Advice for potential grad students

Here's an amusing advisory notice for future lab rat hopefuls from Sönke Johnsen, a marine biologist at Duke University.

In addition to the heartfelt sincerity, he crunches the math on landing an academic position, and figures that a graduate student has about a 5% chance of nabbing his or her supervisor's job. (I think his back of the envelop calculation is too generous, though.)

Read the funny pin-up poster at the Science Creative Quarterly.

Elie Dolgin, Associate Editor, The Scientist

The advice kind of gives the impression that even though research university may be out of reach for the young graduate student, there will be jobs in industry, government, and "teaching univerisities". The reality is that these jobs can be quite competitive too. Also it seems to imply that only a graduate student would want to be at a research 1 university, when many are interested in an assortment of jobs. And real research may be done at all of these other choices and there are pros to all of the other jobs that the prestiges research university may not have to the same degree. The bottom line a "Ph.D. is not enough" as written in that book of the same title.

very nice! and very useful

) wish we would have known..
Grazia