On the eve of graduation, I reflected on my time in college and realized that some of my happiest academic experiences had occurred in biology laboratories. So, I applied to graduate school, and am, for the most part, happy as a third-year graduate student in biology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). While the decision was right for me, it was not right for a surprising number of my classmates at UCSF and for a large percentage of students at other schools, many of whom fail to complete their degree. In the next few paragraphs, I will discuss what I think are the positive and negative aspects of graduate school and try to explain why the dropout rate is so high.

I knew many of the positive aspects of graduate school before I started. It is indeed wonderful to be able to spend all day thinking about something you find fascinating. I love working in an intellectually supportive atmosphere, where my ideas and efforts are taken seriously. It is exciting to experience the cutting edge of research and work on a problem that no one else has ever worked on before. To me, there is no greater reward than gaining insight into a process that has, for the history of the world, been a question mark. Successes, when they come, are intensely rewarding.

However, there are negative aspects as well. Graduate school is not easy. Biology is extremely complicated with literally millions of questions that we do not understand. This is reflected on a practical level in the laboratory, where an infinite number of unpredictable variables savagely foil experiments on a constant basis. Particularly when starting out, many technical hurdles must be overcome to answer even the simplest question. This means that you might spend 10 minutes thinking about something interesting, and then months trying to optimize the experiment conceived in that 10 minutes of thinking. This is insanely frustrating to most people, and it takes a certain kind of person to persevere. Success is not just a function of work or intelligence, but to a great extent of chance. This is hard for most people to accept. It is frustrating to work twice as hard as a classmate, and yet accomplish only half as much. Unfortunately, this scenario is common.

Science is also very political. Scientists, I am sad to say, are often petty and sometimes unscrupulous. Multiple labs often work on the same projects and compete with each other. It is agonizing to be scooped by another lab, or to fear that you will be scooped.

You might believe that you have lots of lab experience already and that you know what you are getting into. This may be true, but graduate school will not merely be a continuation of your college lab experience. In college, lab research is probably just one of the many activities that you spend time doing, along with class-work in different fields, volunteer activities, sports, work, and frequent interactions with non-scientists. In graduate school, lab work may be all that you do, classes will only be in your field, and interactions during the day will primarily be with scientists. This is a big change from college, and it makes lab frustrations even harder to rationalize. It is one thing to not get much done in lab when the lab work is just one of many activities. It is quite another when you spend all day in lab, everyday, work on the same experiments, and make little progress. It is a whole new realm of frustration. Many people, after experiencing all of this first-hand, decide to leave.

Why am I still in graduate school then, and why do I think it is a great choice for lots of people? First, it is the most interesting thing that I have ever done. Even with the long periods of frustration, the brief moments of clarity are worth it. Second, the opportunities and rewards of intellectual research are different and for me more worthwhile then anything else I could do. Third, working in an academic environment allows you to work your own hours, be independent, and collaborate and interact with people in your laboratory everyday. Fourth, at the end of graduate school, when you are finally finished, you'll have earned your Ph.D. This opens up a number of opportunities, such as in academia, industry, bio-informatics, patent law, and bio-ethics.

To succeed in graduate school, you must have a passion for research. You must be the kind of person who is resistant to failure, perseveres in the face of mounting frustration, takes satisfaction in small successes, and for whom lots of minutiae are worthwhile if they lead to an occasional insight into the big picture. You must love the pursuit of knowledge and be fascinated by your discipline. If graduate school is the right place for you, the reward of understanding the world around you will make it all worthwhile.