Being a graduate student

A graduate student is a person who takes the first conscious step in the scientific field. The time of graduate school is an amazing time of search, work, communication, new knowledge, acquaintances, and formation.

In our Fatherland, the life of a graduate student is colored by rather strange key details that have nothing to do with science: the threat to children of military service (graduate studies remained practically the only legal opportunity for a healthy young man to avoid it), conscious entry into the path of asceticism (a scholarship for a graduate student, often already a family member) person, still amounts to 1500-3000 rubles per month).

The present and future of science and education depends on how a graduate student lives and how he works: today he studies, gets his first results, writes his first articles, and then, after some time, he will become a candidate, doctor of science, scientific expert , leader and organizer of scientific research, teacher, associate professor, professor, head of department. Will he defend himself? Will he become a real scientist and/or teacher or will he leave science and education? Will he go abroad? How will you approach your business?

We want to create a portrait of a modern graduate student. Therefore, current and recent graduate students (who graduated from graduate school 10 years or less ago) are asked to go to www.makesurvey.net/cgi-bin/survey.dll/0C6591388C5648CE9B4667F246EEFC5E and fill out the form. The survey will be conducted until the New Year. It contains 12 sections: general information, scientific organization, supervisor, scientific seminar, publications, candidate minimum, finances, housing, government and support services, postgraduate plans, family life, self-perception and attitude. We do not ask for any personal information - we are interested in the general picture of a graduate student’s life. An analysis of the results will be published in early 2011 in the TrV-Science newspaper, and the full results will be published on the website trv-science.ru. There are quite a few questions, so thank you in advance for your time. The survey can serve not only as a measuring instrument, but also as a sounding board through which the most problematic aspects of graduate student life can be sounded. The measurement accuracy and sound volume depend on the number of completed questionnaires, so we ask you to inform your colleagues about the survey.

In addition, we ask you to send to aspirantpoll@yahoo. com your own postgraduate stories in free form: how you did it, what you expected, how your relationship with your supervisor developed, how your scientific work went, what happened. To make the picture objective, we are interested in any stories - both successful and unsuccessful.

We will publish interesting and characteristic stories on the pages of the TrV-Nauka newspaper. In order to avoid publishing anyone’s data by mistake, we will omit all specific details (names, institutions, topics of work, addresses) and agree with you on the final text of the publication.