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Some parts of graduate school have kept up with the times. Campuses modernize; hybrid learning abounds; and according to a Microsoft plugin I don’t remember installing, artificial intelligence is making everything better and we should all yield to its whims.

But some parts of grad school feel like they haven’t changed in decades or even centuries, and I’m not just talking about your stipend. There’s one particular part of grad school that has always felt downright, for lack of a better word, medieval. It’s a ritual you could picture happening in the halls of whatever passed for academia in dimly lit stone chambers, with everyone in heavy robes. And still, to this day, it’s fairly universal: the oral exam.

Some programs call them comps, or quals. At my school, we called them GBOs, graduate board orals, and they essentially constituted the dividing line between being given the thumbs-up to continue toward your Ph.D. after your first 2 years of course work and lab work or being asked to kindly slink toward the exit and pursue a career in the humanities.

Actually, there was a third option: “pass with conditions,” which—depending on the conditions—could be a sliver away from an unconditional pass, or potentially worse than a fail. I knew one student whose conditions required her to take a year’s worth of undergraduate chemistry courses that were probably, because of our university’s high concentration of overachieving premeds, much more rigorous than any graduate course. Another student had to meet with a committee member weekly for one-on-one review sessions. You might think the latter is easier than the former. But apparently, that professor was repeatedly unavailable during the time slots when he had scheduled the review sessions, leaving his student to wonder how she could fulfill the requirement he had created and then made impossible.

With all that at stake, it’s no surprise these exams are scary. And it doesn’t help that there’s a good chance you’ve never taken a test before in this type of format, standing in front of a panel of relaxed-looking professors and lecturing about science as if you’re a budding expert in your field, not a nervous grad student, answering questions spontaneously and competently—no “I’ll come back to this later” and flipping to the next page, no avoiding live, immediate judgment. Adding further to the pain, many scientists are introverts who chose this field precisely because they want to minimize human interaction.

If you find yourself freaking out because your school is forcing you to participate in the least entertaining type of performance art, hopefully you’ll find the following advice helpful.

Study efficiently and effectively.

Well, duh. Of course you should do this. But what makes studying effective? For me, I knew I would not only have to learn the material, but also train myself to recite and apply it out loud. And the only way to do that would be to understand it backward and forward. So I started a month in advance with a stack of blank paper, and I started to make study guides—vocabulary, chemical structures and mechanisms, graphs. Writing out the study guides forced me to relearn the material, and studying them reinforced it. Then I would hide them and see whether I could explain the same thing, out loud, to an imaginary thesis committee. The imaginary committee was very forgiving.

Study what the committee is likely to ask.

This is challenging, because they can literally ask you questions about all of science. But don’t try to study all of science. You already know they will probably ask about your specific research project, so start there. Know your project well. Read and understand the most important papers and reviews. Then broaden your reach: Study the fields that pertain to your research. I worked on the binding kinetics of particular enzymes in the parasite that causes malaria, so I reviewed the basics of kinetics, the basics of malaria, and the scientific principles behind all of the machines and assays I used in the lab. Think like your committee: If you were assessing a Ph.D. candidate who measured one kind of kinetics every day, wouldn’t it be logical to ask them about different kinds of kinetics? I must have reread the kinetics chapter of my biochemistry textbook a dozen times to prepare for my exam, and guess what, the committee asked me a bunch of questions about kinetics.

Seed your studying with a zinger or two.

It’s impossible to predict all possible questions your committee might ask. But you can keep an eye open for a few, and prepare accordingly. For me, that approach happened to pay off. Without going into too much detail, almost all the enzymes I worked with were aspartic proteases, which are a pretty standard kind of enzyme, and it’s well-known how they work. But one was a histo-aspartic protease, which was so rare that the name of the enzyme was literally “histo-aspartic protease,” and no one knew its mechanism. It occurred to me while studying that a clever question might be to ask me to draw out how a histo-aspartic protease might work, in theory, from basic chemical principles. I will readily confess that I could not have figured this out on the spot—but I didn’t need to, because I figured it out in advance and then memorized the answer. Sure enough, my committee asked me that exact question, and I had to hide my glee when I pretended to think for a moment, then wrote the answer perfectly. “Maybe … like this?” I said, while thinking, “Damn right it’s like this.”

But don’t neglect the basic basics.

Somehow, in my studying, I had assumed I would just kind of remember all of organic chemistry. Oops. At one point, my committee asked me to draw a molecule and show them where the resonance could be found. That’s, like, week one stuff in organic chemistry. But week one was 4 years earlier, and I totally blanked. I only remembered that “resonance equals dotted lines,” and I think I drew some dotted lines.

Choose your committee wisely.

You might think your committee should consist of professors in your exact field. And you should definitely include some of those if you can. But there’s another criterion that I think people often forget: You should ensure that your committee includes nice people. We had one professor in my department who probably conducted more orals than anyone else, not because his knowledge extended into their fields, but because he was a nice, forgiving guy who didn’t try to trip anyone up. Conversely, we had another professor who was young and untenured, and rumor had it that he would always try to find fault with students as a way to prove his own worth to the other committee members. The makeup of your committee can truly mean the difference between a positive experience and a nightmare, a pass and a fail. It may seem arbitrary and unfair, but that’s only because it’s arbitrary and unfair.

Don’t get discouraged.

One of the hardest facts for me to accept was that the committee’s job is to find the limits of your knowledge. If they only ask you questions that you can easily answer, they won’t know what you really know. Practically, this means they may ask a question, see the relief on your face as you start to confidently respond, and then immediately switch to a different topic. It also means they will end up asking you a bunch of questions that will baffle you and make you think you should have chosen a different field. It means you will end your orals believing you failed, and why not, because there’s so much you don’t know.

That’s how I felt exiting that room. I finished my 90-minute grilling and entered the hallway, ready to collapse. My lab mate was waiting there to hand me a beer, a little tradition in our lab. His congratulations felt bittersweet because I knew, knew, I had screwed up. At best, I would pass with conditions, and I just had to hope those conditions would be reasonable.

Then the door opened, and one by one, the committee members exited and shook my hand. Even then, I still thought they were going to deliver bad news. When they started to walk out of the building, I wondered whether I should schedule a second session to review what I assumed would be some pretty onerous conditions.

But no. I passed unconditionally, though the committee did note—correctly—that I should probably take some time to rereview organic chemistry.

As I stood there in the hallway, holding my laptop and the bottle of beer, I just kept thinking I should have failed. Toward the end, I had answered so many questions with a deflated “I don’t know.” There was just so much I didn’t know.

Of course, there was so much I didn’t know. Yet.

That’s why I was here.

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From ScienceMag:

Shirley Meng grew up in China and earned her degrees in Singapore, but the United States is where she built her career trying to make better and cheaper batteries for a power-hungry world. After 2 decades here, the University of Chicago (UChicago) materials scientist, who also heads a Department of Energy (DOE) research hub, is now heading back to Asia.

On 1 July, Meng will become vice president for innovation and global affairs at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), her undergraduate alma mater and a growing research powerhouse. Only 35 years old, NTU was ranked 12th this year in one global assessment of research universities—one rung above UChicago.

Meng took the job because she thinks the U.S. has turned away from a commitment to decarbonize its economy. She’s leaving with mixed emotions—and the hope that the political environment for more sustainable energy sources will improve once President Donald Trump leaves office.

In making the move, Meng is also stepping down as director of the $62 million Energy Storage Research Alliance (ESRA) based at Argonne National Laboratory, one of two DOE battery hubs launched in the waning months of former President Joe Biden’s administration. ESRA has not had its funding reduced, and Meng says the hub’s focus on using artificial intelligence in designing next-generation batteries appeals to the White House. Even so, she says, “The last 15 months have been extraordinarily difficult for the energy storage field, with many important projects being sidelined.”

The Trump administration’s immigration policies, including its restrictions on Chinese-born scientists, are another factor in her decision to move to NTU. “I’ve always been an internationalist,” says Meng, who became a Singapore citizen in 2004, “and I think that Singapore is a place where people can collaborate, regardless of what country you come from.”

Meng joined the UChicago faculty in 2022 after spending more than a decade at the University of California San Diego, where her husband, Graham Elliott, is a professor of econometrics. UChicago “has given me 2 years to decide” whether to return or sever ties to the institution, she says. “If things start moving in the right direction—and my family wants me to come back—I hope I can do it.”

In the meantime, she says, she will maintain a partial appointment at UChicago and continue to run her lab, which recently developed the first anode-free sodium solid-state battery, an alternative to lithium batteries that could allow more affordable and faster charging of electric vehicles.

Meng spoke with Science this week after NTU issued a press release about her new post on 22 April—Earth Day, as she notes. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Q: What made the NTU offer so attractive?

A: I was really searching for a position that would let me do my work, which is to translate the fundamental science into industry impact. I’ve been entrusted with a very high position in my home country, but at the same time, I’m seriously concerned that, if I were asked by the [U.S.] Department of War to perform certain tasks, I probably won’t be able to do it. Things like [making better batteries for] drones, or humanoids for war fighting. Maybe they already have their own expertise. But I just don’t want to risk it.

I also think it’s important that I maintain my reputation as someone who’s always building things, not destroying things. So, I decided it’s probably better for somebody else to [direct the DOE hub].

Q: How has the increasingly tense U.S.-Chinese relationship affected you?

A: I’m not a big fan of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. So I had no hesitation about giving up my Chinese citizenship. But I think a lot of my frustration in the last 2 years is the lack of differentiation in discussions about U.S. relationships with China. The word Chinese is being mixed up with race, nationality, and culture, and it’s been extremely tiring to deal with that situation.

Q: What is the situation for foreign-born scientists hoping to work at Argonne and other DOE national labs?

A: I think it’s important for the nation to impose strict [security] controls on the labs. So I’m not complaining. But it also creates difficulties for students from certain nationalities.

As long as they can get a visa and get through the paperwork, it is OK. But it’s not easy to go through all the checkpoints. There was a postdoc from [South] Korea we wanted to hire. But we would have had to pay $100,000 because he needed to come in on an H-1B visa, and nobody understands the rules and where the money would come from. So, in the end we just had to say no.

Another student who is funded by Tesla was told they cannot work [at Argonne]. And when I asked why, I was told the reason is that Tesla has a China operation. I wanted to say, “What international company does not do business in China?”

Q: How are these tensions playing out within DOE’s Office of Science, which is funding the battery hub?

A: I think the DOE managers do a fantastic job. For 18 years, program managers have watched me grow up and mature into a senior scientist, and I’m very grateful for all the support DOE has given me. But they are also caught up in this current situation, and they have been told not to talk about it.

Q: How do you feel about this administration’s emphasis on fossil fuels and tariffs?

A: The leaders of industry know that we need to decarbonize our economy. They also understand that the world has to work together, and that globalization is unstoppable. Unfortunately, the Trump administration has been moving in the other direction. I was in Saudi Arabia this winter [on a delegation led by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright], and the Saudi energy minister took me aside at one point and said, “You know, your [energy] secretary is more pro-oil than me.”

Q: Is there a way for scientists to mitigate the strained relationship between the two countries?

A: We are now in this perpetual cycle of doubt and distrust. A lot of Chinese scientists benefited from the U.S. system in the past 2 decades, and they have gone back to Asia and become very successful. That’s great. But I wish they would show a little bit more gratitude for what America has done for them. I think that would help ease tensions on both sides.

Q: How will you carry out your responsibilities at NTU while maintaining your lab in Chicago?

A: I learned that 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. was working time between Singapore and MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] when I was part of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology [a collaboration begun in the early 2000s] while getting my Ph.D. I’m a lot older now [Meng turns 50 in October], but I think I can survive again on that schedule.”

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From ScienceMag:

“Problem.” As soon as I saw the subject line on my collaborator’s email, I had a sinking feeling. We had been working together—I in China, my collaborator in the United States—to finalize a manuscript from a joint biomedical research project. For a moment, I thought the email might be about journal policies or additional experimental details. But I soon realized better controls or more data would not help. “I may have to be off the paper,” the email read, next to a link to a news article about proposed legislation that would prohibit U.S. researchers from receiving federal funding if they collaborate with Chinese scientists. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I have worked with U.S. scientists for decades. About 20 years ago, after completing degrees in China and England, I moved to the U.S. to pursue my Ph.D. I was lucky to be trained by and collaborate with prominent American scientists, first in graduate school and later as a postdoc, at top U.S. institutions, where my professional identity was shaped. I was taught the universal values of science—the insistence on rigorous methods, open debate, and scientific integrity. I vividly remember one supervisor telling me, “Science is not private property and only grows through sharing.”

A few years ago, life pulled me back to China as my parents aged. I am the only child in the family and feel obliged to stay closer to them. I brought the scientific values I had cherished in the U.S. to my lab and continued to collaborate with my U.S. colleagues. Such ties matter because disease doesn’t stop at the border, and international collaboration is a key way to strengthen the conclusions in biomedical research. Reviewers sometimes want to see that clinical samples have been collected from multiple ethnic populations. And in my discipline, which relies on imaging devices, it’s important that centers around the world collaborate to ensure the data are comparable.

After reading the email from my colleague, I worried that if the legislation went through, it wouldn’t just mean I would lose my many U.S. co-authors on the paper we were finalizing. It could put a stop to all collaborations with those researchers moving forward. As it turned out, the legislation did not pass, and our manuscript was eventually accepted with the names of my U.S. collaborators on it. But the political climate that discourages U.S.-Chinese collaborations has not gone away.

As tensions between the two countries have grown and Chinese scientists working in the U.S. have been targeted by investigations, I have found myself hesitating to reach out to U.S. contacts for future collaboration. “Will our collaboration put them at risk?” I ask myself. Such ties now seem more like a danger than an opportunity. That’s been a hard pill to swallow, because I have spent most of my professional time in the U.S. Now, I must focus on rebuilding my network outside the U.S. from scratch.

I also see this breakdown affecting the younger generation of Chinese scientists, who no longer have equal opportunities to connect with researchers at U.S. universities. I am unsure whether I should even encourage my trainees to attend U.S. conferences. They may be denied visas and unable to present their findings. When they can participate, it is far less likely than before to foster any actual collaborations. Many are already reluctant to go. “What’s the point of attending?” some have asked me.

Over my career, I have found that the universal research language brings strangers together across disciplines and borders. I became the scientist I am because my supervisors and collaborators were willing to share ideas, resources, and mentorship.

It is a strange feeling for me to see that culture threatened. Given the current political situation, I worry about what the future holds for joint U.S.-Chinese research. Right now, it appears as though winter is coming.

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From ScienceMag:

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has chosen a record number of students this year to receive its prestigious graduate fellowship, rebounding from last year’s unusually small cohort. The size of this year’s class, announced today, together with a more traditional distribution across fields, could ease fears that NSF, under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration, had decided to shrink and alter the nature of a program that has supported 50 future Nobel laureates since it began in 1952.

“My take is that the STEM community’s activism around last year’s cuts appears to have had significant positive impacts on this year’s class,” says Susan Brennan, a cognitive psychologist at Stony Brook University and former fellowship program officer.

The 2599 fellows in this year’s class surpass the previous record of 2554 in the 2023 cohort and is 42% larger than last year’s unusually small class of 1500. The 2025 class was announced in two stages, and the second cohort of 500 was dominated by artificial intelligence and quantum information science, top priorities for the White House.

This year’s class returns to a more familiar distribution, with engineering and biology once again leading the pack. But whereas in 2023 and ’24 those two disciplines each garnered about one-quarter of the awards, this year saw a shift toward engineering, with some 35% of the awards going to students in that area, followed by 19% in biology. At the same time, the life sciences was the discipline most represented among the honorable mentions, comprising 40% of the 1440 total. Among awardees, computing and information science saw a slight uptick, from 7% in 2023 and ’24 to 10%. And psychology took a hit, from 5% and 6% to 2% of the overall pie.

The NSF fellowship provides students with an annual stipend of $37,000 for 3 years and gives their institutions $16,000 annually to defray tuition and other educational costs. It’s also a portable scholarship, in contrast to the typical arrangement in which a graduate student’s support is tied to their institution, either from their adviser’s research grant or a graduate training program in a particular field. NSF says it received nearly 14,000 applications for this year’s class.

NSF has launched an initiative to identify high-tech companies willing to contribute to the support of future classes of graduate fellows. But an agency spokesperson says, “NSF plans to support [this year’s] fellows with available appropriated funds in [fiscal year] 2026.”

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From ScienceMag:

“Have you considered running for elected office?” My friend’s question didn’t come out of nowhere. I was active in my community as a volunteer, especially in environmental and social justice causes, and I regularly met elected officials and advocated for issues I cared about. But the question still took me by surprise. As a tenured professor and dean, my academic identity was firmly established. Was politics even something that academics did?

By the usual measures, I was successful. I had good funding, a solid publication record, and I had been promoted to serve as dean of engineering at the liberal arts college where I work in New York state. I enjoyed my leadership role and my research. But I did have reason to think about moving in another direction.

My most cited paper was a nice article with some juicy math—3D vector calculus in non-Cartesian coordinates!—but the work had little relevance to everyday issues. That always bothered me.

So did academics’ reluctance to speak out about policy. I had noticed that even when scientific papers did have findings worth sharing with the public or government officials, they tended to bury phrases like “We recommend that policymakers do X” near the end. There was an unstated assumption that a scientist’s role is to inform policy, not help enact it. That stuff was done by other people.

And as a researcher who’s had his share of scientific disagreements with other researchers, I have been able to work with others whose viewpoints differ from mine—an approach that is needed in these times of intense political polarization.

• Ashok Ramasubramanian
• Templeton Institute at Union College

When I turned 50, I also started to ask myself uncomfortable questions about my own future, such as, “What can I do with the time that is left to me?” I wondered whether I would have regrets if I did not serve my community more directly. After fulfilling my dean duties, I only had so much time left in the day. I realized I could not be an active researcher and engage in public service. To make it work, I would have to give up research.

I had just completed work on a major federal grant. So, I began to think the time might be right to consider running for a town council position. When the idea was only a nascent possibility, I broached it with my boss, our college’s vice president of academic affairs, and was pleased to discover that she was supportive. Our institution encourages community service and outside-the-box thinking, and administrators are generally happy for faculty to branch out. The idea is to help model lifelong learning—a value we work to instill in our students.

After much thought, I decided to take the leap. I closed down my lab space and liquidated all my research assets, turning them over to more junior faculty members, and began to spend my nondean hours going door to door and talking with voters.

It was a new world, and I had to learn a lot of new things quickly. My experience dabbling in research fields outside my own was helpful as I tackled activities that were new to me like fundraising, campaign finance reporting, and social media outreach. But I also leaned heavily into my favorite philosophy: “Fake it till you make it.”

I was pleased to find that voters in my community appreciated my candidacy. Being a scientist and an academic helped me stand out as a unique and qualified individual. And after I won my election and was appointed to the town council in January, I have tried to use skills I gained as a scientist to help my community. For instance, my experience writing research proposals is helpful when applying for grants aimed at infrastructure maintenance and green space preservation. And as a researcher who’s had his share of scientific disagreements with other researchers, I have been able to work with others whose viewpoints differ from mine—an approach that is needed in these times of intense political polarization. The time commitment has also been manageable, as council meetings are held in the evenings after normal work hours.

I miss many aspects of research, especially spending quiet time in my lab and mentoring students. But the experiences of running for office and serving the public as an elected official have been equally rewarding and fulfilling. I am not sure what my political future holds, but for now I am having quite a bit of fun serving my community in an official capacity. I encourage other scientists to ask hard questions about new ways to put their skills to work, especially in the second half of life.

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