What I Wish I Had Known

You Made It to Harvard! (Now What?)

Harvard is big, in all senses of the word. As you begin to settle in, you’ll probably find yourself bouncing between excitement and worry, confidence and doubt. And you may wonder, secretly or aloud, whether your application was accidently mixed up with someone else’s —whether your admission, in other words, was a huge mistake.

To combat these doubts, we asked a broad range of PhD students and faculty for their single best piece of advice to incoming GSAS students. We also asked them to think back to something they didn’t under­stand about Harvard when they arrived, and to tell us how they figured it out.

We present their words of wisdom below.

Keep an Open Mind

Did the thought of arriving at Harvard slightly over­whelm you when you first heard you were admitted? It was the case for me, and, I know, for countless others. I remember wanting to prepare well, both academically and personally. I read articles, looked through the available courses, exchanged an email or two with professors I considered working with, and even looked into the Official Handbook for Graduate Students (which, I imagine, makes me one of very few students to have done so). While I don’t want to discourage you from good preparation (you are a Harvard student, after all), it almost made me imper­meable to one piece of good advice that I should have received: Chill out and keep an open mind!
When you first arrive here, you will notice one thing straight away: there is so much going on! There are more courses happening than you thought would exist, there are more interesting events taking place than you could ever attend, and there is far more free food hidden in corners that you will only find out about in your upper years.

All in all, it pays to remain open in your attitude and your mind. Use your talents, but don’t be afraid of venturing outside your academic boundaries. Take an art class if you are a scientist, and vice versa. Be creative when everyone else only works by the protocol. And so on.

But this piece of advice also extends to your personal life. Go for a drink with your fellow students, instead of only working. Harvard students are allowed to enjoy life. And you might just discover that you hit the jackpot with your research idea when you explain it to someone on the back of a napkin in Queen’s Head Pub.
—Oliver Hauser, PhD candidate, organismic and evolutionary biology

Becoming a Scholar

Research is bit like fishing. Focus on learning the process first, not on what you might catch. Big fish come with a lot of practice and a bit of luck.
—Xiao-Li Meng, PhD ’90, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

You May Not Need Advice

My advice for PhD students is that you don’t have to wait for advice: you can figure out what you need to do by imitating people who have already done it. If you want to publish an article in a particular journal, then look at the articles already published there, compare them to the draft you’ve got, and identify the revisions you need to make. If you want to get a certain kind of job, then look at the people who were recently hired for jobs like that, see what kinds of teaching experience and publications they had, and then go get the same for yourself. Of course, you’ll want to consult with your advisors as you do these things, but too many grad students think of their advisors as the Keepers of the Secret Knowledge, to be doled out as the advisors see fit, when actually what grad students need to do is not at all mysterious. Difficult, yes, very difficult, but not mysterious.
—Amanda Claybaugh, professor of English, PhD ’01

You Belong Here

The faster you realize that you were chosen to come to Harvard for a reason, the more you will relax and become better able to learn. It took me a whole semester to get over the “imposter syndrome.” I kept asking myself, “Why am I here? Why me? Do I have what it takes to cut it? What if I fooled them on paper?” I was so concerned about this that I didn’t sit back and just enjoy the ride. I didn’t smell the roses, mak­ing it impossible to learn because I was stressing out so much. In fact, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, I failed my first exam in microeconom­ics. I cried for days. Luckily, the professor (who was also my advisor and boss —oh no, how embarrass­ing!!) reassured me that it would be ok and that I just needed a little tweaking in my study habits. He also reminded me that Harvard’s been in the business of picking the best and brightest for a long time and that they know what they are looking for.

And he was right. I stopped worrying about failing and started focusing my energy on studying hard and going to office hours. In the end, I earned a B. During my second semester, I rolled with the punches. Some wins, some losses. But I survived. I learned. I grew. And most importantly, I realized that I belonged —that I am an inte­gral part of the Harvard family.

So, the best thing I can suggest is this: go into this knowing you will get your butt kicked by your courses. But that is a great thing. If it were easy, everyone would get a degree from here. It would be a disappointment if you got here and didn’t feel challenged.

The hardest part was getting in. Now you’re here, and an entire team of people —from professors to mentors to classmates —will not let you fail. But most importantly, you will not let yourself fail. You never have.
—Dahianna Lopez, PhD candidate, health policy

Live What You Love

The best piece of advice I can offer to an incoming student is to figure out what lifestyle you like best (in­dependent of graduate school) and endeavor to make it that way while you are a graduate student. Imagine whatever daily routine, hobbies, food, travel, leisure, family, etc., you would ideally like to have. Then figure out how to do as much of it as possible while you’re a graduate student. Sure, you won’t be able to do all of it. But I bet you can fit more of them into your life as a gradu­ate student than you think. It will take a little time to figure out, and you may need to reassess every few months, but it’s definitely doable. Graduate work is all about trying to figure stuff out and then reassess­ing every few months anyway, so why not do it for the other parts of your life?

The worst assumption to make is the assumption that something can’t be done. I think there is sometimes an assumption that graduate school by default involves many involuntary and inconvenient lifestyle changes. In reality, most of the changes can and should be re­ally positive. And if you’re looking for examples, there are oodles of students who take control of these changes and make their years in GSAS really enjoyable and fulfill­ing. Find them, learn from them, and then pass your skills on.
—Anshul Kumar, PhD candidate, sociology

Failure vs. Weakness

Never confuse failure for weakness, or weakness for failure.

Failure is an important and nat­ural part of the PhD and research process. Papers don’t work out, experiments go wrong, data doesn’t show what you thought it would, projects have to be abandoned. You cannot fail unless you are trying to do something ambitious, and doing something ambitious is the key to any successful career. Every scholar has failed at some point: you, me, your advisor, your advisor’s advi­sor, your colleagues, the chair of the search committee. Everyone. The way you respond to that failure, the lessons you learn from it and the way you persevere, are much more important than the failure itself.

Weakness is a different beast. It is an unwillingness to take the bull by the horns, to never chal­lenge oneself, to work urgently on non-urgent tasks, to be busy on easy things undeserving of atten­tion. Weakness is a lack of effort, a refusal to see your own agency, to shy away from the big problems, a fear of failure. It has no place in a graduate career.
—Arthur Spirling, John L. Loeb Associ­ate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Government

It’s a Cliché for a Reason

Do not be afraid to ask for help! This is completely cliché, but it’s still the most important piece of advice I have for incoming graduate students. Many students feel in­timidated when coming to Harvard and think that by asking for help (of any kind), it somehow makes them unintelligent. I can guarantee that the only unintelligent thing you are doing is NOT asking for help.
—Cammi Valdez, PhD candidate, medical sciences

Learning from Risking

Take risks. It may mean that you fail sometimes, but that’s okay. You learn the most when you fail, and learning how to deal with failure is probably more important than learning how to deal with success.
—Sheila Thomas, assistant dean for diversity and minority affairs

Rise with the Tides

Graduate school will be a series of professional highs and lows. One week, you’ll get your submission rejected from a journal, run a ter­rible discussion section, and slip on a banana peel. The next week, you’ll have a breakthrough on your dissertation, read a fantastic paper by one of your students, and get a paper accepted by a prestigious conference somewhere tropical. If you’re in one of the rough periods, remember that morale-raising things are probably around the corner.
—Liz Maynes-Aminzade, PhD candidate, English

See the World

Make friends with people from dif­ferent parts of the world, and don’t just confine yourself to a friend circle of your own country. One reason is, it’s really great to make friends from all over the world and experience different cultural traditions. The number of festivals you have on your calendar will increase a lot!
—Yue Zhang, PhD candidate, SEAS

Finding the Right Advisor

Finding an advisor is like dating. Not everyone is going to be the right match, and the right advisor for your classmate may not be the right advisor for you. Understand the kind of relationship you need to succeed as a graduate student and look for that fit. That means some self-reflection, and it means having conversations with a lot of faculty, program administrators, and upper-level students.
—Sheila Thomas, assistant dean for diversity and minority affairs

You’ve Earned It

First, be confident that you do be­long here. The imposter syndrome is surprisingly common, even among the elite group of students we bring into our programs, but our degree programs do a good job of evaluating applications, and you are here because you have earned it.

Second, relax a little. We all know that the pursuit of a graduate degree involves focus and hard work, but each of you has had other activities that have enriched your life, and I believe that students are both happier and more productive when they occasionally make time to do some of the things that they have always enjoyed.
—James M. Hogle, Edward S. Harkness Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology

Be Social

Yes, we’re all here to learn and do amazing research. But if you pub­lish a paper, and no one is there to listen to you talk about it, does the tree make any sound at all? So, take advantage of your first few months here —socially. The closest thing to having a basket of friends delivered to your front door are events that Dudley House plans the first few weeks of school. I made some of my closest graduate student friends in those weeks.
—Pan-Pan Jiang, PhD candidate, organismic and evolutionary biology

Failure as a Bridge to Success

Be prepared to experience failure. In many ways graduate school at Harvard is an exercise in extremes: the most advanced courses, taught by the most distinguished faculty, to a group of the most talented stu­dents, in preparation for solving the most challenging unmet research problems. Somewhere along the way, your aims are going to exceed your grasp and you will fail. This is a good thing. This is how you learn more about the problem you are studying and the current, hope­fully temporary, limits of your own abilities. In most cases, failure is a necessary prerequisite to success.
—Allen Aloise, PhD ’04, director of laboratories, co-director of graduate studies, chemistry and chemical biology

In Short, Relax

Relax. Everyone else also thinks they don’t deserve to be here.
—Donal Cahill, Psychology

What I Didn’t Understand When I Came to Harvard...

I was surprised to find out how busy Harvard professors are. It’s not that they don’t want to spend time listening to you, but simply that their lifestyle requires them to do everything at once. But grad students are one of their priorities. In fact, the good news is that they usually spend way more time with you personally than they would with any undergrad!

In their meetings with you, they will often be pressed for time. I recommend the following: be orga­nized and prepared for each meet­ing. This sounds like a no-brainer, but I can assure you that professors will be appreciative if you walk in with a clear agenda (I always like to have it written down) of things that you want to discuss with them. Try not to give them the feeling that you are just around for a chat. Put simply, leave your undergrad years behind and become a grad student who aspires to be their peer!
—Oliver Hauser, PhD candidate, organismic and evolutionary biology

When I came to graduate school, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find others who wanted to work on exactly the same problems that I wanted to work on. In retrospect, this is fairly obvious: the whole goal of graduate work is to produce something new and different from anything anyone else has done before. So of course it follows that everyone will be work­ing towards different goals in their own ways. This reflects what can be simultaneously good and bad about life in GSAS. Everyone is really smart and has great, big-time ambi­tions, and it’s great to be around them, feed off their energy, and get new ideas from them. But this feed­ing is typically only indirect, since everyone’s energy is for their own particular work. I haven’t figured out the best way around this yet.

In the meantime, I can offer some coping strategies:

Talk to others about your own work. They’ll be interested. It will stimulate them, motivate them, and give them new ideas. And I find that talking to someone in a completely unrelated field about my own work often helps me make progress.

Keep searching. Every few weeks I find someone new whose interests in some way overlap with mine. Sometimes they’re sitting right un­der my nose in my own department and sometimes they’re in another country. Don’t admire their work from afar. Get in touch.
—Anshul Kumar, PhD candidate, sociology

For my first research presentation, I Xeroxed a 30-page paper onto 30 slides for a 30-minute talk, and practiced reading one slide every 60 seconds. Disaster struck within the first minute —a faculty member asked a question! That was the starting point of my realization of the critical importance of communication skills in research, and in everything else.
—Xiao-Li Meng, PhD ’90, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

What makes Harvard special is its people: nothing more, nothing less.

Those people that think they’re great because they are at Harvard are not the people who make Harvard great. It takes time to rec­ognize this distinction! At any given opportunity, the former bray about their supposed superiority; at any given opportunity, the latter quietly demonstrate their actual superior­ity. Never be intimidated by the former; be inspired by the latter.
—Arthur Spirling, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Government

I didn’t know how many resources Harvard has. Harvard has already considered every part of student life for us, so no matter what kind of problems you have, Harvard can solve them for you. And no matter how many dreams you have, Harvard can try its best to help you to realize them.
—Yue Zhang, PhD candidate, SEAS

The biggest thing i didn’t understand is just how different the various degree programs in GSAS are. Although they all start with admission and end with a degree, the process in between can be very different. I came to understand this by talking to students and faculty in a broad range of the degree programs. It’s fun, enlightening, helps you understand what other students are doing during their time at Harvard, and gives you a better understanding of how the University works.
—James M. Hogle, Edward S. Harkness Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology

If you’re used to writing for other venues —your college news­paper, say, or Twitter —keep in mind that the academic publishing world moves at a comparatively glacial pace. I learned this the hard way: by realizing it several years into my program (incidentally, email me if you know of any time machines). Don’t rush to publish before you’re ready, but don’t put it off until the last minute, either.
—Liz Maynes-Aminzade, PhD candidate, English

The single biggest thing I didn’t understand was how to be good at what I do. I still don’t understand it. But I’m working on it.
—Donal Cahill, Psychology

 In research and in my professional career post-graduation, my path rarely followed an easily pre­dicted route from A to B. In hind­sight, the best way to be prepared for this fact is, 1) excel at whatever it is you are currently engaged in, and 2) be open to new possibilities and new experiences.
—Allen Aloise, PhD ’04, director of laboratories, co-director of graduate studies, chemistry and chemical biology