The Art of Being a Scientist: A Guide for Graduate Students and Their Mentors , Roel Snieder and Ken Larner
Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2009. $32.99 (286 pp.). ISBN 978-0-521-74352-5
Graduate school, where the measure of success often seems intangible, can be a bewildering experience. A manual that demystifies the most important aspects of graduate school and subsequent careers would be useful. It would provide a clear description of the elements of graduate training and guidance in attaining the increasingly important “soft” skills—for example, time management, grant writing, and ethics training—required for advancement in school and beyond.
In The Art of Being a Scientist: A Guide for Graduate Students and Their Mentors, authors Roel Snieder and Ken Larner have taken on the challenge of constructing such a guidebook. The text, based on their course at the Colorado School of Mines, gives students practical skills and insights for getting the most out of graduate school. Although the authors, who occasionally draw from their own experience, are mostly concerned with science, the insights they offer can be applied to any research field.
Written in the voice of the “wise mentor,” the book starts with an overview that describes the various scientific approaches and exhorts readers to analyze themselves to see how they best fit into the scientific endeavor. After detailed coverage of the different elements and stages of graduate education, the authors advise students on the research process—for instance, how to organize and prioritize tasks, how to ask the right questions, and how to proceed when stuck at a dead end. They also give detailed advice on writing research papers and selecting journals in which to publish, and they analyze the implications of such choices. The book also includes chapters on ethics, literature searching, communication, time management, and grant writing—all vital to graduate training. A section on gender issues describes potential problems, but unfortunately offers no advice on how to deal with them.
The latter part of the book contains an overview of careers in science. Snieder and Larner discuss various types of scientific careers that are available to PhDs, most notably those in academic, industrial, and national-labs settings. The primary distinctions in workplace and expectations for those settings are covered well, but, presumably because of the authors’ backgrounds, academic careers receive a more detailed treatment.
Universities are under increasing pressure from funding agencies to provide the kind of training that is described in The Art of Being a Scientist. Professors who want to develop a course similar to Snieder and Larner’s will find the book to be a useful template and text. It may not provide all the necessary detail, but it does describe most of the key elements. The appendices include a list of resources and a sample curriculum; combined, they provide a good coursework foundation.
One book cited in the appendices is A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science (Basic Books, 1993), by physicist Peter J. Feibelman. The contents of that book overlap significantly with Snieder and Larner’s text. Feibelman’s text is written in a more charming and personal style, but The Art of Being a Scientist provides a more modern treatment of soft skills and an updated discussion of the differences between industrial and academic workplaces. Incidentally, neither book mentions the importance of international experience, which is an aspect of graduate education that will play an ever-larger role in the training of PhDs for the global workplace.
The Art of Being a Scientist is a welcome map for the voyage that is scientific graduate education. Graduate students will find it particularly useful and will likely consult it often throughout their academic experience and beyond; it will be valuable, as well, to undergraduate students as they consider graduate school. The book may also help parents gain a better understanding of what kind of life their child is choosing and what obstacles he or she will face. And it should be an excellent resource for graduate-school mentors, particularly those who endeavor to offer more comprehensive training to their students.
