<p>Does anybody here know what the dress codes are like for students under a Ph.D. assistantship?</p>
<p>It varies based on the department, school, and type of assistantship. More conservative fields like accounting might expect at least slacks and a polo, while more relaxed fields won’t care most of the time. Some schools (most famously certain elite British schools) might have stringent dress codes that apply at least some of the time. Finally, if you are an RA most of the time you will simply be expected to dress in a safe manner for your field, while if you are a TA additional rules might apply, particularly when you are actually teaching in front of a class.</p>
<p>Don’t show up in a tank top and shorts. If you’re in graduate school, you should know how to dress yourself.</p>
<p>That’s funny, because there are a lot of profs who don’t know how to dress themselves :P.</p>
<p>Dress for success. Wear classics, not fashion.</p>
<p>I appreciate all the replies, but was not looking for input on graduate school dress codes or personal opinions on proper dress. I want to know if there are dress codes for assistantships. For example, are Ph.D. students under an assistantship typically required to wear suit and tie or will a pair of pants and untucked collar shirt be acceptable? Not asking what would be appropriate or what I should wear, but if there is actually, typically a formal dress code?</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>^Dear lord, I’m certainly not. There’s no codified dress code for any students in my program (biomedical sciences), and I’m not aware of one for when I’m teaching. I mean, we’re not supposed to wear open-toed shoes in the lab, but that’s about it.</p>
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<p>I mean this in a friendly and helpful way and hope that you take it as such. The brutal truth is that is a hyper-competitive academic and career world, you want every tiny variable stacked in your favor. You will be judged by the way you talk and the way you dress. You never know when you will meet a potential employer, or the ways in which you may interact and depend on current professors or colleagues in the future. Of course you do not want to overdress with a dinner jacket at the Bunsen burner, but you should not be wondering about what is “acceptable,” you should be figuring our how you will dress as a professional.</p>
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The ONLY dress codes that I have ever heard of with a graduate program are functional or situational. Those codes indicate what you can and cannot wear while teaching, while presenting at a conference, or while working in a lab - none of them applied to general activities, such as attending lectures or meeting with your professor.</p>
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That is very dependent on the program. In my program, if you showed up daily wearing a shirt and tie, no one would believe you were actually serious about being an engineer.</p>
<p>In my program, the “dress code” involves hiking boots and pants you don’t mind getting dirty while performing field surveys.</p>
<p>Only real dress code is to wear close-toed shoes in the lab, and if you’re doing anything particularly dangerous to either put on a pair of pants or a labcoat.</p>
<p>I also recommend avoiding synthetic fibers since they have a tendency to melt/burn unlike cotton, and that’s a pretty big difference when you spill some acid or accidentally put your arm over an open flame.</p>
<p>Other than that, I don’t think how you dress is a very deal during day to day activities. If you’re going to dinner with visitors or have something “special” going on it’s probably worth putting on something nice to show you understand the importance of the occasion, but otherwise anything other than a polo shirt would be overdressing for lab. Especially since I can think of at least ten ways a tie could get you killed in my lab.</p>
<p>Whether or not there is a “dress code” will vary by university and program, so you’d have to call them to be 100% sure. But In 99% of cases there won’t be one, because people are going to assume that adult graduate students know how to dress.</p>
<p>For my RAship I wear jeans and dressy shirts with flats or sandals, occasionally some nice sneakers. For my TAship I usually wore dark-wash jeans and button-downs with dress flats. When I am leading my own lab section in the fall, I plan to hold about that same standard, maybe wearing some slacks or skirts some days. But I’m also always the most dressy in any room, because I like to dress up.</p>