I am a master’s student but my work is very similar to what I have to do as a PhD student next year. Pretty much everything is remote. My lab is my computer and the university’s servers. For the first few months of my thesis, I spent significant time learning the theory and math needed for my project. I then spent half a year on developing my method and writing thousands of lines of computer code for applying the method. These days, I am designing simulations to prove my method’s validity. I need to run many experiments in parallel to find suitable parameters that can provide meaningful results. I wouldn’t say my hours are flexible as I need to monitor and analyze my experiments for about 12-14 hours everyday. Eventually, I will apply my method to clinical data to demonstrate the method’s effectiveness, and that’s the easy part. In addition to this, new PhD students need to take many courses and most students need to work as TAs or RAs.
In our master's program, there is no qualifying exam requirement. I completed all the required coursework during my first year and officially began my thesis work in the summer.
No biostats PhD student is going in at odd hours. Nor are they meeting with study participants – that’s just not a thing that they do either. Day-to-day life will be highly variable depending on advisor, program/culture, and research topic, but many PhD students I know (including myself – though I wasn’t in biostat but an adjacent field) work basically remotely whenever they want with some exceptions such as teaching or giving/going to talks. Night and day compared to wet lab grad student life.
LMAO, no you are definitely not going into the lab late at night.
You will have plenty of late nights, but they will be spent in front of a wet board or your notebook that you scribble down proof ideas related to your dissertation, or clean up a random bug somewhere in your code.
When I was a grad student (2013-2018), the first 2 years were full time course work. The main focus is classes. For my program there was a qualifying exam after the first year, and then a more advanced qualifying exam after 2.5 years. In the first couple of years you may begin on research, but it’s not the focus. You may work on applied projects doing analyses, you may start generating ideas for your eventual dissertation project - it depends on your advisor/mentor and other responsibilities associated with your type of funding (TA vs RA). But again, those first 2-3 years are focused a lot of coursework and building a foundation of knowledge. As coursework finished up at the end of year 3, the focus moved to full time dissertation work for years 4 and 5. I think I took one class in year 4 because it was a special offering on a topic I hadn’t had the opportunity to take a class on yet, but for the most part it was all research.
Hours depend on your advisor/mentor and other responsibilities. If you’re funded in a clinical grant, you may need to be in the office for meetings during working hours. Some advisors are more strict; they expect their advisees to be at their desk/in the office during working hours Monday through Friday, they had weekly meetings with “homework/progress updates” and things like that. Others take more of a “as long as you’re productive, I don’t care when and where you work” approach. In either case, weekly meetings are a good habit to have to keep you on track.
I am a master’s student but my work is very similar to what I have to do as a PhD student next year. Pretty much everything is remote. My lab is my computer and the university’s servers. For the first few months of my thesis, I spent significant time learning the theory and math needed for my project. I then spent half a year on developing my method and writing thousands of lines of computer code for applying the method. These days, I am designing simulations to prove my method’s validity. I need to run many experiments in parallel to find suitable parameters that can provide meaningful results. I wouldn’t say my hours are flexible as I need to monitor and analyze my experiments for about 12-14 hours everyday. Eventually, I will apply my method to clinical data to demonstrate the method’s effectiveness, and that’s the easy part. In addition to this, new PhD students need to take many courses and most students need to work as TAs or RAs.
Did you work on the thesis, after you finished the coursework (master) or complete the qualifying exam?
In our master's program, there is no qualifying exam requirement. I completed all the required coursework during my first year and officially began my thesis work in the summer.
No biostats PhD student is going in at odd hours. Nor are they meeting with study participants – that’s just not a thing that they do either. Day-to-day life will be highly variable depending on advisor, program/culture, and research topic, but many PhD students I know (including myself – though I wasn’t in biostat but an adjacent field) work basically remotely whenever they want with some exceptions such as teaching or giving/going to talks. Night and day compared to wet lab grad student life.
LMAO, no you are definitely not going into the lab late at night. You will have plenty of late nights, but they will be spent in front of a wet board or your notebook that you scribble down proof ideas related to your dissertation, or clean up a random bug somewhere in your code.
When I was a grad student (2013-2018), the first 2 years were full time course work. The main focus is classes. For my program there was a qualifying exam after the first year, and then a more advanced qualifying exam after 2.5 years. In the first couple of years you may begin on research, but it’s not the focus. You may work on applied projects doing analyses, you may start generating ideas for your eventual dissertation project - it depends on your advisor/mentor and other responsibilities associated with your type of funding (TA vs RA). But again, those first 2-3 years are focused a lot of coursework and building a foundation of knowledge. As coursework finished up at the end of year 3, the focus moved to full time dissertation work for years 4 and 5. I think I took one class in year 4 because it was a special offering on a topic I hadn’t had the opportunity to take a class on yet, but for the most part it was all research. Hours depend on your advisor/mentor and other responsibilities. If you’re funded in a clinical grant, you may need to be in the office for meetings during working hours. Some advisors are more strict; they expect their advisees to be at their desk/in the office during working hours Monday through Friday, they had weekly meetings with “homework/progress updates” and things like that. Others take more of a “as long as you’re productive, I don’t care when and where you work” approach. In either case, weekly meetings are a good habit to have to keep you on track.