the Nature of failure

While this is a bit of an esoteric topic, I've been quite busy and I was happy with the final product so I decided to post this entry: a failed submission for the Nature Careers Columnist competition that I wrote a month ago (see this link for background). My apologies for the lazy recycling of material. I'll hopefully get time to write a bit more soon.

"The skies of the northern hemisphere are cluttered each spring with birds returning to their thawing homes and graduate school applicants hoping to find a home of their own. It was only a short year ago that I traversed the United States as an interviewee, and now that it’s my turn to entertain the potential incoming class I realize just how important these weekends are for everyone involved.

As a student, I have a vested interest in my programs ability to select the top candidates and to convince those candidates to enroll. Their aptitude and production will ultimately effect the ‘name brand’ of my degree, but far more important than benefits to the program and institution as a whole is the direct influence that these individuals will have on me; a portion of them will undoubtedly be my future friends, collaborators, and reviewers.

Faculty also have reason to concern themselves with graduate student selection; these students will make up the front-lines of the research, share the bylines, and most likely make up a considerable portion of scientific connections years down the line. And of course, everything that I mentioned both for faculty and current students applies equally to post-docs who are too often conspicuously absent from recruitment events though their research and connections still rely heavily on students.

In our capacity as members of the department, the more face-time that we get with students the better. Exhausting as that may sound, it need not be so intellectually taxing; indeed, sometimes less science is even better. As a recruit, I found even casual conversations with professors and current students to be far more informative than hours spent with web-pages and journal articles, and it amazes me to this day how accurate these initial sketches were even with a year of new knowledge to build on.

I recall two different interview weekends, both of which went reasonably well, but following my string of thank you emails I received responses from all five professors that I met with at one university and zero from another; they practically made the decision for me. The important thing to remember is that these impressions aren't just about graduate school, my opinion of certain departments and individuals has been likely shaped for years to come.

Face-to-face meetings are a two way street, and I still firmly believe that a conversation is worth as much as GRE scores, essays, transcripts, and reference letters combined. While these other methods may importantly measure past aptitude, conversations are where we can get a sense for a persons intangibles that are difficult to teach such as confidence, enthusiasm, presentation skills, etc. Try as we might to quantify and objectively view a person with essays and test scores, determining graduate school success may never be so algorithmic.

And of course, we must keep in mind that while the nebulous 'department' may be trying to judge graduate school success, as individuals in that department, we are trying to judge far more. We're making decisions about who we surround ourselves with, which will have implications perhaps decades down the line.

If students attend the highest ranked school that they get into regardless of their interviewing experiences then we all have little incentive to bother. But I still don't believe that student decisions are quite so rigid, and the data would be relatively easy to gather. Start by thinking of yourself and your close colleagues, and while your at it, think about how many of those close colleagues you met while either one of you were in graduate school."