Kurt Friehauf's
Advice for Graduate Students

• If you don't have a thesis project yet, then make it your 100% full time job to secure one - that means 10 hours/day every day.  You must work closely with your advisor to make sure the project is narrowly and precisely defined - and therefor completeable in the time you have there.  A nebulous project can become an exercise in fighting a cloud of smoke with your fists.  It's your responsibility to work with your advisor to carefully define the project.
  
• If you do have a thesis project, then you need to be working on it like a full time job. It's a good idea to avoid burning out by taking a weekend day or two off to decompress and recuperate, but only if you're putting seriously productive time into the project 10 hours every other day of the week (that excludes commuting time, email and other computer distraction time, etc.)  Think of it as a zero sum game - every minute you spend not working on your thesis now just gets tacked onto the end of the project - and that's generally the unfunded end!
• Be sure to cultivate the other facets of your life, too.  Do not neglect your art, music, poetry, etc.  A one sided geologist who cannot "turn it off" will most likely be a lonely geologist!  My advisor, Marco, was great about reminding me to do this.  Again, this is to be done on your own time - not your school time.
  
• Homework in courses definitely needs to be done and done well.  Homework certainly takes a lot of time, but that's on your own time.  Some students believe that doing homework or reading for classes should count as time on the clock - I disagree.  With a few exceptions, undergraduate students don't get to do homework when they're working at their jobs waiting tables, stocking grocery shelves, etc.  Why should it be any different now that you're a graduate student?
  
• Meet with your advisor frequently to keep him/her posted on the status of your project.  If there's a problem that you know about, they need to know immediately - don't let splinters get infected and gangrenous.  There might also be problems that you don't see, but which your advisor can see - you want to know about those hidden tumors before they metastasize.
  
• Time spent complaining can be therapeutic in some cases, and self-destructive in other cases.  I doubt that it's possible to clip it completely from your life, but try to find other outlets for steam.  Whinging about your frustrations with your project, your advisor, or your school in general only create unnecessary conflicts for you and the people around you - conflicts that are battles with no prize to win, just a bunch of pointless casualties and your own bullet-riddled feet.
  
• Try to write your chapters as you go and think of them as papers.  Doing it this way will help identify holes in your story that require futher experimentation/observation evidence to support.  The goal of your thesis project is to solve a specific problem scientifically, which means you you need hard evidence to support every conclusion.  Doing it this way will also help reduce (but hopefully not eliminate) the amount of time spent following stray leads and side paths on your intellectual journey.
• Try to step back every now and then to look for the broader scale implications of your work.  This perspective will change throughout the project, so it's important to keep looking repeatedly.  No one really cares about the geology of some obscure little hole in the ground out in the middle of nowhere, unless they can learn something from your study that helps them understand their own little hole in the ground.
• Try to go to presentations by visiting scholars - they may not be there to talk about your very narrow little piece of academic turf, but it's good to develop some breadth.
  
• Go on as many fieldtrips as you can.  Those are extremely precious opportunities that won't come around ever again.  Experience geology.  It's also a great time for bonding with friends.
  
• Even when you're feeling overworked and exhausted, try to find time to meet the people around you.  Friendships are easily among the most valuable gifts you can possibly have in life.  Be sincere and caring.  Make some sacrifices for others.  Don't exclude people who study different things from your potential pool of friends - they actually add a lot of spice to your mix!  And when you find people you love, make sure they know how you feel without delay.
  

Part 2 - The difference between undergraduate and graduate school

Andrew's also correct that I was required to take a LOT of non-economic geology courses.
I'll try to find my transcripts so I can list the classes for you, but the list includes:  geostatistics, geophysics, sedimentary basins, geology of California and Nevada, physical volcanology, metamorphic petrology, igneous petrology, techniques for mineral separation, and (radio)isotope geochemistry.  Those are just some of the courses I took that I didn't need for my thesis and which were far from economic geology.  I also was required to take courses relevant to economic geology such as geochemical thermodynamics and the advanced thermo class and, in my eight years at Stanford, a grand total of three economic geology courses (or was it just two?  One course was a week-long fieldtrip, albeit a brilliantly enlightening one for those people who put their hearts and souls into it!)  I am a much better and happier scientist because I took those "outside" courses.  One of my favorites was Sedimentary Basins (taught by Dr. Steve Graham) which had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with porphyry-related magmatic hydrothermal ore deposits. 

Graduate school differs from undergraduate college in that much more of the impetus is on the student.  In undergraduate programs, there are a bunch of courses that spoon feed students basic foundation ideas and information.  The purpose is to give students enough of a basic background that they can wisely shop for the geology specialty they fancy and give them the basic language needed to read papers and pursue base level careers in geology.  A B.S. in geology is enough to get a decent paying job that gets people outdoors (if they like) and has a lot of room for upward growth.  Most jobs requiring only a B.S. have ceilings, though, too.  That's because, in general, an undergraduate education expects students to do work assigned, but does not require students to go much beyond that.  I try to get students working on projects so they have a small taste of working on their own and thinking creatively beyond what's printed up in their textbooks.  Sadly, most students procrastinate long term projects until the week (or day) that they're due and only then realize the opportunity they let escape.  Every year, I hear the same comment over and over again, "Golly, doing this project was really swell!  I sure wish I would have started it sooner!"  (the exclamations might be a little off, but you get the point).

Graduate school asks students to feed themselves.  Sure, there is still coursework to help students pick up facts and ideas that undergraduate programs don't get in due to the four year time constraints (and those pesky, but nutritional general education requirements).  Some graduate courses have a professor doing a bunch of lecturing - those are the remedial courses meant to patch the holes in undergraduate backgrounds and build up a higher base knowledge.  Many graduate courses, on the other hand, are seminar format, requiring students to process readings on their own.  Seminar courses are essential because students need to learn to think on their own - given a few papers, harvest the ideas out of a group of papers and synthesize something coherent, creative, and original from that.  If students can only learn by spoon feeding a la most undergraduate courses, what good will they be as professional scientists when their job is to discover what is not already known? 

Perhaps the hardest part about graduate school for many students is analogous to moving out of your folk's house to get your own place.  Now you have to do all this stuff yourself without mom and dad nagging you to do your chores.  Now you have to work at a job in order to feed and shelter yourself.  With freedom comes the responsibility to work.  A lot of people drag their feet, party with friends, skip work, etc. at first and so rack up debt.  The more debt they rack up, the more they want to avoid working to pay up.  It's not a computer game, though, so there's no restart button or extra lives.  As the bills pile up and lupine creditors move in, the pressure leads to alcohol/drug abuse and those people all become crack whores facing long prison sentences.  Well, that last sentence is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point.

So it is with graduate school.  The school provides a heuristic environment full of resources ripe for the taking (e.g., libraries, professors, fellow graduate students, laboratory facilities, industry ties, etc.), but it's on the graduate student's shoulders to take the initiative.  You need to take hold of the proverbial reigns of your education and actively work!  It's the blessing and the curse of being an adult.  If you don't work hard on your project, a debt of time will start to build.  The greater that debt (i.e., the further you get behind), the more stressful will be your life.  Some people react by withdrawing and procrastinating even more - those are the ones who ultimately become crack whores.  I think that it's rarely too late to save yourself, though - you just have to really hunker down and focus.  Life may be Spartan for a while, but the payoff will last the rest of your life.

Ideally, your advisor is there to help you learn to support yourself - they are a mentor who has already succeeded in the process and so know what it takes to become a scientist.  Your advisor chose you out of a big pool of applicants - they were a stranger who made the choice to take the significant risk of helping you.  I think of it as a variation on the Good Samaritan story in which your advisor walked along a road that is lined with hundreds of people in need and your advisor, having limited resources and thus the need for triage, chose to help you instead of all those others.  Advising graduate students is a huge commitment in time, money, and effort.  It's as thankless a job as being a parent, but they do it because they believe in doing the good deed.  In my opinion, an advisor should not spoon feed you, otherwise you'll never mature as a scientist.  Marco was a great advisor (and friend) because would nudge us in the right direction, but not lead us by the nose.  (Well, I might have sometimes needed leading by a nose-ring, but that was my fault, not his!)

Bottom line:  personal responsibility is a big factor in graduate school - if you can take control of your life, then the payoff is truly great - if you cannot, then you'll either finish if your advisor carries you, or you will fail miserably.