PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS

We enjoy having an active group of students, ranging from undergraduates to Master’s to doctoral students and postdocs in our lab. If you are an undergraduate and interested in our work, stop by one of our offices at Nash Hall sometime and introduce yourself, or send us an email (go to www.oregonstate.edu and click Find Someone in the upper right corner of the page; we don’t post our email addresses here to reduce the effectiveness of address mining by spammers).

If you are a prospective graduate student, here are some tips. First, nearly all of our students are supported by grants. That situation is typical for a department in a College of Agricultural Sciences. Very few of our students are supported by teaching assistantships. What does all that mean for you? We usually only take new students if we have available dollars to support them, or if they have their own support already in the form of fellowship dollars (EPA STAR, NSF graduate fellowship, NSERC fellowship, etc). When we do have dollars for a new student, we will post announcements on our web page and we will advertise in the Ornithological Newsletter and the newsletter of the Society for Conservation Biology or other relevant places.

At the moment, Tara is not accepting new students. It does not hurt to ask if Douglas is admitting new students. However, unless you send the following information, you will almost always get a negative response. I get many queries per year, so if you want serious consideration, you won’t leave anything off the list. From talking with my faculty colleagues around the world, they will all pretty much tell you the same thing.

1. Write a cover letter that outlines your research interests and your educational background. Do not send a two-sentence email asking if we are taking students.
   
2. In your cover letter, make it clear that you know what we study. It would be great if you can reference specific content of papers we have published. Show that you are truly interested in working specifically in our lab.
   
3. Include your GRE scores and your GPA in your cover letter. GRE scores are not perfect predictors of success in graduate school, but better scores do indeed increase your competitiveness for fellowships and awards. If your scores are low (below the 50th percentile in verbal, analytical, or quantitative sections), take the GRE again. If you have not taken the GRE yet, do it. Know that most of the students in our lab scored above the 90th percentile in all three sections of the GRE. But not all of them did; real-world experiences and evidence that you can think and write clearly can make up for average test-taking abilities.
   
4. You will always get more attention if you have publication experience. This can take the form of being first author on a paper or co-author with a former supervisor. The key issue is that you realize how important publication is in science. If you want to go to graduate school “because it is the next thing to do,” do not go. You have to have a passion for hard work, both physical and mental, to succeed in the real world, and in our lab. Publications open doors in your career.
   
5. Include a complete resumé or curriculum vitae as a Word file or pdf. In that document, you should include, at a minimum: your name and address (with phone number and email address); your educational history with GPA at each stage of the game; your other work experience with a clear and succinct statement about what you did in each experience and the dates you were there, as well as your supervisor’s name; details on any grants you have obtained or publications you have made; a listing of any other relevant professional experience you have such as presentations at meetings (make it clear if you gave the presentation, if it was oral or a poster); and names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of at least 3 references. If you have other special skills, you should mention them briefly. Such experiences might include skills in genetics lab work, or database management, or teaching.
   
6. If we have funds and your application looks competitive to us, we will then invite you for an interview. Take this seriously. Getting invited for an interview is not the same as getting admitted to graduate school. We want to meet with candidates in person before we admit them.
   
7. Save your money! Don’t apply to the university unless we tell you we will admit you as a graduate student. If you apply without sponsorship of a graduate advisor, you might get accepted to OSU, but you won’t have any financial support from our department unless we agree to sponsor you (or another faculty member in our department does). So save your dollars until you get confirmation that we will sponsor your application.
   
8. Last, timing is everything. Watch the web page and the newsletters for announcements about grant funds we have to support students.

Other things you should know:

Corvallis is an AWESOME place to live and work. Therefore, when we have openings in our graduate lab, competition is keen. If you get admitted, you not only have a responsibility to yourself to work hard and excel, but you owe it to us and the many other students we turned away so we could extend you an offer. So, enjoy living in Corvallis, but get busy and be productive!

We are both caring people, but this does not mean we are push-overs. We know how hard it is to land good jobs in this very competitive world. You can expect us to challenge you, but we will not do your work for you. Students who are self-motivated, yet willing to take guidance, will succeed best under our supervision. We try to be engaged in the work of our students, but we have dozens of commitments and responsibilities, so successful students have to achieve a balance between keeping us involved and being independent.

It is important to realize, too, that we have nearly always already made significant intellectual contributions to your work; even before we admit you to the lab. If you are supported on a grant we obtained, we wrote the grant and we have commitments to agencies to fulfill the objectives in our grants. You can expect that most of your thesis work will be co-authored with us because of this situation, but we have to walk a fine line of being involved without writing your thesis for you. It is your graduate education, so you will have to do the lion’s share of the work on the parts of a project that become your thesis.

We expect Master’s students to finish in 2 years. We expect Ph.D. students to finish in 3 to 4 years. We see great value in having a Master’s degree. It is NOT a waste of time, even if you know you want to get a Ph.D. someday. In our department, a Master’s degree is required before admission to the Ph.D. program, but exceptions are made. To have an exception, the student must have publication experience already, basically the equivalent of what we expect from our Master’s students.

We care deeply about our students and their successes. We view our students as colleagues that we would like to interact with for a long time after they leave Corvallis. We try our best to maintain a group of graduate students who are interactive, happy, work hard, and do strong science. If you want to join our group, we will expect a lot of out of you!