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Advice for Prospective Grad Students
Positions available in PMGG labs
Fellowships and Jobs in Microbiology, Genetics and Genomics
Microbiology and Genomics Links
Micro and Genomics Education Resources
Journals and other useful Links
Fellowships
Why apply for fellowships?
Qualified students and postdocs in the Life Sciences today find themselves being aggressively recruited by faculty who are more than willing to pay them. Given this situation, why go to the extra work of writing a fellowship application where the chances of getting funded are usually much less than 50-50? I can think of four good reasons:
- Improving your resume - getting into grad school and getting a postdoc are not the hard step in a career in science. Getting a faculty or industry job is much harder. Looking ahead, having a fellowship on your CV provides evidence that your potential has been recognized by others in a nationwide competition.
- Flexibility - sometimes the lab you start in as a grad student or postdoc just turns out to be less attractive than you thought it would be - perhaps you suddenly discover that you're allergic to the organism or some of your coworkers just drive you up the wall. Although changing labs should not be done lightly, there are times when it is the right thing to do. When you need to move, you'll find that prospective mentors will not always be as enthusiastic about having you join their labs as they might have been when they were first recruiting you. This makes sense; they can't tell why things didn't work out in the first lab. Having your own money makes finding a new home a lot easier because your new boss isn't risking as much of his own funding in order to take a chance on you.
- Schmoozing - several of the top postdoctoral grants include an annual meeting of their fellows. These are often attended by many former fellows who are now prominent faculty. Getting to know these people can be very helpful to your career. At minimum, having smart people give you feedback on your ideas is never a bad thing. In addition, these are people who could potentially promote your career by writing letters of recommendation or by flagging you as a top candidate in a pile of hundreds of job applicants.
- Practice - being able to write a successful grant proposal is an important skill that every scientist needs (unless s/he is independently wealthy enough to provide self-funding!). Like any other skill, you get better at grant writing the more you have to do it. It's better to start learning as a student or postdoc with a fallback of funding from your mentor than to start your first proposal as a junior faculty member when you might have to get a significant fraction of your salary from grants.
I'm a microbiologist - Can I really apply for a fellowship from a Cancer (Heart Disease, Arthritis, Muscular Dystrophy, Birth Defects/lstf.) Foundation?
Most societies and foundations associated with specific diseases have a history of supporting basic research that seems to be pretty far from the disease they focus on. This is in recognition of the fact that we aren't very good at predicting the long-term application of discoveries in science. Certainly a lay person in the early 1980s would have had a difficult time understanding how research on bacteria from hot springs inYellowstone Park could help cancer research. As it turned out, studies on thermophiles enabled the invention of practical PCR, which has had broad impacts on every kind of biomedical research, including studies of cancer, heart disease etc.
For the same reasons that we believe that graduate training in microbial genomics and genetics will provide you with a foundation for success beyond microbiology, funding agencies understand
How to find them
As with almost everything else these days, the Internet is a good place to start. Several web sites offer links to a wide variety of fellowships and other funding opportunities. I've included a few because individual sites may not have up to date links for all awards.
The sections below have links to specific programs.
Predoctoral Fellowships
The following links provide useful information about predoctoral fellowships (i.e. money for grad school).
Postdoctoral Fellowships
The following links provide useful information about some specific postdoctoral fellowships.
Jobs
Several web sites have classified ads listing postdocs and jobs. For example, see:
This program is funded through a grant from the Life Sciences Task Force at Texas A&M. Admission to Texas A&M University and any of its sponsored programs is open to qualified individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, or educationally unrelated handicaps. Texas A&M University is an equal opportunity/ affirmative action employer. Last modified: July 31 2004 19:37 PM