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Hello, hello, it's Asami here. Today, it's just me and I know you all miss Masako, but you're just
gonna have to deal with me alone. So, since I'm the only person talking, I figured I can just kind
of blab on about, you know, whatever that's specific to me. And so, one of those things is
my grad school experience. I realized that I haven't done a full proper 振り返り type episode
and time flies. It's like end of October now and almost, yeah, like five months since I defended
my thesis. So much, I feel, has happened since. So, yeah, it's gonna be like very easy to kind of
forget that, I think. The minute details of how I went about applying and how I chose my lab,
what I would do differently if I had another shot at grad school, for instance. So,
in this particular episode, I think I'm gonna record maybe two or three episodes.
In this one, I want to talk about why I decided to go to grad school at all because it's not
really obvious why I wanted to do that. First of all, I come from the line of family where
none, to my knowledge, have gone to grad school. So, some have gone to four-year universities,
some have gone to Tandai. So, I'm not strictly what you would call a first-gen
college family. So, if you have been to America, you might have come across this word first
generation or first gen and those usually refer to students who are the first to attend college
in the family or in the immediate families. Which might come as a surprise because I think,
I don't have the numbers, but in Japan, nowadays, a lot more people go to college than
those who don't ever attend college. So, it's perhaps rarer to find people who haven't attended
four-year colleges or whose parents have never attended four-year college. Whereas in America,
03:01
you still get plenty of people who have never been to college or at least not the colleges in the US.
I think those also kind of count as a first-gen sort of definition because the systems of
universities are very different country to country. And US universities, I think,
are very peculiar, particular type of institution, monster to deal with. So,
it's definitely helpful to have your family member having gone through the same system,
the same US university system to sort of know how to navigate what to do in those four years.
So, in that way, I guess none of my parents have attended US university, but my parents have
attended universities but never grad school. So, it just never occurred to me that I should go to
schools after university. Really, that was not really what I thought about when I joined,
when I started university. But it's not like I knew whose footstep to follow because none of my
family, again, to my knowledge, went to STEM field or research field. They attended college
with the goal of getting a job after four years or after two years, and that's exactly what they did.
So, it was odd to me that some of my peers, especially those who were doing the same
chemistry majors as I was, already knew, by the time they selected chemistry as a major,
already knew that they wanted to go to at least a master's program. If not, most of them wanted to
go to PhD programs because their parents also have a PhD, most of the time, or they knew somebody
who went to grad school in the family or in their community, so they felt like in order to do what
they wanted to do, which was to do research for a living, they needed to go to grad school.
So, none of this was obvious to me. I also was not an A-star student all throughout, my GPA is not
4.0, and I had to work really hard sometimes just to get a B. So, it was, again, not an obvious
choice for me to then, you know, go to pursue research for a living either. But I think this
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was end of third year or beginning of fourth year at the university. This professor who was in the
chemistry department, she was not my direct advisor, but she was, I think I took a class taught by her,
perhaps just one. Anyway, this professor just found me working in the computer lab of the
chemistry building, and I was probably doing some homework, and she was like, hey, I saw me,
and started, you know, chatting up with me, and asked me when I'm graduating, and I said, oh,
I'm graduating in, you know, this year or next year, like 2016 is when I graduated from undergrad,
and she was like, oh, so which grad school are you planning to go to? Like, just like that, she
asked which grad school I'm going to, rather than am I going to grad school? Like, she assumed that
I was already going to grad school, so I had to be like, um, I actually haven't decided if I want
to go to grad school, or if I can at all, and she was really surprised, because from the way I was
doing the lab, and doing my senior thesis research, she thought that I was very excited to do my
research, and I liked doing research, which was true, and she thought I was naturally going for
a grad school route, like all the other people in my major, but I wasn't, and she was very surprised,
so she recommended me to take a look at a few schools, she gave me some names, and like, you know,
like, if you like the sort of things that you're doing for your senior thesis, perhaps you want
to look into these schools, who, you know, they have, these universities basically had
sort of university museum attached, so that I have a chance to work with the museum environment,
museum setup, while I'm doing PhD, even though that's not what I ended up doing, this did help me
sort of think, start thinking about taking a step towards becoming a scientist at the museum, because
yeah, again, like, I wasn't sure that's what I wanted or needed to do, let alone if I am qualified
to do that kind of, you know, PhD, just, it sounded crazy. I think I didn't fully understand
the extent of what it means to do a PhD either, because I went to an undergrad institution where
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there was no grad school attached, like, there was no grad school system attached to the college.
To the larger university, there was grad school, it's a quite prestigious graduate school program,
but in my college specifically, so, you know, each, like, this one university had four colleges,
and I was in one of the colleges, but there was no specific grad school program for my college,
so I didn't really know anybody who was currently a PhD student or a postdoc, I didn't know anybody
like that, I didn't, again, like I said, I didn't have anybody in my family who went to grad school,
so I didn't really understand or register in my head that these are possible options, and in fact,
perhaps a necessary option to continue working in research environment. And around the same time
was when I found out from my museum colleague that in order to work in a museum and do the job
that they were doing full-time, I also need a PhD. I remember thinking, like, dude, I'm so
already tired of having gone through schools, like, do I really have to do five more years of school,
and am I ready for it, you know, I'm not particularly the best student either, and do I really want to
commit to it? That was sort of the questions I had to ask myself time to time again, but
that was my process for sort of initiating my search for grad school. So maybe in the next
episode I'll talk about how I went about choosing the grad school program that I ended up going to,
and so for now, bye! That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening, and find us
at EigoDeScience on Twitter, that is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time!
