{"id":153,"date":"2006-03-29T21:36:06","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T21:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/29\/so-you-want-to-be-a-grad-stude\/"},"modified":"2006-03-29T21:36:06","modified_gmt":"2006-03-29T21:36:06","slug":"so-you-want-to-be-a-grad-stude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/29\/so-you-want-to-be-a-grad-stude\/","title":{"rendered":"So You Want to Be a Grad Student?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school<\/a>, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you’re accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school<\/a>). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here.<\/p>\n

Below the fold, I will list the three most important decisions you will make in choosing a graduate school:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Choosing a research advisor.<\/li>\n
  2. Choosing a research advisor.<\/li>\n
  3. Choosing a research advisor.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    What’s the “right” choice? It will vary from one student to another, and one institution to another, but basically, you’re looking for someone who has funding, who graduates students in a reasonable amount of time, and whose students get jobs after graduation. And more important than any of those, you need to pick an advisor that you can get along with– grad school is stressful enough when all goes well, but it can be unremittingly miserable if you have a major conflict of personality with your advisor.<\/p>\n

    There’s a lot of argument in the comments to Sean’s post about the importance of the prestige of the insitution, which I think is really sort of a side issue. It’s important to have a diploma from a prestigious institution if you can see yourself leaving the world of research altogether, but if you plan a career as a research scientist (in academia or elsewhere), the research group you work with is much more important than the reputation of the institution as a whole. People working in the field will know who the good groups are, and who the bad groups are, and that will carry more weight with other scientists than what US News<\/cite> thinks of the school you got your degree from. Even at a second-tier school, you can find good researchers, and working with somebody who has a solid reputation in the field will open more doors (to good post-docs, and good jobs down the road) than working for a known crank at an Ivy League school.<\/p>\n

    Of course, I’m naturally inclined to think that way, because my graduate advisor is considerably better known than the program from which I received my degree…<\/p>\n

    Anyway, if you’re a student thinking about graduate study in the sciences, take a look at Sean’s posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Sean Carroll offers another installment of unsolicited advice about graduate school, this time on the topic of choosing what school to attend once you’re accepted (the previous installment was on how to get into grad school). His advice is mostly very good, and I only want to amplify a few points here. Below the fold,… Continue reading So You Want to Be a Grad Student?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}