When an airline asks you to sign a waiver for your guitar just scribble quickly in hard to read handwriting "no thank you" and hand it back. Later if they damage your equipment you can claim you did not understand why they handed that waiver to you.
Get involved in the community. Grad school is more than your research project; expand your contributions beyond your field of research and into the community where you are working.
Workshops offered through the library and OpenEd are so beneficial to help with your research goals and teaching tips/tricks. Definitely be sure to check these out!
To future graduate students, it is important to keep a clean, legible, and logical lab notebook! Also remember that your brain is your best weapon to succeed in graduate school and it functions best when it is well-rested; only pull all-nighters if necessary. Learn to manage your time and try not to do multiple things at once; multi-tasking in the lab can lead to errors in experiments. Finally, enjoy your time and get all the food and freebies from conferences and other events!
I advise prospective grad students to network with as many interesting people as possible. Networking is key to finding research opportunities and gaining experiences. Even simple conversations can stimulate new ideas or help solidify original ones.
The University of Guelph is a small family in itself with a lot of support to facilitate different types of lifestyles. My ability to feel safe and learn without worry is something I have admired.
My advice for prospective grad students is to reach out to people. When I was looking at the CDE program, I reached out to a couple of graduated students in different fields to talk about their experience in the program. This information was very valuable and helped me to make a confident choice. If you have any questions about the program or my experience please feel welcome to reach out.
Smart or slow, doesn't really matter in the end, the point is everyone has their own time zone, all you have to have is your own balance of work, play, and all other stuff, the others don't really matter.
My advice would be that a Masters degree is like a roller coaster. You will have your ups and downs in your research but that is all apart of being a scientist! There is no such thing as a 'bad' discovery.
