(This appeared as well in our Report on Campus Research, including a story about commercializing research, one on 3D printers, and an opinion piece arguing research should not be concentrated in Canada's "Big 5" universities, among others.)

Most people, upon receiving their Bachelors degree, would not rank "earn a pathetic amount of money, ride endlessly alternating crests and troughs of hope and despair, and subsist primarily on pizza, cookies and watery coffee" high on their list of short-term goals. Remarkably, however, tens of thousands of Canadian graduates opt to do this every year, and enroll in graduate studies.

Those who take the oath of poverty and opt for the ascetic academician's diet of whatever they can scavenge at seminars have a magical journey of 'n' years ahead of them, where 'n' is sometimes a very large number, indeed. They will ultimately emerge - we hope - with some sort of advanced credential, and may accrue other things along the way, including families, academic reputations, and gastric ulcers. And eventually they'll be able to look back on the journey and say "it wasn't really so bad, was it," forgetting about that one time they thought about quitting to become a spy, and those other times when they sat under their desk and cried, and that other time when, well, you can see where this is going.

Really, though, the life of a graduate researcher isn't actually that bad. One just has to go in with reasonable expectations. And by reasonable, I, of course, mean drastically lowered.

You will be earning a pittance, at least to start. Most universities typically fund grad students to the tune of about $21,000 a year, which is about $2K less a year than someone on Employment Assistance receives. This can go up with merit-based awards, however, and is mercifully tax-free, but nevertheless, the realization that you, who are working so hard on that unified theory of such-and-such or a new model of this-that-and-the-other, are vastly out-earned by your little sister with her fledgling babysitting career, well, that's more than a little disheartening. Be prepared to budget wisely, and forego some of the finer things in life, at least for the first couple of years.

For those few measly peanuts, you'll be working hard. You're expected to devote at least 40 hours to your research project every week, which would seem reasonable were it not for the fact that things like coursework, teaching commitments and research group meetings cut into that time. Time management is critical, and setting a plan for the day, a plan for the week, and a plan for the month is the simplest way to ensuring you remain on track. Don't forget to include time at the pub in your plan, though, as congregating for a beer with your colleagues and comparing thesis progress and supervisor stories is really the cornerstone of the graduate student experience.

On the subject of time, I should probably take a moment to dispel the myth that to be successful in graduate research, one must chain oneself to the bench, desk or what have you, and put in 80+ hours a week. This is hooey.

Spending too much time on your project can actually be detrimental - you lose focus on the things in life that keep you grounded, fresh, and inspired, and nurturing that aspect of your life does ultimately result in you doing better work. Also, it cuts into your hygiene schedule and nobody likes a stinky researcher.

One thing you're not taught going into grad school is that it isn't just your ability to do research that will determine your success, instead it's your ability to communicate that research. Grad school sometimes seems like an endless series of PowerPoint presentations, and if you can design one that's clear, engaging, and memorable to your audience, you will be miles ahead of your colleagues. Just as using a semicolon properly will bag you better marks in university, having a cool deck of slides is your ticket to A+s in grad school. Since those A+s are, in turn, the ticket to scholarships, think twice the next time you feel compelled to use Presentation Wizard, eight levels of bullet points, and that stupid clip-art stick guy with the oval head.

Be prepared, too, for disappointments. Yes, there are highs - days when the research gods smile upon you and you get tight error bars and amazing p-values, but there are dead ends and let-downs too. The best researchers don't get bogged down by these, though. They try to understand why things went wrong and what can be done to remedy the situation, and if things still don't work, they're not afraid to change direction and move on. This can sometimes be as drastic as a total change in supervisor and research project, which is more common than you'd expect in graduate school. If you're not happy with your experience and talks with your supervisor haven't improved anything, it is entirely okay to pack up and move down the hall to a new research group whose environment is a better fit for you.

All that can generally be avoided, of course, by doing your proverbial homework in advance of starting a graduate program. Figure out what you want to do and then look for the place to do it, rather then deciding on the place first and shoehorning yourself into whatever project happens to be available. Examine the group's publication record and ask around about their reputation, and after you interview with the supervisor, ensure you spend just as much, if not more, time talking with their students. Try to get a sense for things like working conditions, interpersonal dynamics, management style, supervisor expectations, and the very important question: "How good are this lab's parties?"

The point of grad school isn't to cram you full of knowledge related to one very exclusive area of research; instead it's to develop you into a researcher and equip you with the skills - independence, academic creativity, communication - that you'll need to succeed downstream. Remember this as you embark on your graduate school career, and remember, too, that yes, you should always go back for that second slice of free pizza.

(GlobeCampus editor: For undergrads, see Jen's audio advice on what to expect from their first year.)

Some years ago, finding myself in a terrible snit about some prolonged and joyless experimentation, I thought that perhaps a career change might be in order. I was in my early twenties and had somehow strayed from my intended course of becoming Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak and chasing angry, Ebola-riddled febrile monkeys through the African jungle with a butterfly net. Instead of taking orders from Morgan Freeman and saving people from hypovolemic shock, I instead found myself hunched over a computer debating the intricacies of signaling peptides while escaped mutant fruit flies from the genetics lab down the hall circled my coffee mug and the beefy wet-dog stench of agar filled the air.

Realizing that I liked talking about science just as much - if not more - than I liked actually doing it, I talked to my supervisor about getting more involved in science communication. She was tremendously supportive and that discussion ultimately led to what has been a rather fruitful spare-time career in science media. "Spare-time" because, as you can see from my affiliation, I finally ended up with a job doing what I originally intended, provided you replace "chasing angry fever-monkeys through the African jungle" with "sitting in an office chair monitoring surveillance reports and watching H1N1 spread all over B.C."

Anyway, six or seven years, a few hundred newspaper and magazine articles and outreach talks, one CBC documentary series, one blog and a few radio interviews after that chat, I have finally reached the pinnacle of Canadian science communication - I have summited Mount Suzuki and have a one-off gig hosting The Nature of Things.  Do check it out, since it's a tremendously interesting episode about the exploits of forensic science researchers at Simon Fraser University. There's crime-fighting pollen, tiny bee detectives, and an underwater pig carcass that's revealing how bodies decay in aquatic environments (the phrase "crab bites" will never bring to mind a tasty party appetizer ever again).

Creating science television, be it the TNoT episode or an earlier series I did for CBC called Project X, is quite possibly one of the most entertaining jobs in the world. I've been stuffed in a human centrifuge and spun around at 5Gs, floated weightless in a parabolic flight, swallowed a radio thermometer pill and put on a treadmill in a heat chamber, done parkour on the banks of the Thames, trapped gators in Louisiana, and watched a pig be butchered for sale in rural Mexico.

It's also one of the strangest jobs in the world for a scientist to step into. In television, the audience's perception of your program's scientific authenticity depends not so much on your story, host or interview subjects, but rather whether or not you've lit the set in a convincingly CSI-esque fashion and whether you've got enough beakers filled with coloured liquids around the set.

Unlike the lab (which, by the way, features jaundice-worthy fluorescent lights and no coloured liquids whatsoever), in TVLand your lab coat is altered to fit perfectly, someone is constantly trailing you around brushing your hair and giving you a thorough once-over with the lint roller, and you get to do things over if you screw up.

This latter point is particularly helpful, as TVLand science requires all sorts of scripted actions that necessitate you doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time under exactly the right light, and even the brightest of Nobel prizewinners would have a hard time getting some of these scenes straight.

By way of example, I once had to retrieve an Actual Live Baby from a crib, walk with it from out behind a plastic sheet without getting tangled, cross the studio floor, hit the correct mark, and finally deposit the Actual Live Baby into a kiddie pool filled with dirt, all in 4-inch heels, without breaking my eyeline to camera, and without so much as a peep from my neonatal co-star. This is not something you learn to do in grad school.

Now, while teaching future scientists how to deliver a line convincingly, catch the light nicely, and not drop one's infant co-star aren't likely ever going to be taught in a fifth-year seminar course, there are some lessons to be learned from the world of television about how scientists can communicate effectively.

First, TV is all about the soundbite. If you're going to be interviewed about your work, be it for TV, print, or new media, it pays to have a few soundbites already prepared. Be ready to explain your work, why you're doing it, and what its relevance and impact are, all in two or three sentences or less.

Next, TV writing is a shining example of simplicity. If you transcribed the evening news from radio or television and offered it up in written form, it would look as if it had been scripted by a breviloquent Neanderthal. "Stock market crash. Ugg no like. Ugg lose money." You don't have to aim for quite this level of simplicity, but a good rule is that when explaining a scientific concept, pretend as if you were explaining it to someone at a bar. Use functional descriptions instead of specialized terminology (for example it's beer, not a malted Hordeum vulgare fermentation end-product), use real-world analogies and metaphors where possible, and avoid symbols or acronyms.

Another bit of television wisdom was passed on to me many years ago by a producer friend, who said that in TV, if you say a duck, you'd better show a duck.  What he meant by this was that if you find yourself in the kitchen peeling potatoes and listening to the 6:00 news when the newscaster suddenly stops and declares that an angry fever-monkey is wielding a butterfly net and chasing Dustin Hoffman through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, odds are you're going to drop the potato and rush to the other room because you want to see the footage. No footage, no happy. This is why even if the angry monkey grabbed the news guy's camera and flung it at Dustin, destroying the footage in the process, the producer of that newscast is still going to dig up at least something to show, even if it's a quickly-crayonned picture of an angry monkey-teddy-dog-thing drawn by the anchorwoman's tot. 

This applies to science too. If you're giving a presentation or writing an article and you're talking about something that has a visual component or is best explained graphically, give your audience the visual instead of just talking about it.  

I firmly believe that if every scientist were to follow those three simple pieces of advice, we'd quite likely be rid of 80-90% of the egregiously bad PowerPoints of the world and indeed this has become my personal mission in science communication.  So after you've watched my Nature of Things episode, stay tuned for my fundraising telethon and call in your pledge to be a good science communicator. I'll send you a T-shirt with the angry monkey chasing Dustin Hoffman if you do.

Hello again Dear Readers, and apologies again for my prolonged absence.  Pig flu and all that; you understand.

I'm writing this from the UBC campus again - I'm here for a day of meetings and have managed to squeeze in a few minutes of writing in between talking about neglected global diseases, systems biology, and whether the opera singers should go before or after the orchestra in the annual revue.

I've plugged my laptop into an outlet in the foyer of the Laserre building, known in my time as being a great place to get intimate on campus, as the 2nd floor washroom had a vinyl couch and lockable door. I may venture up there later out of curiosity, but I suspect my investigation will reveal that the couch is gone, the old wooden door has been replaced with some modern frosted glass number, and the 2nd floor bog has been renamed the "Earl and Marion Peterson Family Relief Facility" in the continuing tradition of  academic patronage.

While some things on a campus never change (beer, dissatisfaction with student-led politics, weird food smells), this is a very mutable place and bears little resemblance to the campus I left behind when I got my B.Sc. I was reminded of this a few times recently, taking part in student-led events that demonstrated the marked change in extracurricular activities over the years.

As I wrote some time ago, the beer-drinking and trouble-making of years gone by have been replaced by rather more mature pursuits, like creating associations for networking, communication, activism, putting on conferences, starting charities, and other things that have relevance to the real world and look good on a CV. I've always poked gentle fun at all of this - after all, university's the time to have your fun while you still can and not worry about grown-up business, because once you've graduated you will spend much of your existence running from meeting to meeting as dictated by your Outlook calendar, filling out forms in triplicate to have someone come and move your wastebasket, and having to delay your actual work to deal with crises like an 8-foot freezer that won't fit through a 7-foot door. Gentle needling aside, though, there are some really great student-focused initiatives on campus.

One of the coolest by far is Tedx Terry Talks (http://www.terry.ubc.ca/terrytalks/), or #TedXTt to call it by its hashtag (another campus change I've noticed - if you play word association and say "hash" you get "tag" back and not "pipe"). In its second year, this is a Ted-style conference (if you see "Ted" and think first of your accountant or your brother in law, please go to ted.com and be awed) featuring a few of UBC's most interesting and inspiring students speaking about something important to them. I was delighted to be a part of it this year as the alumni speaker, and came out feeling very warm and fuzzy about our world's future (I then saw peopleofwalmart.com and my belief in the impending doom of our society was suddenly and violently reawakened, but I was doing good for at least a day or two there).

Terry Talks emcee Dave Ng (also founder of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique - http://www.scq.ubc.ca/sciencescouts/) edited a wonderful series of videos featuring this year's speakers (http://www.terry.ubc.ca/terrytalks/) which I encourage you to check out. Alexander Cannon shared the very personal and engaging story of his transition from female to male, Azim Wazeer took us on a tour of the many places and cultures he experienced growing up, Iris Amuto painted a vivid portrait of Africa's true and beautiful self, Tahira Ibrahim expressed her wish for all of us to just get along, and Camille Israel and her ukulele taught us how to fall in love with our major all over again. The scientists were well-represented too, with Jennifer Kaban encouraging us to keep a sense of wonder in looking at the world, Nadine Qureshi advocating simple measures for malarial prevention, Eric Ma explaining the world of synthetic biology and designing life forms from scratch, and yours truly talking about H1N1, open access, and sequencing poop (note: times may change, campuses may change, poop jokes, though - always funny).

UBC President Stephen Toope is another champion of student achievement. Three years ago, he resurrected the Blue and Gold Revue, which had been a 1950s-1960s-era student talent show with dramatic readings, skits, and polite young men with clean fingernails singing "How Much is That Doggie in the Window" a cappella. The 21st century version of the Revue highlights amazing student achievements, and this year's event, to be held December 2 (http://www.supporting.ubc.ca/revue), has everything from an interdisciplinary student-led clinic in Vancouver's most impoverished neighbourhood to the sixth-best moon-dust-excavating robot in the world.

You've also got great student-led groups like The Student Biotechnology Network (http://www.thesbn.ca/) and Young Women in Business (http://www.ywib.ca) working to prep students for their eventual release into the wild, and cross-organization events like Worlds Aids Day (http://www.terry.ubc.ca/index.php/2009/11/24/cool-event-ubc-world-aids-day-events-dec-1st-3rd/), for which a whole range of student groups have come together to stage a series of events December 1-3 (one of those groups is UBC A Cappella, who I'm pretty sure still have clean fingernails, though they may have dropped "Doggie in the Window" by now).

So, yes, the campus has changed, but it's certainly changed for the better if the accomplishments and engagement of its current students are used as a yardstick.  The price of beer hasn't changed much, though, and I can now afford more of it, so with that I'll sign off, as I really must dash off to the Earl and Marion Peterson Family Relief Facility.

This is the first time in 13 years I won’t be around campus for back to school and, frankly, I couldn’t be more pleased. Yes, I’m a little misty-eyed at the prospect of missing out on the electric atmosphere, the welcome back concerts and events, and the endless free samples of detergent, condoms and power bars handed out by marketing reps, but you know what I’m not sad about? SWINE FLU. Loads and loads of swine flu. Coughy, fevery, diarrhoeay, nasty, dirty swine flu. Everywhere.

If early data from the United States, where school goes back in late August, are any indication, campuses worldwide are going to be veritable cesspools of H1N1 this Fall. As of August 28, the American College Health Association had reported just over 2,000 suspected cases of H1N1 at its 189 sentinel colleges and universities. By September 5, however, the outbreak at Washington State University alone had ballooned to a suspected 2,000 cases. In its first two weeks of classes, WSU saw nearly 1 in 12 students contact a campus health care provider about flu-like symptoms.

There’s no reason to expect the situation in Canada will unfold any differently over the coming weeks, as the September campus is a most predictable beast indeed. There will be close social contact – buses like Tokyo subway cars, undersized and overfilled lecture halls, old friends and new friends coming together at parties, beer gardens and club meetings. There will be immune systems stressed by moves to new cities and the shock of having to return to a normal routine after a summer off. And there will be many, many people who mistake those first signs of illness for the after-effects of last night’s party. A virus couldn’t ask for a better home than the ivory tower come fall, really.

September outbreaks are, therefore, the rule rather than the exception. In 2006, for example, campuses from coast to coast were struck by norovirus, a gastrointestinal bug whose usual modus operandi is to infect cruise ship passengers sidling up to the Lido Buffet for a fifth helping of strudel. Salmonella rears its peritrichous flagellated little head fairly often, as do other more exotic viral illnesses like mumps, which has been appearing on campuses with such regularity in recent years that Ontario’s Ministry of Health started the “Mumps Campus Tour” to vaccinate students against this entirely preventable illness.

Most of these outbreaks are relatively small and well-contained due to the nature of the infectious agents. Pandemic H1N1, however, is a bug of a different colour. One need look no further than the name – pandemic H1N1. This is not something lurking only in the cafeteria’s day-old tray of mac’n’cheese or on the unwashed hands of one especially dirty student. Nuh uh. It’s everywhere, and a run-in is virtually guaranteed. Beyond its ubiquity, H1N1 is distinctly ageist in its infection profile, with students from kindergarten to grad school falling squarely within its sights, and the vaccine won’t be available until well past mid-term exams.

So what’s a student to do? First off, hope your university has a good H1N1 policy in place. There should be clear communication of guidelines surrounding self-isolation (like when to stay home and the importance of avoiding campus events if you’re feeling ill), and universities need to do everything they can to facilitate isolation, from providing private “sick rooms” for students in shared housing to ensuring absenteeism due to illness won’t be punished by docked marks or other penalties. Ditching the doctor’s note policy is important, as most primary care physicians are advising against coming in for a consultation if H1N1 is suspected, and universities need to encourage their professors to adopt distance-learning technologies to ensure that students can still access lecture material if they’re at home in bed with a barf bucket and laptop by their side.

Facilitating hygiene is another critical factor, although having seen the condition of some dorm rooms this one might be a bit of an insurmountable hurdle. Custodial staff need to be cleaning common surfaces (desks, door handles, etc...) more frequently, students should be cleaning their residence rooms more thoroughly than usual, and disposable wipes should be provided to allow people to wipe down things like clickers (those little poll-answer remotes many profs use during lectures) in between classes.

If your campus administrators have been living under a rock since April and haven’t enacted a flu policy, you and your fellow students need to take matters into your own hands, literally. Wash them . Frequently. Not just before a date or after you’ve dissected something in Bio 101. Also, if you have to sneeze, do it into a tissue (which you then throw away) or into the crook of your arm – not into your hands and not on the back of the head of the kid in front of you in class. If you see others sneezing incorrectly, glare at that. Scathing mockery at the hands of one’s peers is a very effective motivator for correcting behaviour.

Above all, if you feel a bout of influenza-like illness coming on, STAY AT HOME and don’t come back until you’ve been symptom-free for at least a full 24 hours. Be kind to your fellow students. They’re already stressed and/or hungover; let’s not add febrile and diarrhetic to that too.