Nationality: Singapore
Current Job: Senior Research Fellow, Yale-NUS College, Singapore
Graduation: Faculty of Science, Year 2014
Undergraduate: National University of Singapore, Singapore
"Fit your work into your life, not the other way around!"
In retrospect, would you still have chosen to do a PhD? Why?
Choosing to do a PhD in physics was a good choice even in hindsight. The subject is too interesting to stop studying after graduating with an undergraduate degree, which is exactly where one starts getting to the really interesting and exciting stuff.
On hindsight, would you have chosen the same research supervisor for your PhD?
| I could not have asked for a better PhD supervisor. To new students – know that your choice of supervisor might be the single most important decision you make in graduate school. I think compatibility of character/personality/working style should be the first consideration when picking a supervisor, and field of research should come as a close second. |
Suggest 2 or 3 things that graduate students should do to prepare for their professional careers?
1. Your plan cannot just be to become a professor. You must have a career plan B and preferably also C. This will vastly reduce the pressure you feel and just allow you to enjoy the work more. Along the same vein, take any available opportunities (or create them yourself) to build skills in the course of your research work that may be useful for industry. Nowadays, I suppose data science and AI are the main draws. Subscribe to one of the free online job portals and see what kinds of employers are looking for people with the postgraduate degree that you are working towards. This will give you a sense of what options are available to you.
2. The ability to give good presentations is incredibly important. Make practicing how to give good presentations a long-term side project. Watch and learn from good presentations in your spare time (perhaps when commuting), TedTalks for instance.
Name 2-3 things you wished you had been told when you started graduate school?
1. Google is your friend. Use it as the first line of attack to gather information on any problem. Surprisingly useful stuff resides in internet forums and online databases, especially wikipedia. Use your own know-how and commonsense to separate out the wrong information, which also exists online in large amounts unfortunately.
2. Always have physical intuition when working on a physics problem- something like a little cartoon in your mind. If you can’t find one from books, try and come up with one yourself! This is the real essence of physics in my opinion.
3. Block out all the noise when working on a difficult/controversial problem- what you want or don’t want the result to be, what other people want or don’t want it to be, etc. Look at things squarely in terms of what (most likely) is true, what (most likely) is false and what you simply don’t know based on available information, and work from there. The truth/data is what it is regardless of what anyone wants it to be. Denial of the truth only leads to wasted time from working in the wrong direction.
Any other words of wisdom to share?
Try to work on problems that you truly feel are interesting. As far as is practical, do not settle for the safe and boring projects. Pick the risky exciting ones that have a reasonable chance of success and work really hard and really originally on them. This is your journey and no one else’s. But at the same time, process and weigh the advice from your supervisor seriously and work respectfully with them to find/formulate projects you both agree are exciting and feasible for you to take on. Note that if you build your career on projects that you do not really enjoy, it defeats the main attraction of being an academic and you could do similar in industry with much better remuneration.
Get enough sleep and exercise. Fit your work into your life, not the other way around. Do not fear failure and instead focus entirely on making sure you succeed. Know in the back of your mind that IF it so happens you do not succeed (nothing is guaranteed in life), there are always new and exciting paths to explore elsewhere.