From a Taiwan Degree to US Research Assistant, Then a DIY Application to Caltech's Neurobiology PhD! ft. 阿雲ㄉ美國生存筆記

I'm really happy to have Ayun here to share her story: working as a research assistant at UCB in the US, now a neurobiology PhD student at Caltech, applying to 25 PhD programs, two years of application experience, and what doing a PhD has been like so far.

🌟 This is a condensed version of the podcast transcript!

Click here to listen: Podcast link 🔗

🎤 Guest: 阿雲ㄉ美國生存筆記 (Ayun's US Survival Notes) ☁

BS in Life Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University ➡️ Research Assistant at UC Berkeley, California ➡️ Neuroscience PhD student at Caltech

Hi everyone! Hello to all the listeners of Jason學長的職涯資料夾 (Jason's Career Folder)～ I'm Ayun, and I'm currently a second-year neurobiology PhD student at the California Institute of Technology. I studied life sciences at National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan, and after graduating I came to the US first and worked as a research assistant at UC Berkeley for two years. My first year applying to PhD programs, I actually got rejected everywhere. As the title says, it was only in my second round, in 2022, that I got into Caltech!

💬 You're two years into your PhD. Is it the same as your expectations? Has it lived up to what you hoped for?

I'd say absolutely, and to an extreme! Being a scientist, especially at Caltech... I think what's distinctive about Caltech is that it constantly emphasizes doing science that other people might not want to do, or might not want to support.

So here, maybe because of the professors or the atmosphere, a lot of people really are doing research on "things that, if I don't do them, maybe nobody else in the world will." So I think a lot of people do research that really is, if I don't do it, maybe nobody else in the world will. That has its pros and cons. The good part is that if you're the first person in the world to discover something new, it's incredibly, incredibly inspiring. But at the same time, because you might be the only one in the world doing it, it can get very lonely, and it's full of uncertainty, because there's nothing for you to refer to.

I think that's what makes it so different from studying medicine! Personally, I feel medical school is more like a factory: they're trying to produce really good doctors. Ideally every doctor has similar surgical skills, because you need to make sure the surgeries they perform are highly precise and consistent, so it's a career that very much follows an SOP.

Being a scientist is completely different! You rarely have an SOP to go by.

💬 You knew pretty early that you wanted to stay in academia, so you built up a lot of research experience in college. What did you do back then that helped you later when applying for research assistant jobs or US PhD programs?

What I remember doing is: "I started trying to get into labs really early." I think the first time was the second semester of my freshman year, when I found a lab to join. Of course, as a freshman you don't know much and you're kind of clueless, so there isn't much you can do, but starting that early helped me figure out which research methods and which topics I wasn't interested in. I could rule out the methods or topics I didn't care about early on, by process of elimination. Then in my sophomore and junior years I joined one more lab each, staying a year and a half and a year respectively.

I know a lot of people start going to places like Academia Sinica in high school, so compared with them I was late, but I think spending two or three years in labs on and off was really helpful for exploring my interests!

💬 If you could redo college, what would you decide differently?

I think we can start with what you could do differently after high school. After coming to the US, I realized that doing your undergrad in the US is actually a huge, huge advantage, especially if you want to apply to grad school or PhD programs later. So if I could go back, and if my family's situation allowed it, I might consider coming to the US for college.

But if you're already in college in Taiwan, I'd encourage you to find ways to do more summer internships. Especially, if you can, come to the US for a summer internship or an exchange first! I know some upperclassmen who used exchange programs, like the ones at NTU, to come here for two or three months over the summer, and I think that's also really useful for future applications.

And if you can't come to the US for anything, then maybe join a lab early and see if you can spend an extra year or two, or even two or three years, on one project and publish a paper. But if you stay in the same lab the whole time, you don't get to find out what you like and what you don't. So I think either you try lots of things, or you stay in one lab and go for a paper. Each has its pros and cons; I can't say which one is better or worse.

🌟 Applying for research assistant jobs as a Taiwanese college student

💬 Your path is pretty unusual. I've rarely heard of anyone graduating from a university in Taiwan and, without any full-time job yet, applying straight to research assistant jobs in the US. Why did you decide to go to the US as a research assistant after graduating, and how do you apply?

Actually, in my senior year I was already thinking about what to do after graduation. By then I knew I wanted to apply to US PhD programs, but I also knew deep down that what I'd done in college wasn't enough. So I considered four options:

One, do a master's in Taiwan; two, do a master's in the US; three, be a research assistant in Taiwan; four, be a research assistant in the US

At first I was pretty against a master's, whether in the US or Taiwan, because I'm a bit lazy and didn't want to take more classes. It felt like a hassle. On top of that, I knew master's programs in the US are really expensive and mostly career-oriented; in biology, US master's programs are all career-oriented. So I ruled out the master's options right away.

If I could be a research assistant in the US, that would obviously be better than in Taiwan, because US research experience and recommendation letters carry a lot more weight than Taiwanese ones. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I remember spending about two months before graduation frantically applying to research assistant jobs everywhere.

Applying is actually a lot like sending out résumés in Taiwan, where you'd use something like the 104 job bank; in the US it's Indeed, Glassdoor and so on. You look at the openings, and I applied across the whole US, anywhere at all, to any school I'd heard of. I just kept sending résumé after résumé, and in the end I think I applied to forty-something.

In the end I only got two interviews, one for a Berkeley position and one, actually, for a Caltech position. Only the Berkeley professor was willing to take me. So the biggest hurdle was really not having status. If you don't have a green card, like me, it's very hard to find a boss willing to sponsor your visa.

💬 You applied to forty places for research assistant jobs and got two interviews. How did you get these people to want to hire you as their RA? Did you highlight anything in particular that made you stand out from a huge pile of applicants? After all, you were just a college graduate from a faraway country!

I have to be very realistic here! I think compared with American college students, we basically have no advantage when it comes to applying for research assistant jobs. Of course, the labs I was in during college all worked with mice, so my mouse experience at the time, whether surgery or some Lilicoco work, was above average for an undergrad, but nothing especially outstanding. I'm sure plenty of American undergrads had as much experience as me, or even more.

So personally I think the biggest reason I landed a research assistant job was simply luck, and meeting a kind boss! And my skills matched the person he was looking for. After I got the job, because I wrote that article, a lot of younger students came to talk to me about it. Later quite a few people applied for research assistant jobs and got them too. I know of at least three or four people who found research assistant jobs after reading my article, so maybe luck isn't that hard to come by after all.

But the visa is the issue: you need to find a boss willing to go through that process with you and sponsor your visa. I know a lot of people look for bosses who are Taiwanese or Chinese, and I think that might be a bit easier; since you speak Chinese, they might be more willing to help you.

My boss at Berkeley was actually American! But I later found out his wife is Taiwanese American, so maybe that's why: he saw I was Taiwanese, felt a bit of a connection, and kindly gave me a chance. I really consider him my benefactor.

💬 Are research assistants mostly American? Roughly what share are foreigners, and do many of them need visas?

That's a good question! When I was at Berkeley, there were four research assistants including me. Two were American, one was me, and the other was a girl from India who was also on a visa.

But our professor was quite kind, so I think that's why he was willing to sponsor visas. I know a lot of professors... for example, when I was applying, some job sites said outright that their institution doesn't sponsor visas. So I think the share of people who need a visa is still on the low side.

🌟 What being a research assistant is like

💬 You often hear that PhD students also work as RAs. What's the difference between a PhD student being an RA and a full-time research assistant like you were?

A PhD student being an RA doesn't actually mean they're really working as an RA! It means what they do for their PhD itself, staying in the lab doing research, is RA work by nature. When we hear that PhD students hold an RA or TA position, a lot of the time it's nominal: it's an accounting label for how the money gets paid to the student, meaning their salary comes from an RA or a TA line, and they may have to do some corresponding work. But in the RA case, a PhD student being an RA really just means a PhD student being a PhD student.

💬 You've said Twitter played a pretty big role in your applications. Why? I've rarely heard anyone say Twitter helped their applications, so could you explain how Twitter helped you back then?

Yeah, I first started using Twitter just because I wanted to apply and wanted to follow some professors I was interested in, so I followed a lot of professors in our field, or whose labs I wanted to join.

Every now and then I'd post something random. Back then I was sending out applications for research positions, and I tweeted something like: "Ugh, I've sent out 20 applications and nobody's replied, being an international student is so hard haha." I was just venting. Then suddenly a really famous professor in our field whom I followed, who was at Harvard then (he's since moved to Switzerland), DMed me out of nowhere and said, hey, I saw your tweet, I can look over your résumé for you. I was completely flattered. I've written about this on Medium if you're interested.

I sent him my résumé, and he actually emailed me back and gave me lots of really thoughtful advice. I revised my résumé and cover letter based on his suggestions, and then I got in. So it was a pretty magical experience!

Besides that, a lot of professors on Twitter now retweet openings in their labs, or openings from professors they're friends with, and a lot of it is hot-off-the-press, firsthand info. So it's not just for job hunting: if you want to keep up with new papers from other labs, or what people in your field are discussing lately, what they're arguing about, what drama is going on, Twitter has all of it firsthand. I highly recommend everyone sign up for Twitter! You don't even have to post, just follow the big names and you'll have more than you can read every day.

💬 So it's kind of like business students look at LinkedIn, and STEM or biomedical students look at Twitter?

I think LinkedIn isn't that big in academia; it feels more popular in industry. But I also follow a lot of famous people on Twitter, like OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, just to see what they're talking about.

Apart from that professor, did you get any other unexpected help?

Let me think～ Back then I think I saw some positions that hadn't been posted officially yet, say on the university's job site, and the professor had first posted an unofficial tweet saying what kind of person their lab was looking for.

I think I applied to one or two because of that, so I'd say Twitter is more real-time (that's the strength of social media)