Starting a Doctorate

   Since I started writing this blog, blogs have become much better.  Many have progressed beyond simple online diaries to legitimate publications.  I would like to promote two blogs in particular, my

younger brother's (by blood)

and my little brother's/good friend's (by decree of Alpha Gamma Omega Executive council/by compatibility)


   Now, my stats suggest that my readership consists of pretty much myself, but considering that I publish a post about once a year these days, I am not surprised.   In any case, I don't think my promotion of their sites is going to do them much good.  If nothing else when I read my blog, I can click the links.

  The coursework today happens to be on the light side, so I thought I would take the opportunity to process the past two weeks.  Looking back on posts that I wrote when I graduated from college, it is interesting to think that I am doing exactly what I wanted to do at the time, but the road there was circuitous, and the reasons I am doing it are different.

  I never considered pursuing a PhD until my last year at undergrad.  I remember during my second year at Davis, I thought I would probably just get an M.S. in some life sciences field and work as a research assistant in a lab somewhere.  By the time graduation approached, I thought grad school had been ruled out completely.  My grades were not great, I had about a 2.9 GPA, and my GRE scores were above average, but nothing special (my best score was verbal and I scored somewhere between 80th-90th percentile).  Furthermore, I basically hid from most of my professors so getting letters of recommendation was quite a challenge.   I did not expect to get into a Master's degree program at Northwestern.  Even more so, I did not expect to go to Kenya after I graduated and then change my plans and get an MPH at Emory University.  In both cases someone on the admissions team must have seen something in me that suggested my ability to succeed in graduate school.

  During my time at Emory I developed an interest in getting a PhD, but not in Epidemiology, which was the focus of my MPH.  What really excited me was lab research, particularly in pathogenesis of infectious diseases.  In fact, as I look back, I believe that the most interesting classes I took during my MPH had to do with biomedical science in some way.

Come Fall semester of second year, I was faced with the decision of job or more school.  Interestingly enough I was equally pessimistic about my chances of getting into a PhD program as I was about getting into a Master's program.  To understand this, you should probably understand my situation.  I had two advisors for my thesis, one in South Africa and the other at Emory.  In addition, I worked in my Emory advisor's lab, but for all intents and purposes my PI was an assistant professor working for my advisor.  The work I was doing in the lab had absolutely nothing to do with my thesis but was simply out of interest in the research and keeping the option of a PhD open to me.

Without going into very much detail, when application time came around, neither of my advisors were an option as far as letters of recommendation.   I knew my advisor in South Africa did not have an abundance of favor for me, so I did not go barking up that tree.  This is an entirely different tale.  Suffice it to say that I learned quite a lot from that experience, most of it the hard way.

In the case of the Emory advisor, I have to say that I was initially surprised that he was not able/willing.  His reason for declining was wanting to wait until I finished my thesis.  That seemed fair enough.  After all, the lab work I had done was really for his assistant professor.  My thesis was more directly under his jurisdiction, and it had not been completed in any significant way at that point.

In any case, I was not willing to wait another year pinning my hopes on the chance that he would like my thesis so I could get a letter of recommendation from him.  Besides, I suspected that there was more involved than the stated reason.  I am not entirely sure on the specifics.  All I know is that academia is very political, particularly when it comes to graduate school, and no one ever seems to tell you this in undergrad.  I suppose getting my MPH was not only an education in public health practice, but also in workplace politics.

In the end, my letters came from my PI, and two professors from some of my smaller courses.  I had spoken to one professor about my desire to pursue a PhD, and she had expressed support for this desire.  The other professor did not know me as well as the others, but I was a strong enough student in his course that he was willing to write something for me.

So, take this and add in GRE scores from a second round of test taking that were slightly worse than the first time, and you have a pessimistic PhD program applicant.  Looking back I think I had three factors going for me.

1) The strength of my letters
2) The name of my school
3) My research experience, even if it had not produced anything publishable to date

Regarding my research experience, the project that led to my thesis did involve submitting a proposal for competitive funding.  My proposal was accepted, so that may have helped.

After all was said and done, I simply asked God for wisdom in my decision, and I submitted applications to UCLA, USC, UC Riverside, and Loma Linda University.  I was accepted to UCR and Loma Linda.

As someone who has been attracted to a big name all his life, choosing to attend UCR was out of character.  It is the lowest ranked school that I have ever attended.  The fact that my choice was between UCR and Loma Linda may have had something to do with the circumstances I have described above.  In the end, I decided to ditch any concern about the rankings.  I wanted to pursue a career in biomedical research and now a door had been opened to pursue that path.  Furthermore, UCR was offering me a pretty decent fellowship.  I had never been paid to go to school before!

This description makes the decision seem easy, but truthfully I agonized over it quite a bit.  Once I decided to even do the PhD, I then had to decide which of the two programs was better for me.  In the end, the hard truth of the debt I acquired over the course of getting the MPH convinced me that going into more debt was a bad idea, especially for a PhD.

So, if you have stayed with me this far, here I am in the second week of a doctoral program.  I think if someone were to glean lessons from my academic life thus far they would probably resemble this list:
1) Trust God.  The path that He takes you on is perfect, but you don't usually realize this until afterwards.  Most of the time you never realize it.
2) Even really bad situations are salvageable if you have at least one advocate.
3) If you don't mind going to a school that is not as well-known, don't let weak stats (e.g. GPA, GRE scores) prevent you from pursuing a graduate degree.
4) If you find yourself with weak stats and don't mind taking a gamble on the low probability of getting into a big-name school, go for it! In the case of PhD applications, this didn't work out so well for me, but it seemed to work for the Master's degree.
6) Pursue your interests with singular purpose.  It will save you from getting caught in the mire of politics and rumor that graduate school (or any institution) can be.
7) We will have to wait and see if I am actually able to earn the degree.

Those are some of the things I got out of this in any case.
As it turns out, I think this is going to be helpful in this PhD program.  This is something of an unusual program in that we have an extremely heavy course load in the first year.  This is because we take all of our classes with the first year medical students at UCR, with slight variations, including rotating through labs to find a major professor.  This places us at a disadvantage in two ways.  First, we have less time to devote to a lab rotation than other graduate programs, and second we basically complete year 1 of medical school and nobody really cares because we are not going to be medical doctors.  Despite this, I find the material fascinating and I am enjoying the challenge.  I am aware that I have a unique privilege to devote myself to learning.

My discussions with other graduate students in the program have convinced me that the lessons I have learned thus far in my academic career will serve me well in this program.  Getting into labs seems to be a highly political endeavor (surprise), with rumors abounding on which lab is better, what lab to avoid, the things that impress Dr. So-and-So, how to avoid the bad side of Dr. Something-or-other.  This reminds me that in the end, I am the one who has to make the decision.  I have to make the decision to study and excel so that I can pass the first year.  I have to decide if a lab will be a good fit for me.  Finally I will have to decide what I am going to do when/if I get out of here.  No one is going to do those things for me.  There is no such thing as a perfect decision, and we live with the consequences of our imperfect decisions.  Even if I studied game theory and knew the choices that would present me with the most favorable outcomes, I don't know if it is possible to fully predict the consequences of our decisions.  That is why I trust in God.  Call it a crutch if you must, but I consider it an acknowledgment of my frailty.  This is His world, not mine.  I may seek to understand it, but a person cannot entirely choose the windows they get into how the world looks.  I don't think a person can feel too good about themselves if they happen to see things using their windows that others cannot.  The placement is up to God, and sometimes he simply gives certain people a better view.  This is not to discredit intelligence, but only to place it in context.  This is why I enjoy G.K. Chesterton's quote: "The poet seeks only to get his head into the heavens.  It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  And it is his head who splits."  As someone who tends to fall in the latter category, it is a humbling reminder of who is really in control here.