From Taiwan to a US RA Job to a Caltech Neurobiology PhD, Applying DIY

Updated 2026/10/16

This article is an edited transcript of my podcast. Click here 👉🏻 to listen to the full episode (in Chinese).
If you enjoy it, please leave the podcast a five-star rating on your favorite platform 🌟 (transcripts take a lot of work to put together 🥹)!

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Hi, and welcome to Jason’s After-Class Study Hall. I’m your host, Jason, and I’ve been sharing content about careers and studying abroad for a long time. On this show I have relaxed conversations about all kinds of stories from studying and working abroad. Whether you’re a student still figuring things out, a new graduate starting your first job, or a professional looking to grow your career, I hope every episode gives you something useful.

You can drop into the study hall anytime to explore these stories, pick up new skills and insights, and grow your career along with me. Whether you want practical workplace tips or real stories from real lives, the show aims to be easygoing, fun and useful. Open any of the notes and let’s explore what a career can look like!

🎤 Guest: Yun’s US Survival Notes ☁
Medium | https://yunnnnnnnc.medium.com/
YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1U-Nx4ae7snA4dEaGLd9Mg
BS in Life Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University ➡️ Research assistant at UC Berkeley, California ➡️ Neuroscience PhD student at Caltech

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In this episode:

📂 Reaching out to professors before applying: is it necessary, and how to do it
📂 When her passion for research began
📂 Which undergraduate research experiences helped with RA and US PhD applications
📂 What she would do differently if she could redo college
📂 Going straight to a US research assistant job without US residency
📂 With a life sciences degree from Taiwan, how to find someone in the US willing to hire you as an RA
📂 The important role Twitter played in her applications
📂 What a US research assistant actually does, and how it differs from a PhD student
📂 Pressure and difficulties she faced
📂 A day in the life of a PhD student
📂 Advice for students interested in a PhD abroad

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I’m really happy to have Yun here today. She’ll talk about working as a research assistant at UC Berkeley, her life as a neurobiology PhD student at Caltech, applying to 25 PhD programs over two years, and what she has learned so far in her PhD. If you’re curious too, keep listening! First, let’s have Yun introduce herself.

Hi everyone, and hello to the listeners of Jason’s Career Folder! I’m Yun. I’m a second-year neurobiology PhD student at Caltech in the US. I studied life sciences at National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan, and after graduating I came to the US and spent two years as a research assistant at UC Berkeley. In my first year of PhD applications I was rejected everywhere. As the title says, I only got into Caltech on my second try, in 2022!

Okay, I’m really glad you agreed to this interview. Yun has written a lot on Medium, and her posts are full of practical, honest reflections. I enjoyed reading them, which is how I found her and invited her onto the podcast. Let’s go in chronological order and start with some personal questions.

Research experience in college

If you had to describe yourself in three adjectives, what would they be?

That was hard. I thought about it for a long time after I saw it in your interview outline. The three words I came up with are determined, open-minded and optimistic.

Determined describes my attitude toward studying abroad. I decided very early, in my freshman year of college or maybe even in the second half of my last year of high school, that I wanted to do a PhD in the US. So I’d say I’ve been pretty firm about that goal. Once I decide something, I keep pushing forward and don’t give up easily until I get there.

The second word is open-minded. Even though I’m determined, I’m pretty open overall. I keep an open attitude toward different options and toward changes in life, and I think I’m open-minded about science too.

The third, which I think matters a lot, is optimistic. When you study abroad, all sorts of strange things happen to you. In a PhD especially, a lot of things don’t go as planned, so being an optimistic person is important. That’s my last word: optimistic.

J: Those three adjectives sound like a perfect fit for a PhD student. Should every PhD student have those three qualities?

Yes! But honestly I think every human being should have them.

Why did you become passionate about research and a PhD so early, in college or even in high school?

This is a bit sensitive with the recent election, but it goes back to Ko Wen-je. I was at Lianli, a cram school near Taipei Main Station that used to be quite well known for physics. I think it was around the time Ko was running for Taipei mayor, and the teacher at Lianli said: “Ko Wen-je is a doctor, but he invented ECMO. What he did is actually closer to what a scientist does.”

After class I went up and asked him: “What’s the difference between being a doctor and being a scientist?”

In my second and third years of high school I had wanted to study medicine for a while, mostly because of my family. That was the first time I heard that being a scientist could be a career. The teacher had done a physics PhD in the US himself, so he knew what that path was like. He explained the difference to me: scientists work upstream, as the people on the front line inventing things or discovering new science. Doctors are more clinical, further downstream, using that scientific knowledge to treat patients. They sit in different places.

At the time I was very interested in psychiatry, things like how mental illnesses are diagnosed. Once I understood the difference between scientists and doctors, I realized I’d rather do what scientists do. I wanted to understand the mechanisms behind mental illness, or what objective biological evidence exists in the brain, instead of diagnosing patients in a hospital or clinic the way a psychiatrist does.

Neither one is better. It’s about what kind of life you want and what you’re drawn to. After that conversation I did some research on my own, found I was more interested in the biological sciences, and later decided to study neuroscience.

Two years into your PhD, does it match the expectations you had at the start?

Absolutely, and to an extreme! Being a scientist, especially at Caltech, is very much what I expected. Caltech often stresses that we should do the kind of science other people may not want to do or may not want to support.

Maybe it’s the influence of the professors and the atmosphere here, but a lot of people really are working on things where, “if I don’t do it, probably nobody else in the world will.” That has good and bad sides. If you’re the first person in the world to discover something new, that’s incredibly motivating. But because you might be the only one working on it, it can be lonely and full of uncertainty, since you have nothing to refer to.

That’s where it’s very different from medical school! To me, medical school is like a factory designed to turn out very good doctors. Ideally every doctor has similar surgical skills, because you want their operations to be consistent and as close to flawless as possible. It’s a profession that follows standard procedures.

Being a scientist is completely different! You rarely have a standard procedure to follow.

You knew early that you wanted to stay in academia, so you built up a lot of research experience in college. What did you do back then that helped your later RA and US PhD applications?

The main thing I did was start joining labs very early. I joined my first lab in the second semester of my freshman year. Of course, as a freshman you don’t know much and you’re a bit clueless, so there isn’t much you can do. But starting that early helped me work out which research methods and topics I wasn’t interested in, so I could rule them out by elimination. Later, in my sophomore and junior years, I joined one more lab each, and stayed about a year and a half in one and a year in the other.

I know many people start at places like Academia Sinica in high school, so compared with them I started late. But spending two or three years in labs back and forth was really helpful for exploring my interests!

If you could redo college, what would you do differently?

Let’s start with the decisions right after high school. After coming to the US, I realized that doing your undergrad here is a huge advantage, especially if you want to apply to graduate school or a PhD later. So if I could go back, and if my family’s situation allowed it, I might consider coming to the US for college.

If you’re already in college in Taiwan, I’d encourage you to find ways to do summer internships, and if you can, do a summer internship or an exchange in the US first! I know some older students who used exchange programs, like the ones at National Taiwan University, to spend two or three months here over the summer. That was very useful for their later applications.

If you can’t come to the US at all, then join a lab early and see whether you can spend one or two years, or even two or three, on a single project and publish a paper. But if you stay in the same lab the whole time, you can’t find out what you like and don’t like. So you either try lots of things, or you stay in one lab and go for a paper. Each has pros and cons, and I can’t say one is better than the other.

Applying for research assistant jobs as a Taiwanese college student

Your path is unusual. I’ve rarely heard of someone graduating from a Taiwanese university and, with no full-time job yet, applying straight to a research assistant job in the US. Why did you decide to do that after graduating, and how did you apply?

In my senior year I was already thinking about what to do after graduation. I knew I wanted to apply to US PhD programs, but I also knew what I’d done in college wasn’t enough. So I considered four options:

One, a master’s in Taiwan. Two, a master’s in the US. Three, a research assistant job in Taiwan. Four, a research assistant job in the US.

At first I was against a master’s, whether in the US or Taiwan, because I was a bit lazy and didn’t want to take more classes. That sounded annoying. I also knew a US master’s is expensive and mostly career-oriented; in biology, US master’s programs are all aimed at getting a job. So I ruled out the master’s options early on.

Being an RA in the US was obviously better than being one in Taiwan, because US research experience and recommendation letters carry a lot more weight than Taiwanese ones. I figured I had nothing to lose, so in the two months before graduation I applied like crazy to research assistant jobs.

Applying is a lot like sending out a resume in Taiwan. There we use 104 Job Bank, and in the US it’s Indeed or Glassdoor. You look through the openings. I applied anywhere in the US, as long as I’d heard of the school. I just kept sending resumes, and I think I ended up applying to more than forty.

In the end I got only two interviews: one for a position at Berkeley and one, actually, at Caltech. Only the Berkeley professor was willing to take me. The biggest obstacle is not having legal status. If you don’t have a green card, like me, it’s very hard to find a PI willing to sponsor your visa.

Why didn’t you consider applying directly to PhD programs?

Because I knew that with my experience at the time I wouldn’t get into the schools I wanted.

You applied to forty-some RA jobs and got two interviews. How did you get them to hire you? Was there anything that made you stand out from a big pool of applicants? After all, you were just a college graduate from a faraway country!

I have to be realistic here! Compared with American college students, we basically have no advantage when applying for RA jobs. The labs I worked in during college all used mice, so my mouse work, surgeries and other lab techniques were above average for an undergraduate, but nothing special. I’m sure plenty of American students had as much experience as I did, or more.

So I think the biggest reason I got the RA job was simply luck, and meeting a kind PI! My skills also matched what he was looking for. After I got the job, I wrote an article about it (in Chinese), and lots of younger students reached out to talk about it. Quite a few of them applied and got RA jobs too. I know of at least three or four people who found RA positions after reading that article, so maybe getting lucky isn’t that hard after all.

The visa is still the problem, though. You need a PI who is willing to go through the process with you and sponsor your visa. I know many people look for PIs who are Taiwanese or Chinese, and that may be a bit easier: since you speak Chinese, they might be more willing to help you.

My PI at Berkeley was actually American! But I later found out his wife is Taiwanese American, so maybe that’s why. When he saw I was Taiwanese he may have felt a bit of a connection, and he very kindly gave me a chance. I consider him someone who changed my life.

Are most research assistants American? What share are foreigners, and how many need a visa?

Good question! When I was at Berkeley there were four RAs including me. Two were American, one was me, and the other was a woman from India who was also on a visa.

But our professor was unusually generous, so he was willing to sponsor visas. Many aren’t. When I was applying, some job postings said outright that the institution doesn’t sponsor visas. So I think the share of RAs who need a visa is still fairly small.

What working as a research assistant was like

You often hear that PhD students also work as RAs. What’s the difference between a PhD student working as an RA and a full-time research assistant like you were?

When a PhD student is an “RA,” it doesn’t mean they’re really working as an RA! It means the work they already do for their PhD, doing research in the lab, counts as RA work. When we hear that PhD students hold RA or TA positions, a lot of the time it’s a label on the books for how the money gets paid to the student: their salary comes from an RA or a TA line, and they may have some matching duties. For RA positions, a PhD student working as an RA is really just a PhD student being a PhD student.

So as a research assistant you were doing full-time research in the lab, while PhD students are busy with their own research. Is that right?

Right. A PhD student works on a project for the dissertation or paper they need to graduate. RAs also have their own projects, but many RAs play a supporting role for the PhD students or postdocs, and the PI can send them to help other people.

PhD students, on the other hand, focus more on their own dissertation and research topic.

You’ve said Twitter played an important role in your applications. Why?

J: I rarely hear anyone say Twitter helped their applications. Can you explain how Twitter helped you back then?

Sure. I started using Twitter only because I was getting ready to apply and wanted to follow professors I was interested in. So I followed a lot of professors in my field, or whose labs I wanted to join.

Every so often I’d post something random. I happened to be sending out applications for research jobs, so I tweeted something like: “Oh, I’ve sent out 20 applications and nobody has replied. Being an international student is so hard, haha.” I was just venting. Then out of nowhere, a very well-known professor in our field whom I followed, who was at Harvard then (he’s moved to Switzerland since), sent me a direct message. He said, “Hey, I saw your tweet. I can look at your resume.” I was completely stunned. I wrote about this on Medium (in Chinese) if you want to read more.

I sent him my resume, and he really did email back with a lot of careful advice. I revised my resume and cover letter based on his suggestions, and then I got the job. It was an amazing thing to happen!

Beyond that, many professors on Twitter now retweet openings in their own labs or in their friends’ labs, and a lot of it is fresh, first-hand information. And it isn’t only for job hunting. If you want to follow new papers from other labs, or see what people in your field are discussing, arguing about, or what drama is going on, Twitter is where you hear it first. So I highly recommend opening a Twitter account! You don’t have to post anything. Just follow the big names and you’ll have more to read every day than you can get through.

So it’s a bit like business students using LinkedIn, while science, engineering and biomedical students use Twitter?

LinkedIn isn’t that popular in academia. It seems more popular in industry. But on Twitter I also follow lots of famous people like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk, just to see what they’re talking about.

Apart from that professor, did you get any other unexpected help?

Let me think. I remember seeing openings that hadn’t been posted officially yet, on a university job site for example, but the professor had already put out an unofficial tweet saying what kind of person their lab was looking for.

I think I applied to one or two because of that, so Twitter is more real-time (which is what social media is good at).

A day as a research assistant: what does a full-time RA mainly do, and how is it different from a PhD student?

I think any job with “assistant” in the title is a very broad label. The scope can cover almost anything. Basically, you do whatever the PI who hired you wants. So when you apply for an RA position, read the job description carefully, and when you apply or interview, talk very directly with the PI about your expectations, so you’re sure you’re on the same page.

Otherwise you might want RA work and research experience because you’re applying to PhD programs, while the PI is looking for someone to do odd jobs like sterilizing bottles or ordering supplies. Then you’ll be very unhappy.

One of my coworkers back then was also called a research assistant, but the work was very different from mine. That job was managing the mice in the animal facility, as the assistant in charge of raising them. My position was mainly running experiments in the lab and sometimes supporting postdocs or PhD students. Later I was assigned a complete project of my own and worked with the PI directly. So we had the same title, but our jobs were quite different.

Do most research assistants take the job after their bachelor’s and before starting a PhD?

From what I’ve seen there are two types. One is people who’ve just graduated from college and are applying to grad school, so for them it’s like a gap year. The other is people like that coworker of mine, who are older, maybe in their thirties, and one was even in their fifties. For them it’s a long-term full-time job.

These days quite a lot of American college graduates also stay in labs as research assistants after graduating, so it’s roughly those two types.

When you became a research assistant, was it your first time in the US, or had you been before?

My first time in the US was in high school, for a summer language program. I stayed in Boston for two months, or maybe a little over one, at a language school with high school classmates. The second time was for the RA job.

Did you face any pressure in that full-time job, or any difficulties you didn’t expect?

In college I worked hard at watching American TV shows and learning about American culture. But once I actually lived in the US, at first I still found the social interactions and the general atmosphere very hard to get used to. If you know a bit about the US, you’ll know the overall style is more individualistic, and most people lean extroverted.

It’s hard to describe in a few words. I wrote a full article (in Chinese) on Medium about how I see and adjusted to American culture. Overall, besides the language, there was the personal distance between people and lots of subtle differences in how people interact. All of that added up and put me under enormous pressure.

There’s a story I tell a lot. There was a supermarket near my place, and one of the cashiers there loved making small talk. When I first arrived, every time I went grocery shopping I tried to avoid him. Whenever his line was free, I’d deliberately walk a few more laps around the store until another cashier was free, and check out there. I just really didn’t want that cashier ringing me up.

Small talk is a kind of chit-chat in American culture, a bit like asking “Have you eaten?” in Taiwan. It has no real content, but it’s how Americans interact, and I was really bad at it. Without my noticing, it built up a lot of stress. I think you only understand this once you’ve lived here: I could speak English, I could buy whatever I needed, so why did I feel so held back? It wasn’t the same as being myself in Taiwan. Language and culture create a kind of barrier.

At work, though, my PI and the lab were great, so I consider myself lucky. I did have some friction with a postdoc I worked with. I remember one day I was so stressed, because we just weren’t communicating well, that I called my boyfriend at the time and cried. That’s the moment I remember most clearly as the RA job really getting to me. Other than that, if you have a good PI, you shouldn’t run into big problems.

After four years in the US, how do you handle small talk now?

This is what I wrote about in that Medium article (in Chinese) I just mentioned. One very important point: “Stop caring what other people think!”

In Asian cultures you tend to pay more attention to the mood of the group, to hold back, to be careful, to “read the air,” as the Japanese say. In the US people are much more likely to just do their own thing. They do whatever they feel like, and they rarely think, “The mood right now is like this, so I shouldn’t speak up or share my opinion.”

People often say American students are more willing to voice their opinions while Taiwanese or Asian students hold back. I think this is part of it: you have to learn not to care what other people think. In my Medium article I put it as: Don’t give a fuck about what other people think. Because no one cares about you

At first I was very self-conscious: I look like a foreigner, my English isn’t good. Then I realized everyone is busy with their own stuff. Nobody cares how good my English is, what I’m wearing, or what dumb thing I’m doing. Once you grasp that, you start living very comfortably. That’s how I feel about my life now.

J: So if you don’t feel awkward, it isn’t awkward?

Exactly! That’s it. But actually making it part of your daily life took me about six months, so the first half-year was a bit rough.

Two years of applying to US PhD programs

Let’s talk about applying to US PhD programs, since you applied twice. Did your first round of PhD applications start during your last year as an RA in the US?

Yes! I applied after a full year as an RA. I knew I might have a shot, but I wasn’t sure how good it was. I was willing to apply again the next year, so in the first round I applied to only thirteen or fourteen programs, all at top schools.

You applied DIY to 25 programs over two years. How did your profile or your mindset differ between the first and second rounds?

On paper the difference wasn’t very big, so I was pretty confused about why so many schools turned me down the first year without even an interview, while the second year I got lots of interviews. I don’t know if it was because COVID was bad during the first round, or because my PI’s recommendation letter wasn’t as strong yet that first year. It could also be that I had more research results to write about, so my CV and SOP caught the reviewers’ attention more.

Overall, PhD admissions are a black box. There are a hundred reasons you might get in or not, and you never know why. There’s a rough bar, and you can’t be too far from it. But when everyone is close to that bar, it’s very hard to tell what made you stand out.

You mentioned the black box. Choosing schools and estimating your chances for a PhD seems trickier than for a master’s, where it’s easier to judge where you’ll land. Did you have a strategy for picking schools, and how did you judge which schools your profile could get into?

I think it’s a bit like applying for a master’s. At first you definitely look at rankings.

But I also looked at finer details: how many international students the PhD program has admitted in the past, and which of the admitted students had backgrounds comparable to mine. Take Stanford, for example. In Stanford’s neuroscience program,
almost 80% to 90% of students did their undergrad in the US. Even the foreigners they admit came to the US for college. And every one of them has a superhuman background and record. One look and I knew I wasn’t at their level.

So in my second round I think I didn’t apply to Stanford. After rankings, I looked at the share of international students and the backgrounds of the people who got in, and weighed all of that together. On top of that, you need to check whether you’ve actually found professors you like at that school, so you’re sure there are labs you want to join once you get in.

Based on all those factors, I’d sort schools into reach, target and safety. For example, I could split reach, target and safety schools 2:6:2. In my first round I had almost no safety schools. I just wanted to try my dream schools and see if I had a chance. If not, I’d apply to more target and safety schools the next year to make sure I had somewhere to go. That’s why I applied to 25 in the second round.

You did all your applications DIY, without even paying for English editing. Do you have any advice for preparing application documents, especially the PhD SOP?

Let’s start with the English. Assess whether your basic grammar is good enough. If you think your English is okay, ChatGPT makes things so easy now. You can check your grammar yourself, and at most ask one or two people with very good or native English to read it over. I think that’s enough.

I don’t think paid English editing adds that much. Of course, if you know your English isn’t good, you should still get it edited. But editing doesn’t add much to an SOP, because the content itself matters much more than the English phrasing.

Over the past year or two I’ve read SOPs for quite a few younger Taiwanese students, and the most common problem in English SOPs written by Taiwanese students is too much vague description and too many adjectives. For example, lots of people write things like Oh I’m smart, Um I’m hardworking, I’m curious about science. Anyone can write that, and you can write whatever you like, so in the end it’s as if you wrote nothing. Saying you’re smart is the same as not saying it.

So those adjectives just waste words. I’m being blunt, but the key to writing an SOP is that you get straight to the point and say concrete things. The purpose of the SOP matters a lot: your research interests and career goals. Then describe in detail the research you’ve done, your thinking along the way and how you see science. I think that’s what matters most in a PhD SOP. Use real examples to make a strong case for why you want a PhD and why they should take you into their research.

If someone describes their experience and their ideas about science concretely, they don’t need those vague adjectives. From your experience and how you think about research, readers will naturally be convinced: this applicant is smart, persistent and curious about science.

I think it may come from how essay writing is taught in Taiwan, which makes us like to write vague, flowery prose. That’s the biggest difference, I think.

J: I agree! A lot of people end up writing something like a lyrical essay.

On that note, I saw in your Medium post that the professor from Twitter suggested you could even write in bullet points. Is that right?

Right. When I wrote that cover letter (not an SOP), I also wrote it like the lyrical essay you just mentioned: my background, why I’m interested in science and so on, with my research experience woven in.

His main point was that everyone is busy, and professors even more so. If you want your key points to stand out, the best way is to use bullet points and just list your skills. Of course, that’s for job applications! For PhD applications you obviously can’t use bullet points, so the SOP really is hard to write. My other advice is to start writing early.

Writing an SOP takes a lot of self-reflection and understanding of your own passion. How much time did you spend on it, and how many versions did you go through?

So many! I applied twice, remember? Even in my second year, when I looked back at my first-year SOP, I found a ton of things to change. Everyone says the SOP is hard to write and can never be perfect, so I’d suggest giving yourself at least six months.

Are there specific requirements or word limits for PhD SOPs?

It differs by school. Some say two pages, some say 1,500 words, some say 1,000 words. I think most people back then wrote one complete general version first, then adjusted it to each school’s rules. It really takes a lot of time.

A big feature of PhD applications is reaching out to professors before you apply: writing to them to communicate and get to know them. How necessary is that for a PhD application, and do you have any tips?

Opinions on it are really split! First, it depends on the field. I have many friends in physics at Caltech, and I know that for physics and math, reaching out seems to matter quite a bit. You find the professor you want ahead of time, and the whole thing is more like an apprenticeship, like a master taking on a disciple.

In biology, though, I know it’s almost always a committee system. Each year the school forms an admissions committee, and your application has to be reviewed by every member. Sometimes current students even sit on those committees. It’s a holistic evaluation; one professor wanting you isn’t enough. If the program you’re applying to uses a committee system like that, I think reaching out helps very little. But because everyone does it, you feel you have to do it too, or you’ll fall behind.

So I still contacted quite a few professors. Some replied, but most were form replies along the lines of: sure, you’re welcome to apply, but we can only talk once you’re admitted. My advice is not to make reaching out your focus, unless it’s a professor you really like, or you know your current PI in Taiwan has connections with those US professors. Then you can try. Getting to know them might help later!

Personally, I’d say do it if you have the time, or if it gives you a bit more peace of mind.

Most PhD programs still interview, right? If you’ve reached out beforehand, does it help a little in the interview?

As I remember, in my interviews three or four professors did recognize that I’d emailed them before. But my take is that if you’re an undergrad in Taiwan reaching out, they’ll forget you quickly. I think they remembered me because of my PI’s name, not mine. They remembered my PI at Berkeley, who may have been their friend, and that’s why they remembered me.

If I’d been a Yang-Ming student reaching out, by the interview two or three months later I’d guess there’s an 80% chance they wouldn’t remember me.

What information did you include when you reached out? Do you attach your CV and SOP?

You probably don’t need to attach the SOP. Professors are busy. But you definitely need to attach your CV! Then in the email itself, get straight to the point and briefly describe your research interests and background.

One trick if you want more replies: split your email into two paragraphs. The first covers your background, and the second asks questions. I’d deliberately ask things like whether they’re taking students this year, who the current students in the lab are, and what research topics are ongoing. Once you’ve asked questions, the person feels that since you asked, they kind of have to reply. So if you want a higher reply rate, asking questions is a pretty useful trick!

But overall, I don’t think it affects your chances with the committee much. The effect is pretty small.

You’re almost two years into a US PhD. What does a typical day look like for a PhD student?

The fastest way is to watch my YouTube! Yes, I’m shamelessly plugging my YouTube channel. Honestly, a PhD schedule isn’t that different from an undergrad’s, except you have fewer classes and spend most of your time in the lab doing experiments. More specifically: reading papers, running experiments, and meeting with your PI or labmates. There’s usually a weekly lab group meeting where people take turns presenting their recent progress. Outside of that, you might go to talks, apply for scholarships, attend conferences elsewhere, and sometimes go to workshops or other networking events.

Outside school, I really like going to the gym because it relieves stress. Sometimes I go to social events run by the school or department, where we drink beer, eat cheese and ham, catch up with classmates, and complain about whatever’s going on in our labs. On weekends, since California has lots of outdoor activities, I might go hiking, to the beach or camping. Otherwise it’s the boring everyday stuff, grocery shopping and dinners with friends. Once in a while I take a longer trip. If you’re frugal, a PhD stipend lets you save some money for travel. Over spring break I went camping with friends in Northern California, and I just got back from New York over Christmas. So even though it’s tough, you can still save a little to treat yourself. Those are the small joys of a PhD.

Is there a lot of deadline pressure in a PhD? Are there regular reports you have to turn in?

If you’re taking classes, you’ll still have midterms, finals, or midterm and final reports. Beyond that, everyone says 80 to 90% of how good your PhD life is depends on your advisor. With a good advisor, you’re in heaven. With a bad one, those five or six years can feel like living in hell. Luckily, my advisor is pretty chill.

As for deadlines, apart from taking turns presenting progress and meeting my advisor once a week, my advisor puts very little pressure on me overall. But I’ve heard plenty of horror stories from classmates and friends who are really suffering. It depends heavily on your advisor, and I guess that part is luck too!

Can’t you choose your advisor?

You can! In the first year of a PhD, most programs have what we call rotations, where you rotate through different labs for short stints. So first year is very important. You need to find an advisor you get along with and whose research you like. It’s a bit like making friends or dating. People say picking a PhD advisor is like a matchmaking date: you need someone who suits you, whom you can put up with and who can put up with you. Otherwise you’ll end up in a very unhappy marriage!

Is a PhD about 30% coursework and 70% research?

In the first two or three years, coursework may be heavier for some people. It depends on your department. But later on, once you’ve finished your classes, coursework might be just 1 or even 0.5 out of 10. Especially in the later years, you basically have no classes.

What advice do you have for students interested in doing a PhD abroad?

If you want to do a PhD, first figure out what kind of research you want to do. A PhD is different from a master’s. For most people, the goal of a master’s is to find a job. If you’re doing a PhD to land a high-paying job, that’s not wrong, but you still need a research topic worth investing those five or six years in. So for undergrads, the most important thing is to find research you’re interested in!

The other, more practical piece of advice: if you want to come to the US, start practicing your English listening and speaking now! That’s the most direct and fastest way to adapt to life in the US. I have a lot to say about learning English too, but we probably don’t have time today, so follow me on Medium and YouTube!