SPINLAB @ MSU

Jaideep Taggart Singh
Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
Michigan State University
640 South Shaw Lane
East Lansing, MI, USA, 48824-1321

lab: FRIB 1350
office: FRIB 2016
reliable: singhj@frib.msu.edu
unreliable: +1.517.908.7176

We are always looking to train and mentor curious, self-aware, self-motivated, & hard-working students at all levels as well as possibly sometimes postdocs. Come join us!

Prospective Postdocs: If you are interested in my group’s activities, then please send me a brief email with a CV or resume, a short description of your research interests, and follow the instructions here.

Prospective Graduate Students: If you are interested in our group’s research activities, then please send me a brief email with a CV or resume and a short description of your research interests and experiences. If you contact me, then I will make the time to meet with you over zoom and I will do my best to help you on your grad school journey. However, you do need to respect my time, so please make sure you’ve studied our website carefully especially the information that I provide below. See also Required Reading For Prospective Grad Students.

FYI: I believe in radical transparency, so you should know that if you contact me about applying for grad school at MSU with the intention of potentially working with our group, then I will email one or more of your letter writers the following message:

Mentorship of students is a privilege that I take very seriously and put a lot of effort into.

One thing that I’ve only recently learned about myself is that my mentorship style and personality is more limited than I liked to admit in the past and that I now, to be fair to everyone involved, need to be more deliberate about my mentorship. I am working on improving my skill set, but I also recognize that some students fit my style better than others.

Graduate application materials, including letters, don’t always do an effective job conveying what I now view are the most important criteria for mentorship in my group:

1. curiosity (wants to know why and willing to put in the effort to find out)
2. selflessness (willingness and ability to learn how to be a team player)
3. proactive receptiveness to critical feedback (growth mindset)

In your letter of recommendation, if you’ve been asked to, or via directly in response to this email, please consider commenting on these traits above.

At the moment, the RA slots made for my 2024-2027 NSF and DOE grants are more or less filled. The renewals for our main grants are due in Fall 2026. In general, I average 2.4 grant submissions a year with a success rate of about 1 in 3. I strongly prefer to have overlap between the junior and senior graduate students. Graduate students at MSU typically TA for their first year and an RA slot is not usually needed until the summer after the first year which provide a buffer and time to secure funding for an RA. Typically an incoming graduate student taking classes with a TA assignment does not have much time for research unless they enroll in PHY 800 which is a research-for-course-credit course. I’ve hosted many students this way and taking this course is a low stakes way to get to know the group culture and for us to get to know you to see if it might be a good fit.

There is always uncertainty as it pertains to funding and some years things are more uncertain that others. I can’t guarantee anything other than I am continuously applying for grants, which is the only thing in my control. Alternatively, an US National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, if awarded, opens up an RA slot via a different mechanism and, if you were interested, we could work on one together at some point. If you are willing to work with a collaborator of mine at a DOE National Lab, then the Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program is another option that has worked well for some of my students in the past. There are also other competitive graduate fellowship programs that you could apply to and I would be happy to help with the application process. The uncertainty never goes away and is part of the background noise of my job role. I can’t really do my job effectively if I decide to wait on certainty before making every decision. My only obligation is to be open and honest about the uncertainty.

See these posts for general guidance on applying to grad school and requesting letters of recommendation. Regarding applying to MSU in particular, be sure to follow the guidance regarding the written statements for the application here. In other words, address the questions head on and be certain to tailor your statements to MSU specifically. Not addressing the requested points will hurt your application here. In particular, make sure you address bullet point 11 on the application instructions very clearly. Applying to graduate is a competitive and unforgiving process. Not following the directions is often times an automatic disqualifier.

Spinlab Model for Undergraduate Research

Rising Seniors: please consider joining my group for a Senior Thesis (PHY 490) which would fulfill your MSU PA Capstone requirement.

Rising Sophomores & Juniors: please consider applying for the group on Handshake if there is a posting or as an REU student over the summer.

Incoming freshman: please consider joining my group as a Professorial Assistant.

Undergrads in general (if no posting on Handshake): If you are more than one calendar year away from graduating, then please answer the following questions using LaTeX and send me the PDF along with a CV or resume. Use any resource that you’d like, but make sure to cite it properly My motivation for having a set of questions like this is to gauge a student’s investment in the process. The most valuable things my group offers to undergraduates are our time to teach you skills relevant for success in science as well tools for performing research that you would not get otherwise from your coursework. Working with, mentoring, and teaching a student who is new to research takes up a lot of valuable time – which is a very important part of our job. The time we invest in the students that we work with pays the most dividends when the student is highly motivated and takes full advantage of the opportunities offered to them. As a consequence, it is very important to my group that I make best use of their time. To provide a sense of scale, it costs about 40 people-hours just to hire a new person into the group and then get them properly trained just to be able to enter the room where our research is conducted. It would not be fair to my research group to allow someone into the group who has not demonstrated the motivation and determination to pull their own weight. Please let me know if  you have any questions.

1. What is your name, email address, and, if applicable, website/github account?
2. What year in college are you?
3. Have you worked with another research group before? If so, which ones?
4. Have you contacted other research groups? If so, which ones?
5. Why are you interested in my group?
6. Which project are you most interested in and why?
7. Are you considering going to graduate school?
8. What is the last book you’ve read and why?
9. What is the most recent new skill or topic that you taught yourself?
10. Why did you want to learn it?
11. How did you teach yourself?
12. How many psi are in one atmosphere?
13. What is the molecular weight of air?
14. What is the magnitude of Earths’s magnetic field?
15. What direction does the Earth’s magnetic field point?
16. How many photons are emitted by a 5 mW laser in one second?
17. How many electrons pass through a 50 ohm resistor in one second?
18. What is special about the number 137?
19. Let’s say that you have a rectangle with length x and width 1. Cut a 1 by 1 square off of the edge of this rectangle. This will leave you with another smaller rectangle with the same length to width ratio. What is x? What is special about this number?
20. Make a plot of the data below and determine the function that best describes the data, both using Python 3.x: