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Choosing among grad school offers posted 03/30/2006 03:09 am by Jim Hu

Last update:03/30/2006 03:11 am

Chad Orzel and the other Sean Carroll (the physicist, not the biologist) discuss how - if one has made the decision to go to grad school, hopefully with eyes wide open - how to decide on which offer to accept. Sean:

The single most important influence on your graduate career will be who your advisor is.

Chad:

It might be a slight overstatement to say that the choice of advisor is the single most important factor in your grad school experience, but only a slight overstatement. The right choice of advisor can make your life much more pleasant, and set you up well for your future career, while the wrong choice can lead to extreme amounts of pain and misery.

The comments at both places address the proper weight to place on prestige of the department/institution.

Prestige is positively but imperfectly correlated with that most important factor that Chad and Sean agree on: Choosing an advisor. The positive correlation is due to the fact that the higher ranking institutions are enriched for successful potential advisors. This means:

More options if you haven't really narrowed down who you want to work with, and
More options if you can't get into that person's group

This applies also to options if you have to change advisors midstream. If the best person in the field you're interested in is the only decent scientist in that institution, then you really need for everything to go right. At a larger place with more choices, you're more likely to end up in a good lab. Also, you're more likely to realize that what you thought was true love was just a passing fancy...and that someone there is doing something really cool that you didn't fully appreciate as an undergrad. And it's very likely that you don't fully appreciate a huge fraction of what goes on in a field as an undergrad. Here's a clue: if people are enthusiastic about something and they can get others to fund it, there's usually something interesting there.

The correlation is imperfect, however, for several reasons. One is that there is a lag for reputation vs. reality. If you've done undergraduate research, your undergraduate advisor is probably more reliable than the US News rankings, but only for telling you that University X is a good place. She probably can't tell you that X is better than Y for all Y, since she doesn't have sufficient information.

The other reason why choosing on prestige per se is not a good idea is that different places have different institutional/departmental cultures. Some of these will not be a good fit for you, even if others have been sucessful going through those programs. In some cases this affects whether you enjoy doing the science. At one extreme are places where working in the lab is a constant testosterone-poisoned version of Survivor. At the other are places where students who work hard are ostracized. My take: avoid places where the students don't talk about science when they're out socially, either because they're paranoid about their ideas being stolen, or because they don't want to think about science after working hours. If you fall into the latter category, you might want to rethink whether you should be going to grad school at all.

A last thought for now. At some point your ability to rank your options will be limited by the facts that you can't predict the future and you can't know what would have happened if you chose differently. But choosing a grad school is not like the grail scene in the last Indiana Jones movie. It's not between eternal life and horrible death. Most of the time it's more like choosing between different things on the menu at a good restaurant...the different options are not objectively better or worse; they're just different. And how much you enjoy your meal is also affected by your own attitudes.

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