While this is understandable, increasingly

male faculty also serve as important role models for work-life balance. I would strongly suggest to women students that as they evaluate potential graduate advisors, male or female, they examine to what extent prospective mentors have a good track record of having trained successful women scientists. As you gauge the mentoring environment of a prospective lab, make sure to ask whether the students are generally happy. If not, this is selleck kinase inhibitor a warning sign. I strongly believe that when a talented student is in the right lab, with a good mentor, that going to lab every day should feel almost like being in summer camp. Someone once told me with great sincerity that he felt that you had not done a real PhD until you hated your advisor and he or she hated

you. This is a tragic way of thinking! I have heard of many cases HDAC inhibitor in which a student has been told that they are not working long enough hours in a lab and that the advisor expects the student to work 60+ hours per week. In 20 years, I have never said or implied such a thing to any student. I feel that the advisor’s job is to provide a fun and exciting environment, to set a good example, and the rest must come from the heart of a student. Henry Ford once said, “Hire good people, and then get the hell out of their way.” What great advice! If all is well, doing science will feel like play, and students will freely choose to work long hours because it is fun and exciting (that does not mean

there will be frustrating times when your experiments are not working, of course). Moreover, if trained well, there should be no problem being successful in science while leading a happy and balanced life (okay, I am not a great example of and this—but most of my previous students have accomplished a balanced life in their own labs despite my poor example. And I am living the life I love, just as I hope for my students.) Here are some signs that a prospective advisor is thinking more about his own career and less about your career: he (or she) never mentions his students’ names when he presents their work in a talk or only mentions them in a long list in small print at the end of the talk, he does not practice the students’ talks with them, he puts two students in the lab on the same project so that they must compete with each other, he tells you what experiments you must do, he insists on writing the research papers rather than allowing the student to write it and then editing it with the student, he allows the students’ papers to sit on his desk (sometimes for years, sometimes never even submitting them), and he refuses to allow students to take their projects or reagents with them (or fails to make sure they have lots of good starting points for projects in their own labs). Although most faculty do not behave this way, I have seen these things happen to many students over the years.