"In my experience, the two main things that make graduate school hard are the unstructured nature of the process, and the lack of information about what you should spend your time on," writes Marie desJardins in a paper called "How to Succeed in Graduate School." She's right. Graduate students, for the most part, don't get enough advice - or maybe just not good advice - about how to be successful graduate students. There's a lot more to grad school than simply doing experiments, and the decisions that you make will impact the rest of your scientific career.

Virtually all scientists were once graduate students, and yet very few pass on the skills and information students need to make it in this challenging occupation. It's pretty surprising. Before the days of the Internet, grad students relied on the scientists in their departments or universities for advice. Now they can use the Web to find those researchers who really want to help them make smart decisions.

If you have only one bookmark to spare on a grad-student-related site, place it at PhDs.Org. Subtitled "Science, Math, and Engineering Career Resources," this site contains information for grad students and postdocs in a wide array of fields. It also includes a well-organized layout that lets a visitor quickly find information.

Each page of PhDs.Org covers a specific topic, such as teaching or career information. If you know exactly what you're looking for, try the search function at the top of the home page. The topic pages also contain lists of annotated links, many to resources at other sites. Readers can filter the links to see only those that relate to a specific field (e.g., engineering, chemistry, or life sciences). Another feature of PhDs.Org orders the links based on one of three criteria: most popular links, newest links, or highest ranked links.

Graduate School, one of the topic pages, covers "How to choose a grad school, how to pay for grad school, how to survive and flourish in grad school." One of its offsite links goes to Marie desJardins' pragmatic paper How to Succeed in Graduate School, which covers the entire process from applying to grad school to writing a thesis. She has included sections on finding an advisor, staying motivated, and getting financial support. The second part of the article offers suggestions for becoming part of the research community and gives advice for advisors.

In her introduction, desJardins credits How to Do Research at the MIT AI Lab as one of the resources that helped her get through grad school. Put together by "a whole bunch of current, former, and honorary MIT AI Lab graduate students," this article includes specifics for MIT artificial intelligence grad students, but several of the discussions pertain to all scientists-in-training.

A section called Emotional Factors discusses topics that affect every grad student, like experimental failures. It takes little effort to get beyond the AI-specific lingo; just insert your field of work when the MIT authors mention AI, and replace "writing code" with cloning a gene, purifying a protein, screening for mutants, or whatever.

If you are in the process of selecting an advisor, you might spend some time looking through the National Academies' publication called Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering. Although this was designed as a guide for advisors, knowing how to be a good mentor might help you pick one. If you're continuing on in academia, these are also skills that you too will someday need.

The National Academies has two other resources for graduate students. On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research - a booklet developed by the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) - guides scientists, young and old, through the ethical dilemmas they might face. It is valuable reading for researchers beginning their careers. This information might not make your life in graduate school any easier, but it will make you a better scientist. The online version is easy to navigate and covers subjects such as dealing with anomalous data, assigning authorship, and conflicts of interest.

The second publication, Reshaping the Graduate Education of Scientists and Engineers, covers two topics that all graduate students should know about: trends in graduate education and the career prospects of Ph.Ds. This 1995 report, also from COSEPUP, served as a wake-up call of sorts to graduate programs. Among the committee's general recommendations were that programs should offer a broader range of academic options, control the time it takes to get a degree, and maintain a focus on the education of students as the primary objective of graduate school. This report also discussed whether or not there's an overabundance of Ph.D.s, an issue close to all of our hearts.

PhDs.Org carries on this discussion in two of its sections, Required Reading and The Big Picture. These pages list more online resources about the trends in graduate education and academic career issues.

PhDs.Org recently added a survey that examined graduate student sentiments about their education. Survey results from the 6,533 responses suggest that, although the majority of students are satisfied, graduate schools have several areas in which they might improve. For a summary of these results, see PhDs.org Survey Results Are In, which was published on another online grad student resource, Science's Next Wave.

Science's Next Wave delivers career advice for young scientists. If you belong to a group that is an institutional subscriber you get free access to this site. Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany have even set up access for their scientists nationwide. If you don't belong to one of these groups, an online subscription will cost you $19.95 per year, or you can stick to the free-access parts of the site.

This weekly publication provides regular features on career advice (in both academics and industry), alternative careers, and graduate education. Relevant articles can easily be found on the page entitled For Graduate Students. Next Wave forums, which are open to everyone, cover topics for grad students, postdocs, and junior faculty. There's even a Grad Student Support Group.

A recurring theme in these Web sites is that the people who have taken the time to put this information together feel they belong to a large community of scientists. They are interested in helping not only the grad students in their own departments, but any and every student around the world. Their best piece of advice might be that graduate students also need to entrench themselves in this scientific community - at all levels. Don't get to know just the scientists in your department. Know those in your university, your field, and beyond. Use the Web to start building these connections. Use these sites to make your life a bit easier and your time in the lab more productive.