It’s PhD student rotation season again at CWRU, so I figured I may as well put this post on the lab website to 1) inform any prospective PhD students that may be perusing through the lab website, and 2) remind me of the things I like to bring up before people rotate.

1. If you’re interested in rotating, we should definitely schedule a meeting so I can get a sense of your background and interests, so I can tailor the rotation appropriately (and screen out people who are likely to be really poor fits; see point 3 below). It will also give me the opportunity to talk through some of the other points listed below.
2. Rotations are suuuuper short here (Generally 4 to 6 weeks). Thus, there is ZERO expectation on my end to get any “publication quality” experiments done. My main goal is to make sure you’re familiar with some of the bread-and-butter methods in the lab (eg. molecular cloning, landing-pad -centric tissue culture, script-based data analysis). Failed experiments are fine, since it gives us the opportunity to talk about the data and troubleshoot together. The main thing I’ll be looking for is how well we’re able to communicate and work together, since that’s arguably the most important thing we can learn from that rotation that could be extrapolated to predict how good of a dissertation work environment it would be for the specific individual.
3. There isn’t really any prerequisite experience for rotation students. Yea, it would be helpful if you know how to pipet, have done some basic tissue culture work of any kind, and have designed and interpreted some experiments before. Being housed in a wet-lab department, I have very little expectation of computational experience. That said, wet-lab people that have zero interest in learning computational biology and data analysis are probably not great fits, since all projects in the lab will always have hefty data analysis components. Conversely, computation-only people with zero interest (and maybe even experience) in wet-lab research is also likely a bad fit, since all projects in the lab will also always have hefty wet-lab components.
4. The lab is pretty interdisciplinary. Like, some people work on virology, while other people work on proteins related to clinical genetics. Thus, you’ll have to be generally interested in science / biology to enjoy your time here. In contrast, if you only care about subject XXXX or subject YYYY and nothing else, then lab meetings are going to be really boring to you. There’s always talk about (practical) statistics, molecular biology, cell engineering, assay development, and high throughput sequencing; thus, if you’re into those things at some level, then you’re probably fine!
5. There are three very different options in terms of dissertation projects. There are some “ready-to-go” project ideas, where I’ve already crafted a grant application very clearly explaining the project scope. There are also some projects where I’ve played around a bit with some ideas / preliminary data, but it’s not really clearly written out anywhere and things will need to be hashed out. Both of these types of projects should be listed in this “Research Directions” network graph. Then again, there are probably some really great projects that I haven’t thought of yet, that A) are in line with the student’s interests, and B) can be tackled with the techniques / perspectives that the lab is good at. If it’s a decent idea that has links between cell culture assays, cell engineering, genetics, proteins, cell biology, and pathological consequences, I’m sure I’ll find it interesting and get on board. Highest potential risk, but also highest possible reward for the student (at least from a training for independent thinking perspective).
6. Rotation projects don’t have to be on the same topic as potential thesis projects. In my opinion, it’s oftentimes best to separate them, since potential thesis projects likely don’t have any DNA constructs made for it already, so working on it means only doing (likely failed) cloning during the rotation, which is no fun and not particularly informative.
7. I’ll only ever take one student any given year. So while it’s not a competition, some people who may want to join may not be able to. Something to keep in mind!
8. I expect every student to give an “end of rotation” presentation during lab meeting. The main reasons are A) So I can get a sense of where you’re starting in terms of presentation skills, and B) so we can go through the process of giving feedback on a presentation, since that’s an important part of doing a PhD in the lab (giving and receiving critiques / constructive feedback). It’s OK if you didn’t really generate any real data during the rotation; pretty hard to generate data in such a short rotation, and as I note in point 2 above, it’s not really the goal of the rotation anyway. Instead, what I would be looking more for would be signs of understanding the concepts behind the project and the techniques, and thoughtfulness in organizing the presentation for clarity.
9. While I suppose I’ll have the final word into who is potentially offered a spot in the lab, I will still be soliciting opinions on rotating students from existing lab members. The idea isn’t that it’s a “popularity contest” in any sense; it’s more, I want to make sure that all full-time personnel that join the lab are able to get along with the people already there, to curtail potentially problematic or toxic situations.