Author Archives: David Hillis

About David Hillis

Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas-Austin, and owner of the Double Helix Ranch. Dancing and softball enthusiast and accomplished leg-wrestler.

Is There Life After Graduate School?

In an earlier post, I discussed the decision about attending graduate school in the sciences. I argued that graduate school is certainly not the right choice for everyone. For people of a certain mind-set, though, it is the perfect choice. And even if you have all the right attributes for graduate school, you can still be miserable if you pick the wrong advisor or graduate program, so that choice is also important. But let’s assume that you decided that graduate school was the right choice for you, you did the research, found the perfect advisor, happily toiled away long hours discovering things about the natural world that no one else in the world knew about, published lots of exciting papers about those results, finished a dissertation, and successfully completed a Ph.D. Now you have to address the question that friends and family have been asking you for years: What will you do for the rest of your life, and how will you make a living doing it? How can you make a living doing something as specialized and arcane as phylogenetics, for example?

Continue reading →

I’ll Admit It: I Loved Graduate School

At least once a month, I see blog posts from disgruntled current or former graduate students about “The Terrible Experience of Graduate School.” I advise a group of extremely bright undergraduates who are interested in research careers in the sciences, and they get scared to death by all these internet horror stories. The problem is, almost the only people who blog about their graduate school experience are the people who are (or were) extremely unhappy. There are certainly unhappy graduate students, but the truth is that many graduate students love the experience. But no one seems to want to write or read a blog post about the writer’s wonderful experience in graduate school. It sounds like gloating or bragging, and happy people usually are just content to be happy.

Continue reading →

Evolution 2013: The Good, the Better, and the Future

The 2013 Evolution meetings (joint meetings of the Society for the Study of Evolution, Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Society of Naturalists) were held in Snowbird, Utah, from 21-25 June 2013. The meetings were a great success, and as usual, the meetings featured many packed sessions on phylogenetic methods, theory, and applications. These meetings were held in Snowbird twenty years ago (1993) as well, but much has changed since then. As I flew home from Utah this week, I contemplated a few of things that made the meetings successful, and I compiled this list of thoughts and recommendations for future meetings.

Things that made #Evol2013 a success:

1. The presence of outstanding undergraduates who are working on research. This was better than I ever remember in the past. In addition to fostering science careers for undergrads, it also makes the meeting much more attractive to faculty who are interested in recruiting outstanding graduate students. It gives undergraduates exposure to professional scientific communities, gives them a chance to practice presenting research papers in public, and allows them to explore opportunities for graduate school. I hope all three societies will continue and even ramp-up efforts to attract research-oriented undergraduates to the meetings.
Continue reading →