This more or less tracks with my Ph.D. experience.
I do wish I had had more opportunities to make things in the student machine shop, and also to make electronics things. But I ended up using a mostly in place apparatus.
Although I know even other STEM fields are wildly different: my brother is a geology Ph.D. and at his program (Stanford), there was essentially no grad-level coursework and you more or less needed to have an agreement to join a research group before you arrived.
And every once in a while there is a twitter thread ostensibly aimed at all new science grad students that goes on about choosing or surviving one's lab rotations, so I guess some fields have those, too.
Excellent job Chad. It parallels my particle physics PhD experience essentially exactly.
Chemistry graduate school is very similar.
I would say that, depending on your supervisor's grant rate, you are likely to TA (teaching assistant) for 1 or more years...
This more or less tracks with my Ph.D. experience.
I do wish I had had more opportunities to make things in the student machine shop, and also to make electronics things. But I ended up using a mostly in place apparatus.
Although I know even other STEM fields are wildly different: my brother is a geology Ph.D. and at his program (Stanford), there was essentially no grad-level coursework and you more or less needed to have an agreement to join a research group before you arrived.
And every once in a while there is a twitter thread ostensibly aimed at all new science grad students that goes on about choosing or surviving one's lab rotations, so I guess some fields have those, too.