Dr. Michelle Young shares tips, hacks, and insights learned over the course of her PhD career. This is a MUST WATCH for all graduate students on their journeys toward a higher degree in Environmental Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Biological Design, Microbiology, or other programs to which students within the Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology belong. She has learned from her own successes and mistakes, or watched others and wished she had done what they had to work smarter, not harder. She also addresses some of the shocks she experienced when getting feedback about her work and highlights tools that ASU provides for your success.
Watch her presentation HERE.
View her PowerPoint presentation, and find all links HERE.
She encourages graduate students to talk to people who are doing or have done similar work to find out what languages, graphics, reference management software works well for them (e.g. microbial community analysis is very different from modeling).
Who Knew?! Dr. Young reveals surprising rules, like you need permission from coauthors and the journal to use a publication in your dissertation and you must include the permissions in your appendix!
She reveals that one of the hardest things for her, especially being a perfectionist, is that you must let go at times.
The Rittmann Lab had a good chat after Michelle’s presentation, captured below.
Rick: The moment that you create something, a copyright exists and you are able to send out a cease and desist letter. The reason to copyright a piece is that it creates rigid use specifications and gives you the power to seek damages, not just request that someone stop using your material.
Bruce: Should a lot of the chapters already be published as papers before you can defend your dissertation? Michelle: This is a chair-centric subject. Some require it, some don’t. It depends on how your story comes together. Bruce: Yes, it really depends. Historically, it was rare for students in Environmental Engineering to publish chapters as papers already. It happened. But it was fairly unusual. It’s become more normal now. From the supervisors POV, it’s always good to have things published. Why wouldn’t we want to have our work published? Not only is it good because it’s been validated by the field, but a PhD student needs to learn what it takes to write and get published. They only way to do that is to do it. It gets easier with each one. One becomes more efficient at doing it. It doesn’t happen every time, Sometimes the timing or style of research doesn’t always permit pre-publication. However, the work should at least be close to being ready for publication.
Michelle: Bruce and Cesar tend to want to tell the story differently. Rosy is really very adamant about publishing before.
Bruce: We have seen people graduate, leave, and never publish. There is a big risk of students doing something else and losing focus.
Michelle: There are definitely some things I didn’t cover but are in my Presentation. Be sure to look at all the slides in my PowerPoint…Maybe we can add this to the SOP section of the website.
Diana: What if we need to apply for a postdoc position earlier than we graduate?
Michelle: You have not graduated until commencement, but you’re a doctor because you’ve submitted everything. You can ask the graduate college for a letter stating that you’ve met the requirements (there is a link in iPOS to request one), as documentation to start your postdoc applications.
Chenwei: Be careful when choosing an option to publish dissertation on ProQuest! You should definitely delay publication of your dissertation if you’re waiting on a decision regarding a patent submission. Otherwise, if you publish your thesis, your patent could be jeopardized.
From Diana Calvo Martinez to Everyone: 10:30 AM
Definitely perfectionism slow things down a lot
From Anwar to Everyone: 10:30 AM
I fully agree with the 24 hr rule. It really works!
From Diana Calvo Martinez to Everyone: 10:39 AM
Format from the beginning!
Mendeley makes your life so much easier! I absolutely love it!
You make a folder for each chapter that you are working on and then add the bibliography and that’s it!
So true!…
And it will be easier to combine all the chapters
From Anwar to Everyone: 10:42 AM
“just write” — my new phd motto- great advice
From Diana Calvo Martinez to Everyone: 10:46 AM
The table of contents format is very particular! Not easy to adjust
From Diana Calvo Martinez to Everyone: 11:02 AM
thanks for the Copyright discussion! I was about to ask you that question!
From Anwar to Everyone: 11:11 AM
thank you so much for compiling all this information Michelle! I will refer to this throughout my phd