Speaker 1: So I'm running out of questions here, is there any?

Speaker 2: You know, were we on mark on the first question? I just wanted to flip it to the audience. You asked us to start with what you think are the main stress-causing factors of our students. It's been a long time since I've been a student, so I'm just curious, is that okay? Would people in the audience be comfortable? I mean, it's probably dependent on how long you've been in our program, so we can maybe even start there.

Speaker 3: For me, it was the same, kind of, I'm kind of at the end of it. I've been through it pretty much all. For me, the first two years were a little harder than undergrad, but everything was well-defined. I have an exam, I have to get it done, I have to get the score. But then the rest of it was not very well-defined, and that was a time of struggle for me, trying to figure out what I want, how am I doing, and I didn't have the means that I used to have in undergrad, which were my scores, or comparing myself to peers, based off of what I would do in my exams. I didn't have those anymore, and so I really didn't know how well I was doing, or if I'm behind, or if I'm good or not. For me, that was more stressful, and it was more of a, as you said, a chronic stress. It wasn't like, done, good, I'm feeling happy now. It was like, oh geez, it's been like a couple months, nothing is working, why is this happening to me? Is it my hands, as you said, is it me, or is it just like, I have to let it go and start another experiment? Eventually figured it out, but for me, that was the highest stress of it all.

Speaker 2: And that is part of the graduate school education, is kind of figuring what your strengths are, trying to be objective about problems that you feel very emotionally, and figure out how to kind of do it, because I think as an advisor, we have solutions, but they're more cookie cutter, and as we get to know our students better, we start to adapt that better. But we're going to be always one step behind the student in understanding what their strengths are. So I just met this really talented graduate student, who I approached because I read his paper, and it's in my area, and I went to congratulate the student at the conference, and he was also student host, so I had a connection with him. And you know, he was so bummed out, because he was from a hardcore synthetic group, and his paper was all mechanism, and everyone knows mechanism is difficult, right? But he was so ashamed that he never made new molecules, because that was the expectations he had going to this group. And so I had to convince him that what he did was amazing, it's going to be a highly cited paper. And so that's why I want to say, there's no one recipe for success, and part of it's very individual. So I'm curious, how did you figure it out?

Speaker 3: Trial and error, is the best answer. As you said, communication, you learn how to talk with your advisor, and how to figure out expectations versus how well am I doing with advisor, with peers, I guess everything.

Speaker 2: Was there a shift in how you viewed your advisor? I remember when I shifted as a student, where the advisor was not the boss, but the resource.

Speaker 3: I think it was kind of a combination of everything. I got into a relationship, so I was learning how to communicate better with people in general, and I think at the same time, I learned that it's all about communication, and thinking that, well, why do you expect everybody to know what's going on in your head if you don't talk about it? You have to know and learn how to express it, and it's going to be different for every person. Again, trial and error, I guess.

Speaker 1: There's a bit of a conflict here, because ... Ah, here.

Speaker 3: What errors?

Speaker 1: I thought we cleared it up. I think what an advisor can really do to decrease the student's stress as they approach the end of their time, is to start cutting things loose. As a graduate student, I remember one of the big sources of stress for me was that you start on these projects that branch out into more and more directions, and I felt like in my fourth year, I had to bring all of those directions to some focus. What really was helpful to me, in my fourth year actually, was my advisor, my graduate advisor, came to me and said, kind of bluntly, there's no way you're going to do this. There's no way you're going to do this, and there's no way you're going to do this. He was able to take of these ten directions that I was going, three of them, and pull those to a point that was going to be my thesis. A lot of stuff that I did as a grad student didn't go in my thesis, and that kind of hurts a little bit, and it kind of hurts when somebody cuts stuff loose like that, that you really feel like you own. It did relieve my stress greatly when that happened. The conflict, I think, is that as an advisor now, from the other side, I like it when my students have a lot of things that they're trying to bring into focus. Especially in their third year, if somebody's got three or four things going, and they're pushing in all directions, I'm like, this is amazing, keep going, keep going, and then I tend to get to their fourth year, and I'm still saying, keep going, keep going, and I should really, we should really, I think, around that time, start lopping things off and deciding this is a path for somebody else to pursue, and start bringing things into focus. But it's a conflict, because you may be really doing well in all those directions, and we want you to keep going in all directions. We want to be everything, everything to be happening, everything to be working at once.

Speaker 2: It's unnatural for research to end, right? I mean, for us, our careers evolve through many students. But for a student, so it feels hard, because it is hard. That's right, you have to focus to finish. It's part of the strategy to be able to write something out that's concrete. So it's kind of like shifting from dreamer to pragmatist. You have to figure out what it is you can write up that would make a nice coherent story. And I think an advisor is a great person to check in with at that time, because they've had to do it. They know what it takes to finish a story so that it's ready for publication. So yeah, if we don't initiate that conversation with you in your fourth year, please initiate it. I remember when I was out on pregnancy leave, my two students were trying to graduate that year, had a really hard time, because we kind of just missed that optimal moment where we should have converged to have this discussion of how do you finish at this stage. So that was probably very stressful for them and me at the time. But yeah, please bring that up. That, I think, is a really important fourth year talk. Don't wait until your fifth year.