Whether to go to graduate school is an important question. Much can be read about the surfeit of scientists, and the need to practice Ph.D. "birth control." Conversely, a new literature is emerging on the predicted shortfall of trained labor over the next decade. Like most other fields of employment, science is changing faster now than it has ever changed before. Increasingly, scientists -- like people on other career tracks -- are being called upon to be "Jacks (and Jills) of all trades and masters of some." Oceanography is preadapted to this description through a tradition of diverse, interdisciplinary approaches. Furthermore, combining diverse approaches to solve real problems is good, clean fun, even when it involves physically and chemically messy media like salt water, mud and digesta! One new trend in K-12 education is worth watching, and that is a reaction to the emphasis on standardized tests. A number of respected educators are suggesting that it would be better to see how students respond to questions and kinds of questions to which they have never been exposed as a better indicator of how they will perform in the brave new world of rapid change. Graduate training in science is about how to ask and answer questions that have not been asked or answered before, so perhaps science will become a useful metaphor for this kind of education.
Some students go to graduate school by default. They enjoy science undergraduate programs and assume that graduate school will be similar but only more intense. The truth is that it will be very different as well as more intense; learning previously gained knowledge is very different than generating new knowledge. This corner of a web site on "Doing Science" is one introduction to the differences. Graduate school may be either far better or far worse for the student who enjoyed undergraduate science. What a Ph.D. brings with it is the ability and freedom to define one's own questions. Undergraduate programs generally give digested versions of others' answers, but some good ones do give experience in bona fide research. An increasing number of internship programs give experience but may not articulate the details found here. Master's programs generally give practice in answering questions defined by someone else and prepare a student for a career in doing so. The Ph.D. is generally the first deliberate practice at defining major portions of one's own questions.
If you are looking for a graduate program, you should ask current students about how it is working for them. You are interested in going to a place that will be recognized as excellent when you finish, about five years after you enter if it is a Ph.D. program. General reputations of schools have a decadal time lag and so are not reliable means for making a rational choice. Ask more than one student how they like the education that they are getting and ask them whether the institution is getting better or worse with time. With a five-year time investment, you are nearly as interested in the time derivative of the reputation as in its actual value.
To excel in graduate school you need a passion for your work. What kind of institution you should choose depends on how clearly developed your passion already is for a particular field or problem. If you know exactly what you want to do, go where the cutting-edge work on that issue is being done: Amateurs teach amateurs to be amateurs. If you do not know very precisely what you want to do but can identify the general field (e.g., biological oceanography or marine biology), you should choose an institution that provides an overview before your choices of a thesis problem narrow. Teaching institutions tend to do better in this regard than research institutions for the simple reason that effectiveness in supervision and teaching of students is weighted more heavily in hiring and promotion at teaching institutions than it is at research institutions. The opposite extreme is certainly not what you seek (i.e., a purely teaching institution); you need to learn about doing research from people who are doing it.
One way to choose a graduate school is by selecting a physical location where one would like to live. This approach can be shortsighted. Graduate tenure is comparatively short. Furthermore, few institutions are inclined to hire their own graduates, and their reasoning is sound. If they had the skills to help create this person, they already have many of the skills of that person (if not in one body). Perhaps the surest (and by no means sure) way of landing a post-Ph.D. job at a particular place once you have been a student there is to go away and learn a new set of skills.
This question is perhaps the most difficult on my web site. It may not be easy, but it can be made substantially easier by making some of the considerations and common pitfalls explicit. A pitfall that can seriously impede your access to graduate school is to be overly precise about your interests, to the point that they match no faculty expertise. A common example in biology is of someone who becomes awed over one taxonomic group to which they are exposed and gushes about wanting to spend the rest of their waking existence working on it. Whereas development of a passion for specific, real organisms is a genuine asset, one needs to ask oneself whether this passion might be generalized to other groups that one has not yet met or at least expressed in the application essay as an example of the kinds of interests that the student has developed. Passion for specific taxa and problems is definitely an asset, but it is unreasonable to think that your choices and passions will not be steered by the graduate classes and research experience. Your mind should not be closed yet.
One can easily go too far in the other direction, however. Having exceptionally general interests makes it difficult to decide where to apply and makes it difficult to explain to yourself and to selection committees why you want to go to a particular place or even a particular kind of place. My recommendation is to give examples of the problems that have caught your interest but to state quite clearly that they are not exclusive (unless you know that they are). Nor does this problem of imprecise research interests necessarily stop after arrival. The most frequent problem I see among graduate students is analogous to the famous (and difficult) "marriage problem" of game theory and can be broadened to include ecological problems like choice of a settlement site by a settling larva. Should I propose to this potential partner (settle here) or keep looking and maybe find someone (some place) better?
I have three observations that usually help. One is that thinking about it too long rarely is useful. It is better to try several problems than to spend the same period thinking and reading about either those same problems or a larger class of problems. (How to extend this suggestion to the marriage problem is left to the reader.) There is a good analogy here with the indispensability of the "pretest" in statistical sampling design. Moreover, how will you ever know if you enjoy it if you do not try it?
The second observation is that there are no perfect thesis or dissertation problems, and you are not being expected to marry one. Among the most boring scientists I know are those who are still working exactly on their thesis problems. Your goal should be to pick a good problem and then do a superb job on it. The Ph.D. is very much a first practice at articulating and solving a problem in your chosen field. So building skills that will be useful in solving other, future problems is more worthwhile than attempting to choose the "best" problem. With this logic in mind, I try to help a student formulate a good problem that involves some theory, some lab work and some field work. The idea is to develop a comfort level that allows the student to pick the next problem and attack it by the means that are most likely to make it yield. A corollary that I would assert is that once a problem is formulated, it usually is possible to identify the limiting one of these three ingredients in the rate of further progress. Another corollary is that this practice of employing multiple approaches substantially expands the list of jobs for which you can qualify. Furthermore, not all Ph.D.s aspire or should aspire to become university professors or researchers themselves. An appreciation of theoretical, field and laboratory work also serves a manager, government decision maker or high school or middle school teacher well.
The third observation is that it is unwise to try to become a clone of your advisor, i.e., to plan to study the same problems by the same means after you get your degree. The science is changing, and you should exceed your advisor's skills in at least one area and preferably more. Moreover, doing exactly what your advisor does in exactly the same way can make you each other's most serious competitor. It is usually worth capitalizing on the novelty of your research problem to acquire a novel combination of skills not yet matched by anyone in the field. Doing so is not as demanding as it sounds, because there ar e so many useful and still novel combinations of skills to be had, especially when theoretical, lab and field approaches are included. It is easy to be the best at what you do when nobody else has yet done it! Most frequently, my students will derive or modify theory (often through the vehicle of a review paper) and go on to test it in the laboratory and in the field against its competitors.
You may find the following technique useful if your adivsor will let you try it. It is the way that I narrow down a problem with an intern or with a new graduate student. I get a list of problems that interest them and ones that don't. The list can be either general or precise at the start. I work from this list to come up with specific research ideas that overlap my interest and expertise and those of potential committee members (when it is a graduate student). We go back and forth a few times with nothing more than revised lists. Then we prioritize, with the explicit understanding that if we try one on and it fits poorly, we can switch. The next switch will be made more reluctantly, and by the third choice very reluctantly. It is a practical means of getting someone into a problem reasonably quickly and with their participation in the choice.
The general default is to choose the best-known person in your field of interest. A better strategy in general might be to pick the person with the best-known students. Fame and ability to nurture apprentices are not always positively correlated. Be particularly wary of choosing an advisor who has had many students, none of whom has finished or few of whom have succeeded by your measure of success. Do not be too quick, however, to judge all new Assistant Professors to be bad advisors. They often work harder at advising than do scientists who have accumulated many other responsibilities, and the narrower generation gap may make communication much easier. Because there is no track record of past success or failure at advising, however, it would seem prudent to make sure that their personality is compatible with yours, either with several telephone conversations and e-mail interactions or, preferably, with at least one visit.
Applications generally comprise GRE scores, a transcript, letters of recommendation and an essay about goals in attending the institution. If you read carefully, I have already given a fair amount of advice on the essay. The school wants to know about your skills and motivations. Explaining the source of your scientific curiosity (when applying for a M.S. or Ph.D. in science) usually gives a better idea of the durability of your motivation than does a vague suggestion that you desire to save the oceans from threats of all sorts or to feed the world from the sea. It also provides a lead-in to your explaining the kinds of problems that interest you and with whom on the faculty you might be interested in working. It is usually a good idea to name someone, because it heightens the likelihood that one more person will read your application carefully. It means, however, that you need to read the web site at least carefully enough to figure out what they do. Naming two or three people (but not the whole department) can be an asset if it accurately displays the breadth of your potential interests, and there is no harm in suggesting an area but also communicating that your interests at this point are not set in stone. It is worth some time writing, revising and proofreading your essay. Errors of fact, logic, spelling and grammar inevitably get circled during review. The competition generally also has high GRE scores, high grades and good letters, so it should not be so surprising that the essay often makes the difference in acceptance.
Students often question the value of GRE scores, but put yourself in the place of a potential adviser who never heard of the undergraduate school or the people doing the recommending. The GRE is the one yardstick, imperfect as it is, that can be used across all applications from native English speakers. But how is it used? I don't try to measure with it very precisely. If all the scores (verbal, quantitative and analytical) are at the 80th percentile or above, I go on to the other criteria without specific concerns. If one or more is lower, I start looking for correlative information. If the verbal score is low, the essay gets special scrutiny, and communication skills are special-interest items in the letters. If the quantitative score is low, math and physics grades get even closer scrutiny than they would. If the analytical score is low, the essay again gets special scrutiny for gaps in reasoning. A GPA < 3.0 (out of 4.0) is a sign for concern, and one looks for an upward trend in later years. In general, with or without other flags, I look for whether students chose to challenge themselves with difficult courses or loaded their curricula with fluff. It is not always possible to judge, but it is usually pretty easy. The combination that one looks for in a letter is evidence that the writer knows the student well enough to give an informed opinion and that the opinion is favorable. The keys are specific pieces of evidence of abilities and motiviation. High ratings on one criterion (e.g., GPA with tough courses or mutually rewarding research experience with a letter writer) can overcome apparent deficiencies on another.
Oceanography is a very interdisciplinary activity. The data that you need to answer your thesis question as a biologist may require skills in geology, physics or chemistry. Hence you need to learn the concepts and vocabularies of those disciplines at a level that allows you to ask for the help that you need, and the curriculum here is designed with such interdisciplinary needs in mind. A tour of our web site should convince you that most of us work with each other and colleagues elsewhere on interdisciplinary problems. We practice what we preach. The University of Maine's School of Marine Sciences was built by agglomerating several existing units, several of which had biological strengths. The result is a great setting for a biologist like me who needs intradisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary advice and help. The physical, chemical and geological units on campus are large enough to support some intradisciplinary efforts and thus maintain disciplinary expertise within the evolving discipline, but not so large as to develop disciplinary chauvinism and other barriers against interdisciplinary work. My interactions with faculty members in engineering groups on campus are steadily growing, and the quality of these units is truly impressive.
A confusing choice for many biologists is whether to pursue marine biology or biological oceanography, and undergraduate backgrounds often are insufficient to allow a rational decision. Moreover, the boundaries between marine biology and biological oceanography are indistinct and time varying (e.g., the OEUVRE report). The School of Marine Sciences spans both fields, allowing this choice of specialization to be made quite late. The range of topics for student research ranges from molecular genetics of individual bacteria to ecosystem and global biogeochemistry; all the marine environments -- pelagic and benthic, estuarine, coastal and oceanic -- are fair game.
I moved here in large measure to enhance the intensity of my interdisciplinary interactions. The number of faculty in the School of Marine Sciences is approximately the same as in the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington where I worked previously. I could not find a place with more expertise in the area of marine benthos that also satisfied my desire for intense interdisciplinary collaboration. The existence of the Internet means that proximity no longer is a necessary determinant of the extent of one's interactions, but presence at the same institution for at least some of the time is still necessary for high intensity of interaction, and certainly for a satisfying graduate experience. A benefit of a moderately sized institution is that faculty in general have more time to devote to such interactions.
The State of Maine has a strong tradition of accepting and fostering individualism in thought and deed, reflected at every level from local and state politics to education and personal interactions, and I am really enjoying learning about my most recently adopted (1999) state. As an educator, I find statewide interest in and support for education at all levels refreshing. The University of Maine has a proud tradition of educating students who are the first from their families to attend any college or university. That spirit spills over into graduate education; snobbery has little use or place. Awe of nature and academic scholarship have traveled hand in hand here for centuries. Women in Maine have been comparatively well educated (by national standards) for centuries. Dress and address give little hint of social or financial position. Maine (in areal proportion) is the most forested state in the union and is blessed with abundant and diverse marine and estuarine environments.
If you have read all the material on this page, you know more about my philosophy of graduate education than you probably need to know. If you believe what you read, you should contact my present students and my past Ph.D. and M.S. students and other students here at UMaine for further information. Feel free to e-mail me with opinions and questions about any of the material aired or omitted here.
I am interested in applied work myself and in supervising some applied work, but I will not supervise a Ph.D. student doing applied research exclusively. My position is that progress on applied issues would be much farther advanced if much of the funds, time and effort now spent on applied issues were spent instead on basic research related to those applied issues.