First a brief explanation of the title: canonical and non-canonical are concepts in cell signaling. A canonical signaling pathway is a the "typical" way a signaling molecule works. For example the "canonical" activity of a molecule called NLRP3 is to activate an enzyme called Caspase 1 which causes inflammation by activating a a pair of inflammatory molecules called interleukin-1β and interleukin-18. This is the "canonical pathway" primarily because it is the pathway that we observe most often and is the one we found first. The "non-canonical pathway" has NLRP3 activating a different enzyme called caspase 11 which has similar effects on inflammation, but also leads to a type of programmed cell death called "pyropoptosis." This idea is actually falling out of favor as we realize that signaling pathways aren't really straight line from A to B to C, but the nomenclature remains. These days, calling something "non-canonical" is sometimes a way of saying "I know this isn't how you think it works, but here's my data saying it really does do that." (scientists can be very petty and hyper-competitive, you just have to know where to look, and how to read between the lines) If you want to read a little more about the NLRP3 example, check out this 2017 article in Nature. Before moving on, I want to make clear that at this point I am talking about how to choose a lab once you are in grad school. How to choose a grad school overall is a related, but separate question with rather different answers.
So, what are the considerations for choosing a lab? I'm guessing the first thing that comes to your mind is some version of "what do I want to study?" This is definitely important. I certainly don't wanna spend 4 or 5 or 8 years studying an organ system or disease I don't care about. You have to be excited about what you're doing or it will crush you. You want your skills to align with what the lab does. Are you an analytical chemist? You want to be in a lab that does analytical chemistry. Is your dream to find new ways to treat diabetes? You wanna work in a renal lab, not a neuro lab. maybe you're an engineer who wants to use ultrasonic ablation as a way to treat caner. Now you need to find a cancer lab run by a biomedical engineer. That's starting to get kinda specific and difficult now isn't it? What if you're in the social sciences and you want to study the linguistic development of Occitan?1 It only has about 100,000 native speakers. There are only going to be a handful of programs with professors who study it.
These considerations are what you might consider the "canonical" ones. They're the big questions people think about first. What I do want to study, how do I want to study it, and who (based almost entirely on their prior work) do I want to study under?
But all of that comes with a great big asterisk. * (see it?).
See all of these considerations are grounded in your professional goals. Don't get me wrong, these are important goals, but this is also where grad school is different from undergrad. In grad school, you lab becomes your single greatest source of interpersonal interaction. You work, and work closely with these people every single day, day in and day out for 4, 5, 7+ years. You will work with these people through some of the most intellectually challenging and emotionally frustrating moments in your life. It is absolutely imperative that you mesh well with your lab and your advisor. It's almost heretical to say this, but that can be even more important than being in a lab that studies the exact thing you are interested in. I know, this is a hard one for someone who is really passionate about a subject to swallow, but here me out. Have you ever worked with someone whose leadership style was the exact opposite of what you need? Maybe you're a person who works well with little oversight, you figure things out on your own and then you do them. Now picture spending the next 6 years working with someone who insists on double checking every single thing you do (there are advisors like this). This works for some people. They find comfort in having their important data double checked, but if it doesn't work for you how would you feel if every single day someone was looking over your shoulder, making you feel like your work wasn't good enough to be trusted? Sure anyone can deal with that for short periods of time, but day in, day out with work that you have poured your heart and soul into? It would be a long slow crushing of your spirit. On the other side, maybe you're someone who learns well with hands on guidance. Now throw someone like that into an environment where everything is new technical skill with lots of institutional knowledge of how things work, that may or may not have ever been written down. This is fine if you have someone helping you along, guiding you and teaching you through these new and different things, but what if your advisor is hands off, and just tosses you in saying "figure it out"? What if everything you do over the next few years of new and different things is like that? Maybe you're someone who thrives off that challenge, but if you're not then your life and work is going to be pure misery for YEARS.
These are the non-canonical considerations. Your advisor is the person you will work with most closely, they determine when you're ready to graduate, when you need to do more work, where you submit your work for publication, almost everything about your professional life goes through them. You need that relationship to work. I've been extremely lucky in my grad school experience. (and no, I don't let my advisor read this blog, not until after I graduate anyway). We work well together, and my advisor is wonderfully supportive. There's a topic I will eventually discuss in this blog that he didn't want me to talk about. We discussed it and once he realized that it was important to me, instead of continuing to try to dissuade me, he immediately switched gears into helping me find resources to talk about that topic constructively and effective (I know I'm being vague, it's because I haven't gotten all the details sorted out yet. I'll get there eventually). The important thing here is that we work well together, his teaching and management styles, my learning, we just mesh. I really do feel like I've won the lottery on that front. But I've also seem friends transition from clean cut pre-medical students, into ragged hobo-esque shells of a human being as they and their advisors butted heads. I've even watched people abandon two years of work to change labs and advisors because they just couldn't take it anymore. As painful as that sounds, it was absolutely necessary. This is perhaps the most important "non-canonical" consideration in choosing a lab. It is critical that you mesh both with your advisor. This is what makes things like research rotations so very very important. Even if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what you want to research, you need that first hand experience with the lab culture to see if it fits you. Folks tend not to think about that, or they thing "I can deal with anything for a while." But grad school isn't just "a while," it's a long a difficult slog, and whether you can "deal" or not, if that fit isn't right, you will suffer, and your work will suffer2. So pay attention to the social considerations, and don't be afraid to walk away from something that doesn't fit. Grad school is hard, don't make it harder on yourself. Take the time to thing about these things at the start, so you don't have to change two years into a project.
Make good choices, and always look at the data
Faxe MacAran
Twitter: @TheMacAran
1) Occitan might actually be a bit better studied than some other very small languages, because a great many of the Medieval Troubadour songs were written in Occitan, including Ai Vis Lo Lop and Ventadorn's La Dousa Vota.
2) Yes, Grad school, much like life, is suffering and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, but there's still varying degrees. Try to suffer as little as is possible.
So, what are the considerations for choosing a lab? I'm guessing the first thing that comes to your mind is some version of "what do I want to study?" This is definitely important. I certainly don't wanna spend 4 or 5 or 8 years studying an organ system or disease I don't care about. You have to be excited about what you're doing or it will crush you. You want your skills to align with what the lab does. Are you an analytical chemist? You want to be in a lab that does analytical chemistry. Is your dream to find new ways to treat diabetes? You wanna work in a renal lab, not a neuro lab. maybe you're an engineer who wants to use ultrasonic ablation as a way to treat caner. Now you need to find a cancer lab run by a biomedical engineer. That's starting to get kinda specific and difficult now isn't it? What if you're in the social sciences and you want to study the linguistic development of Occitan?1 It only has about 100,000 native speakers. There are only going to be a handful of programs with professors who study it.
These considerations are what you might consider the "canonical" ones. They're the big questions people think about first. What I do want to study, how do I want to study it, and who (based almost entirely on their prior work) do I want to study under?
But all of that comes with a great big asterisk. * (see it?).
See all of these considerations are grounded in your professional goals. Don't get me wrong, these are important goals, but this is also where grad school is different from undergrad. In grad school, you lab becomes your single greatest source of interpersonal interaction. You work, and work closely with these people every single day, day in and day out for 4, 5, 7+ years. You will work with these people through some of the most intellectually challenging and emotionally frustrating moments in your life. It is absolutely imperative that you mesh well with your lab and your advisor. It's almost heretical to say this, but that can be even more important than being in a lab that studies the exact thing you are interested in. I know, this is a hard one for someone who is really passionate about a subject to swallow, but here me out. Have you ever worked with someone whose leadership style was the exact opposite of what you need? Maybe you're a person who works well with little oversight, you figure things out on your own and then you do them. Now picture spending the next 6 years working with someone who insists on double checking every single thing you do (there are advisors like this). This works for some people. They find comfort in having their important data double checked, but if it doesn't work for you how would you feel if every single day someone was looking over your shoulder, making you feel like your work wasn't good enough to be trusted? Sure anyone can deal with that for short periods of time, but day in, day out with work that you have poured your heart and soul into? It would be a long slow crushing of your spirit. On the other side, maybe you're someone who learns well with hands on guidance. Now throw someone like that into an environment where everything is new technical skill with lots of institutional knowledge of how things work, that may or may not have ever been written down. This is fine if you have someone helping you along, guiding you and teaching you through these new and different things, but what if your advisor is hands off, and just tosses you in saying "figure it out"? What if everything you do over the next few years of new and different things is like that? Maybe you're someone who thrives off that challenge, but if you're not then your life and work is going to be pure misery for YEARS.
These are the non-canonical considerations. Your advisor is the person you will work with most closely, they determine when you're ready to graduate, when you need to do more work, where you submit your work for publication, almost everything about your professional life goes through them. You need that relationship to work. I've been extremely lucky in my grad school experience. (and no, I don't let my advisor read this blog, not until after I graduate anyway). We work well together, and my advisor is wonderfully supportive. There's a topic I will eventually discuss in this blog that he didn't want me to talk about. We discussed it and once he realized that it was important to me, instead of continuing to try to dissuade me, he immediately switched gears into helping me find resources to talk about that topic constructively and effective (I know I'm being vague, it's because I haven't gotten all the details sorted out yet. I'll get there eventually). The important thing here is that we work well together, his teaching and management styles, my learning, we just mesh. I really do feel like I've won the lottery on that front. But I've also seem friends transition from clean cut pre-medical students, into ragged hobo-esque shells of a human being as they and their advisors butted heads. I've even watched people abandon two years of work to change labs and advisors because they just couldn't take it anymore. As painful as that sounds, it was absolutely necessary. This is perhaps the most important "non-canonical" consideration in choosing a lab. It is critical that you mesh both with your advisor. This is what makes things like research rotations so very very important. Even if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what you want to research, you need that first hand experience with the lab culture to see if it fits you. Folks tend not to think about that, or they thing "I can deal with anything for a while." But grad school isn't just "a while," it's a long a difficult slog, and whether you can "deal" or not, if that fit isn't right, you will suffer, and your work will suffer2. So pay attention to the social considerations, and don't be afraid to walk away from something that doesn't fit. Grad school is hard, don't make it harder on yourself. Take the time to thing about these things at the start, so you don't have to change two years into a project.
Make good choices, and always look at the data
Faxe MacAran
Twitter: @TheMacAran
1) Occitan might actually be a bit better studied than some other very small languages, because a great many of the Medieval Troubadour songs were written in Occitan, including Ai Vis Lo Lop and Ventadorn's La Dousa Vota.
2) Yes, Grad school, much like life, is suffering and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, but there's still varying degrees. Try to suffer as little as is possible.
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