The beginning of a new academic year is a great time to think about the big picture of graduate school, and decide how you should organize your time and efforts for maximum success. This is important for new students, but is worth revisiting even for seasoned (i.e. ready-to-get-out-of-here!) PhD students.
Here is a rough check list, written for MS students doing thesis work. (I’ll try and adjust this for non-Thesis MS and PhD students later, but the principles are the same). I welcome comments about how this should be modified, especially from the veteran students.
First, here is a checklist table for an MS program starting in the fall. Below the table are further details about each line item. Compare this to the graduate college’s posted deadlines.
| # | Item | Description | Target Completion Date |
| 1. | Big-Picture Plan | Start an actual document (e.g. in Excel) that shows your plan | Early September |
| 2. | Research Topic | Settle in on a research topic with your adviser | Early September |
| 3. | Literature Review | Set up a system and read lots of papers | 100 papers by December |
| 4. | Courses | Do well in your courses | Finish course work by third semester |
| 5. | Paperwork | Submit your GS2 | December |
| 6. | Proposal | Write your research proposal | January |
| 7. | Fellowship applications | Apply for various fellowships | Various deadlines |
| 8. | Lab/project work | Create new knowledge through your project | Finish by third semester |
| 9. | Paper | Submit a peer-reviewed journal article | February of final semester |
| 10. | Thesis | Finish writing your thesis | March of final semester |
| 11. | Thesis defense | Present and defend your thesis in front of your committee | April of final semester |
1) Big-Picture Plan. Open a spreadsheet or Word document and fill in dates/semesters. Save this in a conspicuous place in your files so you can refer to it as the years progress.
2) Research Topic. Talk with your adviser and tell her/him what you want to do for your research. She/he may not have funding to do exactly what you want, but that is a starting point for conversation. Ideally the topic should be generated by you first, so that from the very beginning this is your baby.
3) Literature Review. This goes hand-in-hand with number 2; you should delve into the literature to help develop your research topic, and once you have your topic, keep reading vigorously to learn all you can. You should plan to expose yourself to about one peer-reviewed research paper per day. Between now and the end of the year there are 132 days; that many papers would be a very solid foundation for your thesis work. Typically we like to see about 100 references in an MS thesis (and more is usually better). You will not read every word of each paper you find, but you should at least read the abstract and look through the figures. Then you’ll know if it’s a paper that is worth spending more time reading thoroughly. Collect the papers you read in an organized way. I suggest Mendeley, as it can be set up to organize your file structure for you. It also reads PDFs and extracts bibliographic information for you, saving you the effort of downloading that separately. Further, Mendeley is a good bibliography tool for inserting citations and a reference list in your papers and thesis. But the field of reference management seems to be evolving rapidly, so if you find other software packages, feel free to explore them.
4) Courses. Notice that courses come fourth in this list, even though most new students think about their courses first, even before arriving at grad school. The University system trains students to organize their lives around courses. But now you should not think of your courses as your main priority. Your courses are a means to an end; they are there to give you background knowledge to enable your research. (Note that in the Ladner lab, even if you’re doing a non-thesis MS, you’ll be doing research for your special project.) Courses teach you “old knowledge”. But you are here to create “new knowledge” through your research. Decide on the courses that will give you the knowledge base you need. You have to fulfill departmental degree requirements, of course, but other than that, take courses strategically and do not plan on taking more courses than required. The time you would spend on learning old knowledge in a course will be much better spent on creating new knowledge in the lab or writing papers–the world will thank you later.
5) Paperwork. Once you have figured out the things above, you’ll need the paperwork to document it. At Clemson this is the GS2 form. This should be submitted by the end of your first semester. This is your contract with the university, which says if you complete what’s on the list, they have to give you a degree (essentially). You want to get that contract in writing as early as possible.
6) Proposal. As you read the literature and work on your courses during your first semester, your research ideas should be taking shape. Writing your proposal is the best way to hone those ideas and create solid hypotheses and experimental tests of those hypotheses. MS students at Clemson need to submit a short proposal about their thesis work. This can be submitted at any time, but is most useful if completed early. Start on your proposal once you’ve read a dozen or so papers. Use a previous students’ proposal as a template and create an outline. Modify the proposal little by little through your first semester, expanding on that outline and adding detail. Then during Christmas break and early in your second semester, finish and submit your proposal to your adviser and your committee. When they review and approve it, you will know that your research ideas are moving in a productive direction.
7) Fellowship applications. Receiving your own funding is very rewarding and a huge boost to your career. NSF, EPA, DOE, and several other organizations offer fellowships. The deadlines for NSF and EPA are in the fall. For NSF your last chance to submit is the first semester of graduate school. Especially if you think you’ll continue on for a PhD, plan to submit fellowships. Clemson has workshops and other resources for students interested in submitting. And students who have received these in the past (like Muriel Steele) are usually willing to give you their applications as examples. Further, submitting fellowship applications is synergistic with your other work; the literature review and research ideas you generate here are the same ones needed for your proposal and thesis. It’s win-win-win.
8) Lab/project work. Start gradually in the lab or with your project work (which will not be in the lab if it is modeling, life cycle analysis, etc.). By this, I mean do not wait until your second semester to start “full force”. Get into the lab (or start on your project) little by little during your first semester. Learn a few techniques like total organic carbon (TOC) measurement, Amicon cell membrane experiments, etc. Start gathering the data you’ll need. Start purchasing some of the necessary supplies, or start building your experimental setup. Ideally you’ll learn enough during your first semester so that you can capitalize on the winter break and run some serious experiments.
9) Paper. Your goal should be to write at least one peer-reviewed journal paper during your MS degree. The literature review you included in your proposal is already the beginning to that paper. By the middle of your second semester you should have a working title. By summer you should have an outline and know which experiments you need to run to enable the writing of your paper. During your second fall you should draft the paper and be collecting ancillary data needed to complete it. Ideally you will submit the paper for publication during your final (spring) semester.
10) Thesis. Note that your thesis comes after your paper. This is the sensible way to go because, frankly, the paper is shorter than the thesis! Write the short document (the paper) first, then expand on it for the long document (the thesis). Often it is done the other way around, and an attempt to write the paper is made after the thesis is written. This results in a great risk of not finishing the paper because it relies on your completing it after graduation. So after the paper is written, add to it a more expansive literature review section (which you probably have mostly completed during your proposal phase). Then insert the materials and methods from the paper, with additional details about your procedures that didn’t fit into the paper. Also include appendices with experimental details. The results and discussion section will be similar to the paper, but there will likely be additional results that did not fit into the paper; include those in the thesis. Add a comprehensive conclusions and future work chapter.
11) Thesis defense. By the time you get to this, you’ll probably know what to do. But you can discuss further with your adviser. The important thing is to bring the right amount and kind of food; that’s the subject for another post!