I interested in doing
research on?" Then you need to find out who is considered the
tops in their field or is currently doing research on that topic.
Most students review the scientific literature for the topic(s) that
most appeal to them and select potential graduate advisors from those
authors. The faculty here at NKU can help you in that
regard. Check out their web pages, and read some of their recent
papers.
Don't confine yourself to schools in the area, like UC, UK and
MU. All of these schools have programs with top people, but they
may not do what you are interested in. The top person may be at
the University of Maine; they may be at the University of Hawaii; they
may be anyplace in between. Don't be afraid to look at all parts
of the country. If you go into academia, you are likely to end up
living someplace where you didn't grow up. Note that currently no
tenure-track member of the Department of Biological Sciences was born
in
Kentucky!
Don't confine yourself to just biology departments. For one
thing, there usually is no such department at most Ph.D.-granting
institutions; biology is usually broken up into 2 or more
programs. But don't just look at programs with the name "Biology"
in there. Biology is a very interdisciplinary field.
Working biologists are found in quite a number of other departments and
programs, such as medicine, nursing, and public health (biomedical
areas), engineering (biomechanics), geography, fisheries, range science
and forestry (applied ecology), and mathematics, statistics and
computer science
(genomics, biostatistics and biocomputing). Remember, the type of
degree you get will matter much less than who you worked with.
Once you've found someone, look around and see who else is in their
department, and who else has related interests elsewhere in the
university or at least nearby. There are 2 reasons for
this: 1) your interests may change slightly while you are in
graduate school, and you will want some other advisors to fall back on
if that occurs; and 2) you will need to put together a committee to
guide your research. It will be a lot more helpful to your
progress if you have committee members that can actually be helpful!
In most PhD and masters programs, you should not expect to
pay for the degree (some professional/quasi-professional masters
degrees are an exception). Most programs have a nominal tuition,
but you should expect to get a at least a partial tuition waiver.
You should also be paid a
stipend in the sciences. Stipends usually come in two
forms: teaching assistantships (TA) and research assistantships
(RA).
Many incoming students get the TA. Here you are
paid for assisting a professor in a usually freshman- or
sophomore-level course. Responsibilities vary widely, so find out
about that. If you are interested in a teaching career, you
should be a TA for at least part of you time in graduate school.
An RA, on the other hand, pays you to do research. Some students
may spend most or all of their graduate career as an RA, especially if
your advisor is well-funded. The amount of stipends is quite
variable. You should think about whether it's sufficient to live
on, as you want to avoid working at other jobs--that will only
lengthen the time you are a poor graduate student. Whether the
funds are
sufficient often depends on the location of the campus. A stipend
of
$20,000 may be impressive at a rural Midwestern or Southern
campus, but it may be inadequate in San Francisco. Yet another
reason why you should visit the campus.
Don't forget about nationally competitive graduate fellowships.
The National
Science Foundation, the Environmental
Protection Agency (suspended for 08/09), the National Institutes of
Health, the Department of
Homeland
Security and the Department of
Defense all have graduate fellowships. These pay well and
can be used
anywhere. They really strengthen your curriculum vitae (CV; the
academic equivalent of a résumé) for future employment,
too. Even if you don't get one, you will have gained the
experience of writing a research proposal, which you will need in the
future. So apply! Deadlines are usually in the fall of the
year before they begin.
VISIT THE CAMPUS! VISIT THE
CAMPUS! VISIT THE CAMPUS!
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Even if you have to
hock the family heirlooms, do it. Some advisors will fly you in
and put you up; make sure you ask. You are quite literally going
to be entering into a relationship like that of a medieval apprentice
for the next several years. You want to be sure that you can work
effectively with your advisor, his or her colleagues and other
students, and the
surroundings. Otherwise your life may turn into a living hell.
1) Visit the advisor. Find out what he or she is currently doing,
which may be different from their latest publications. Find out
what areas they are excited about. If they have other students,
ask them about their students' research. Pay close attention to
body language, subtext, connotations, etc. Remember, this person
is going to have a great deal of control over your life for the next
few years, and you want to make sure you don't start entertaining
Columbine-like fantasies about them. They will usually have a
good deal of say as to whether you are admitted in the first place,
too.
2) Visit the other students. Preferably your advisor's students,
but if there aren't any, talk with other students in the same
program. They will usually give you a no-holds-barred description
of the program and the advisor. Take what they say with a grain
of salt; grad students usually aren't happy unless they have something
to complain about. But if they are excited about what they are
doing, that is a very good sign. If they are mostly negative,
that is a danger sign, and you may want to reconsider that
program. Ask them about stipends and living expenses, as they
will have experience in living on whatever the university pays (the
faculty are often oblivious).
What You Need to Apply to Graduate School
GRE: The Graduate
Record Exam
is like the ACT or SAT, except more
high-powered. There are different GRE tests; the general and the
subject area. Almost every graduate program requires the
general. Many require the subject area, usually Biology.
You don't have to take both parts the same day. In fact, it's
probably best not to, unless you enjoy the feeling of your brain
draining down your spinal cord! You should have at least
glanced at the web page during your junior year. This test is
offered at several times and in many places in the area; unfortunately,
one of those places is not NKU. Check here to see where it
is offered.
Application: The materials needed here vary widely. Most
schools require:
Transcripts: All
of your college transcripts, from NKU and any
place previous you may have attended. The college's registrar's
web page usually tells you how to order them.
Letters of Recommendation:
This is probably the most important
part of your application. Ask faculty who know you fairly well,
either through courses or projects, to write these. Ask them well
in advance of the deadline, and make sure they have addressed envelopes
with the right forms & proper postage, if appropriate. Then
ask them if they can write you a good
one. Lukewarm letters are worse than useless, and graduate
advisors are usually expert at reading between the lines. If you
have done any kind of research at NKU, make sure whoever supervised you
writes one of your letters. Research experience will give you a
real boost. Almost everyone who applies to graduate school has
decent grades and a reasonable GRE score. But most of what you do
in grad school will be research, and experience in this area shows that
you can do it.
Cover Letter: This
letter
serves several functions. It introduces yourself to the review
committee and allows you to highlight specific aspects of you want the
committee to notice. Mention any research and teaching
experiences you have as an undergraduate. These experiences show
the reviewers that you won't be starting from scratch in their
program. Also, highlight specific experiences and
projects from student organizations that will be useful in their
graduate program (e.g., directed a service project, organized a new
program, etc.). Mention if you've already met with specific
faculty in the department and that how their interests overlap
yours. Review committees like to see that you've done your
homework and have made some investment in getting into their
program. Finally, tie your background and the department's
graduate program together with specific career goals. You're more
likely to get an acceptance letter if you show that you've thought out
how the department will benefit from admitting you, as well as how your
goals will benefit from being admitted.
How the Graduate Advisor Will Look at You
While you are considering how the graduate advisor will benefit you, he
or she is also thinking about how you can benefit them.
Training a graduate student is much more time-intensive than training
undergraduates. In many ways, graduate students are the
intellectual progeny of the advisor, and he or she wants to be proud of
their kids. But also, their success is partially contingent on your
success. Your research also advances their research. When
you publish the results of your research, they will almost always be
co-authors, so it will be a publication for them, too. Your
findings will allow them to apply for their next grant. If you
are
funded off of an existing grant, the successful completion of the work
is partially dependent on you.
For those reasons, most graduate advisors are less concerned about
your
grades than about your abilities to work hard and well. If they
pay attention to grades, it will probably be mainly the upper-division
courses in their area. They are not going to worry too much about
that D you got in Art History as a freshman! There is usually a
minimum GPA they like to see, but that is about it. Your score on
the GRE is not weighted as heavily as you might think, either.
There is usually a minimum, but most graduate advisors are aware that
about the only thing the GRE score does is predict success in the 1st
year of graduate school only. What the advisors are most
interested in is your potential to design and execute a project in a
reasonable amount of time and your abilities to write and talk about
it coherently. That is why the letters of recommendation and your
cover letter are so
important. Your letter writers will be assessing you on precisely
these
kinds of abilities. That is also why research experience is so
important, because you have a track record, not just a potential.
What the First Year of Graduate School Will Be Like
You may have thought you worked hard at NKU, and you certainly
have. But you will work much
harder in grad school. During the 1st year or two, you will
probably be
taking some classwork, and you may be TA-ing a course, too. But
you will also be doing a ton of reading, in preparation for your
project and the comprehensive (usually oral and/or written) exam that
most programs require in the 1st year. If you don't know the
abbreviations of the leading journals in your field, as well as the
closing hours of the library, you haven't been working hard
enough. Expect to be short on sleep. Don't expect to see
much of your spouse and/or kids if you have them. Early
universities were modeled on monasteries, and the traces of the
monastic disciplines are still part of modern universities. On
the positive side, you will be embarking on an intellectual adventure
where you absolutely immerse yourself in the field. You will
become an expert in your chosen area. You will also have
interesting colleagues--your fellow graduate students--to talk to,
commiserate with, cry on their shoulders, etc. It will be intense
but rewarding.
After you get through the first year, it gets better. With most
or all your coursework and your comprehensive exams behind you, you can
focus on the research. There will still be periods of intense
activity, but it won't be quite relentless. Eventually (2nd year
of masters degree, later for doctoral degree), you will
be at the point where you can start writing your thesis. That
presents its own challenges, but we won't address that here in this web
page. A
good resource:Advice for
Undergraduates Considering Graduate School