There’s plenty of advice out there for graduate students on how to get through the 4+ grueling years at the bench, but Irving Herman, a physics professor at Columbia puts a different spin: The Laws of Herman (spoken like a true physicist!), described in this week’s Naturejobs (see here).
There are 20 of them, ranging from the practical (#9: “If you would be unhappy to lose your data, make a permanent back-up copy of them within five minutes of acquiring them.”), to the daunting (#14: “Usually, only when you can publish your results are they good enough to be part of your thesis.”), and the cynical (this is my personal favorite: #17: “Your adviser wants you to become famous, so that he/she can finally become famous.”)
What are some other laws of graduate life that Herman hasn’t thought of?
I found that article to be spot-on. Herman speaks the truth (but I sincerely hope he is wrong on #14. Otherwise, I may be in trouble). I have known a number of graduate students to have horrifically difficult tenures in their labs due to poor communication with their mentors and poorly defined expectations on both sides. The only law I can think to add, and the important lesson I learned, is “Providing motivation is no one’s responsibility except your own.”