Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Association

There are some things that you should expect:

• A lot of classes: You will be getting almost all of your required courses out of the way during your first two semesters, and you will also be expected to TA. This will be a nice exercise in time management.

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• Selecting your advisor: At the beginning of your first semester, you will attend presentations from each of the faculty members where they will give you an overview of their available research projects. You will then set up one-on-one meetings with the faculty you may be interested in working with. Keep in mind that you are not expected to know exactly what you want to do the second you start here, and it is inevitable that you will not fully understand all of the project topics that are offered to you. This is normal. Just do some reading (the professor will usually send you a couple of papers) and ask questions. You should also talk with some graduate students from those respective research groups in order to find out exactly what it’s like, from a student’s perspective, to work with that particular professor. One thing that is extremely important, but not emphasized nearly enough, is finding an advisor who has a personality similar to your own. If your soon-to-be advisor is the type that likes to micromanage his/her students, and you can’t stand when people do this, you are going to be miserable. So be sure that there is at least some sort of a personality match before making your final decision. Most students typically get their first or second choice.

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• Starting your research: In your second semester, you will start getting acquainted with your research topic. This means reading a lot of papers and probably having a lot of discussions with other graduate students in your research group. You will have to balance coursework and the beginning phases of your research project at this point, which can be a little tricky. You will be getting things done, of course, but most of the real work will start over the summer.

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• The qualifying exam: The qualifying exam comes near the end of your second year, typically in late August. This is mostly to see whether you are capable of doing graduate-level research and whether you can give a talk and answer questions without panicking, crying, passing out, or getting overly anxious or violent. You need to pass the qualifier in order to be officially accepted as a Ph.D. candidate, so (unfortunately) it is actually a daunting task that will be hanging over your head until the end of the summer of your first year. Say goodbye to any possibility of summer fun (kidding, of course). As long as you pace yourself well over the summer, there shouldn’t be much trouble at all. And, yes, it will be stressful; but once it’s over with, you’ll realize that it wasn’t really all that bad.