David M. Schneider
I grew up in rural North Dakota. I was a mediocre student in high school and applied to exactly one college, North Dakota State University, where it took me 5 years to earn a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. It took 5 years because I nearly flunked out in years 2 and 3 and rarely attended class except in years 1 and 5. Despite bad grades and a broken compass, I applied to 4 masters programs and got into 1, for the sole reason that the chair at that department was a former professor at NDSU.
When I finished my masters, I applied to 11 PhD programs and was rejected by all of them. The next obvious step (to me) was to cold-call the director of graduate studies at Columbia (where I had just been rejected) and ask if there were any labs that would hire me for a year. There luckily was, and so I packed my bags and moved to New York. I worked at Columbia for a year, reapplied to grad school and was accepted everywhere I applied this time. After starting my PhD, I naively interacted with PIs as if they were peers. This includes the time I bumped into Richard Axel at a bodega the summer before grad school and told him I was going to join his lab for his first rotation. I did indeed rotate in the Axel lab.
During my first year in grad school, I transiently suffered from anxiety attacks, which just about made me drop out of grad school. But I recovered and ultimately ended up studying bird brains with Sarah Woolley, then moved to Duke for a postdoc before coming back to NYC in 2018. My path eventually worked out because I married someone much smarter than myself and because rather than work 80-hour weeks, I spend most of my evenings and weekends hanging out with my children.
Cover image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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