Got grad skills?
From Nature’s graduate journal column, March 16, 2006.
Have you got grad skills?
by Milan de Vries
It isn’t until the end of graduate school that you begin to wonder whether you’ve acquired any transferable skills. Despite having been at school since the age of five, it suddenly occurs to you that you’re not generally useful to the world.
I know what transferable skills I don’t have. I once sat next to a hypochondriac on a plane who berated me for four hours for being a biologist but not being able to cure his adult-onset diabetes. Thing is, unless you are a yeast cell I can’t really help you with your health problems. I can measure sporulation efficiency pretty well, but most humans don’t actually turn into spores, it turns out.
Then I started watching the Olympics. The commentators kept telling me how much pressure these athletes are under. That’s when it hit me. This month I taught a class, wrote an abstract for a thesis committee meeting, finished key experiments for two projects, caught up with the literature, met my adviser a few times, and in my spare time even made it to the supermarket once or twice. This would have seemed like a bit much to handle in my first year of graduate school. Now, it’s par for the course. I’m not sure it’s enough to get hired, but where were those commentators when I trudged to my lab during a blizzard because an experiment couldn’t wait? Good at multitasking under pressure — that’s one transferable skill. Now if only I could land a triple axle.
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