The importance of mentorship has sometimes been written about (Kanige, 1993 and Lee et al., 2007), though this did not occur to me when I was young. Now that I am older, I often reflect on my good fortune to have been one

of the half of the entering students in my PhD class at Harvard who was successful in science. I now realize that all of us selected our graduate mentors amateurishly, almost randomly, and certainly not wisely. Through sheer dumb luck, I happened to pick a wonderful mentor. It is in that spirit that I write this guide about how to pick a graduate advisor. It is the guide that I wish someone had handed to me the day I entered graduate school. I write this with some CP-673451 solubility dmso trepidation, BAY 73-4506 chemical structure as I am certainly not a Nobel Laureate as were Medawar and Ramón y Cajal. But, as I always tell my students, the real Prize is enjoying doing science. This is a Prize that I have won. I want my students—and every aspiring young scientist—to win it too. So why do some talented students succeed as scientists whereas others do not? This is a question that has long intrigued me. I see it around me every day. Students who have always loved science from a young age enter graduate school, but some of these students leave not enabled to be a successful scientist and/or demoralized, having somehow lost their passion for science. I will argue here that

for most students, selecting a good research mentor is the key. To be sure, many students realize in graduate school

that another career choice appeals more to them and happily divert to a new goal. But here I address Edoxaban my comments to the large group of graduate students whose goal is to be a successful researcher, whether in academia or in industry or another setting. First, let me mention what a student should never ever do. An advisor should not be selected solely because he or she is the one researcher at your university that happens to work on the precise focused topic that you think you are most interested in (usually whatever you worked on in an undergraduate lab). In my experience, this is exactly what nearly every graduate student does! Keep in mind that if you like solving puzzles, as all scientists do, there will be many different puzzles that you will find equally rewarding to work on. Although I study the brain, I am certain that I would be just as happy working on the kidney (some would argue that glia are the kidneys of the brain). Begin your search for an advisor by casting as broad of a net as possible. Neuroscience these days spans many areas from molecular, cellular, and developmental neurobiology, to physiology and biophysics, to systems, behavioral, and computational neurobiology. Try lab rotations in different areas, which is increasingly important in an interdisciplinary world.