Why I Made This Site

It feels like my entire academic experience led to the creation of this webpage. I completed my first two years of my undergraduate education at a community college and transferred to UCSD in 2020. When I first got to UCSD, I felt behind and rushed. I only had two years to figure out the academic structure while my peers who had gone straight to UCSD after high school had double. I hit the ground running when I got to campus and was accepted into the honors program, where I was given the information about how to get involved in research.

When I joined a lab, I was thrust into a more senior position—since at this time I was a 4th year and an honors student. My research experience at this point was basically zero and I skipped right over having baseline RA training. This caused me to have to truly learn as I go as nothing was ever explained to me, I was just expected to know.

As I progressed in the lab and grew my knowledge of research and academia, I noticed that some of my peers seemed to have this insider information that I did not. I felt like I was missing something crucial.

It all clicked one day while I was talking with my advisor. I was rambling about goals for my future research and he stopped me and said, “you don’t have family in academia, do you?”

I don’t have family in academia, or any who have pursed any type of graduate level degree. My advisor was able to realize that just based on how I was talking about research. Luckily, he used this as an opportunity to share more with me and began building my knowledge, but I knew so many graduate students who didn’t have this source of information. I was finally able to acknowledge that this was the help and information that the students around me were benefiting from. They did have insider information.

Instead of going straight to graduate school, I decided to apply to lab manager positions. It was Wake Forest that cemented my understanding of how many professors can provide you with the same invaluable knowledge that students with family in academia have access to.

After over two years of professional research experience and two application cycles, I finally feel proficient in understanding and explaining how the system of academia and research operate. This site includes all of the basic required elements of pursuing a graduate degree but also explains the what, how, and why of each one. These are the unspoken elements of how to make your application better.

I hope that this website saves you time; both from trying to collect this miscellaneous information online yourself, and from experiencing it without any type of warning or preparation. This website is to provide that insider info to everyone and make the playing field a little more leveled.