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A survival guide for interdisciplinary PhD students

Nature Biotechnology volume 34, pages 993–994 (2016)Cite this article

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Interdisciplinary studies come with high risk, but the prospects of both advancing science and pushing forward one's professional career make for high rewards.

Find a great advisor. Finding the right advisor—or in this case, advisors—is the single most important decision in graduate school, and it is even more important in interdisciplinary studies. Identify mentors who have expertise in interdisciplinary work and are as excited as you are about the proposed projects. Having co-advisors with complementary sets of knowledge and lead labs with complementary technical expertise is a common way to pursue interdisciplinary studies. When working with more than one advisor, extra effort must be made to set clear expectations and to ensure transparent communications between advisors.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks M. Snyder, R.B. Altman, C. Ré, D.L. Rubin, A. Butte, M. Musen, Y.-J. Chen, M.-J. Ho, and C.-C. Jiang for their advice on mastering interdisciplinary studies. The author acknowledges funding support from a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Student Research Fellowship, a Winston Chen Stanford Graduate Fellowship, the DARPA SIMPLEX program, and National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, grant numbers U01CA142555, 5P50HG00773502, and 5U24CA160036-05.

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  1. the Department of Genetics, and the Department of Computer Science, Kun-Hsing Yu is in the Biomedical Informatics Program, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA.

    Kun-Hsing Yu

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Correspondence to Kun-Hsing Yu.

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Yu, KH. A survival guide for interdisciplinary PhD students. Nat Biotechnol 34, 993–994 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.3671

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