My son has been very fortunate to be accepted to 6 PhD or Master to PhD programs with funding. He is traveling almost everyone of the next several weekends learning about some of the schools and programs. I am just an observer in this process but I am interested in hearing about what criteria people would look at in making the choice which will be challenging. It would help to know if there are any subtler points about funding to have in mind or the importance of rankings in both the individual programs and the school in general. Also things that might not occur to someone who hasn’t gone through this process would be good to be aware of My son will be studying civil/environmental engineering focused on water resources. He is enthusiastic about all of the programs he applied to. Presently he is interested in doing research and possibly going into academia.Thank you for any thoughts you can share.
First and foremost, he needs to decide if he wants a masters degree or a Ph.D. They serve very different purposes. It makes no sense to spend $ on a masters if one wants a career that will require a Ph.D., but at the same time, it makes no sense to waste 4+ years on a Ph.D. if a masters will suffice.
I know you said he has been accepted to programs with funding. Is this complete tuition + fees + stipend funding + health insurance? Just tuition? Half tuition? No stipend? This can be very important. He needs to make sure he knows exactly what will be included. He also needs to make sure he will be able to afford to live near-ish to his school. If he gets a stipend of $30k/year in LA, that probably won’t be enough compared to a $30k/year stipend in Houston.
My next advice would be to pick a program where the students seem happy, the school “feels” right, and their are professors in his field of interest that can and are willing to mentor him.
Congrats on his acceptances!!!
I disagree that choosing between a master’s and a doctorate is the first and foremost problem. It’s something he ought to decide sooner rather than later, but ultimately it’s not something that has to be known going into the program (though it’s advantageous if he does know). For the first year or so the programs will be identical anyway, and the main thing is trying to decide whether he wants a PhD or not in time to take the qualifying exams in a reasonable time frame.
In terms of choosing, the single most important factor from a career perspective (particularly with PhDs) is that the research matches the student’s interests and goals, and that the research group will allow that student to flourish and publish high-quality publications. It’s not always easy to gauge exactly how a student will function within a particular research group just from one conversation and some emails with a professor, but that should ultimately be the goal. Ultimately, the name/connections of your advisor and the quality of your research will trump the brand name on the school.
@mademoiselle2308 :To clarify my son has made the decision between Masters and PhD. He applied as a PhD candidate wherever this was a possibility. Some schools required application for Masters and then to PhD afterwards. All of the financial awards are not in yet but at least 3 are with full funding, health insurance and stipend. He doesn’t have all of the facts to lay them out but I am sure that he will eliminate any program that doesn’t include all 3 of these included. Good point about weighing out the package against the cost of living of the school.
@boneh3ad : I know he has had conversations with his POI at each school and it was based on these conversations and his interest in their research that he chose the schools he applied to. He will also be going to and visiting with the Prof and students at all of the schools he is interested in attending. At this point he is enthusiastic about all of the profs. Thank you for capsulizing the relationship needed I will forward your paragraph to him, that is really helpful. Thank you also for your perspective on brand name vs. advisor connections.
One of my kids had compared 1) number of students currently under the potential advisors, 2) number of students in 1st, 2nd and new comers asking under the potential advisors (not one advisor), 3) completion rates, 4) funding practice and its assignment policy (if competition among students), 5) level of other programs/departments in an university related to the major/research interest.
Fully funded by Fellowship in the first year helped my kid the most to be able to complete the qualified exam by 3rd semester. In addition, a fellowship seems to bring another fellowship opportunity. Having a possible choice to ask as an advisor from multiple well-know professors is very nice thing as well.
One thing my kid looked at was department cohesion in the PhD students. Do they do community service projects together? BBQs? Outreach to local schools? Mentoring of undergrad minority students? Book club in their interest area?
I wanted to add-
If your student is not interested in becoming an academic, many universities have graduate student consulting groups that let grad students get experience in various industries while pursuing the PhD. That is worth checking out.
My criteria would be (in roughly this order):
-Funding*
-Reputation of the PI and the department in academia and/or industry, depending on where I was considering working. Preferably both, because you never know what’s going to happen
-Placement record of the PI and the department. Do people end up in jobs like the one I want?
-Personality fit with the department and the PI/lab group you’d be a part of. I’d at least want to feel like I could potentially fit in with 2-3 PIs/labs
-Research fit with the PI and/or the department. I’d want at least 2-3 PIs I could potentially work with at this department.
-Resources and professional support in the department. What kind of career development opportunities are there, are there funds for conference travel, what do the libraries and lab spaces look like, etc. Also really important: how much training in grant-writing do graduate students get, and how successful are they in obtaining fellowships and grants?
-Funding*
*I put funding in two locations, because this depends. The program being funded is paramount; a PhD program could be a perfect fit but if it is not funded, you should not go. (MS programs are different.) But, assuming that it is funded at an adequate level - tuition waiver, stipend of around $25K+, health insurance - then I wouldn’t let small differences in funding amounts be the deciding factor.
One thing that could be weighted, though, is potential additional perks to funding. For example, many universities will “top up” any fellowships won, so you get a nice additional bonus for winning an external fellowship like NSF or NDESG. Many universities may include individual travel budgets for students in their awards (my award for my first two years of grad school included a personal travel budget of $1300 a year, which is different from “apply to a pot for $500; once it’s gone it’s gone” approach many departments take). Generous PIs is another thing to consider - in some departments it’s the norm for PIs to purchase a PC for their students or pay for all their conference travel, whereas in others it’s not.
For someone studying the environment and especially water, travel funds may be especially important if your research takes you to faraway places.
The other thing I would tell students is not to totally discount personal factors. This will be a place that you have to live for the next 5-7 years of your life. So while location and weather, for example, shouldn’t be the chief concerns - it’s definitely good to take them into account. One of the best things about my PhD program was I got to live in New York for 6 years. I did my postdoc in a small college town and doing a PhD there definitely would’ve been a different experience (and one I wasn’t super-willing to consider when I was making my list of programs, aside from Michigan). People who are happy outside of their program are more likely to be productive and content within their program.
@juillet thank you for that thoughtful reply. I forwarded it to him.
I’m just wondering because he has options. Do you see working with a professor who is doing research that matches his interest, and who he and other students really like, relate to well and respect at a good school but is a new prof without much track record as one to scratch off the list? More simply stated, assuming everything else about a school is great but the professor is a new professor without the much of a track record. Would that be important enough to cut that school from the list? Are there any advantages to working with a younger, newer prof?
Nope. That pretty much exactly describes my own primary PI in graduate school, and I graduated with two prestigious fellowships and more than the average amount of publications PhD students in my field have by graduation. A close friend of mine also had the same PI, and she had twice the amount of publications I had when she graduated and she’s got over 25 at this point, just 3 years after graduation (which in my field is just…amazing. She’s going to be an assistant professor at a top 20 program in our field starting next fall).
New professors aren’t necessarily bad. For one thing, they’re closer to the experience of being a student and a job candidate, so they may have more insight on the current job market than a more advanced professor who hasn’t looked for a job in 10-20+ years. Secondly, new professors are hungry. They need publications to get tenure and grants, and so they’re going to be constantly publishing and writing new grants. One other plus, in my experience, is that my advisor had less clear-cut ideas about how to mentor and how a PhD student should be, so he left me to really define my own role and do kind of what I wanted. It was awesome, because that’s what I wanted anyway.
What I will say is that a student who works with a new professor is likely going to need to be quite independent, because that new professor is going to be busy - especially in years 3-5 of their tenure period, as they travel and speak and try to establish a national/international reputation for themselves (which you need in order to get tenure at a really top-tier R1). You’re going to have to be bullish about getting time on their calendar and getting what you want. A new professor may also be newer to mentoring, and so they may not realize what you need or want. You’ll have to speak up for yourself and ask for opportunities. Ask constantly about papers they’re working on, projects, grants, etc., and make sure that you get on things that are relevant to your interests and will help you get jobs.
Also, a really good tip is that you should find a more established professor as a secondary advisor or mentor, even if only informally. I did have a formal second advisor because my program spanned two departments, and my second advisor was a top researcher in the field who had been around for a while (the kind of person that when I went to conferences and mentioned his name, people knew who he was). I had a great balance of advisement, and I also adopted some informal mentors at various stages of their career.
As someone who (I believe) fits this description, I am obligated to say that no, you shouldn’t scratch them off the list. After all, how else are we supposed to get students!?
Of course, the serious answer is still no, as there are some advantages to working with the young profs, but there is always some risk involved with signing on with the new guy or gal, and you have to be aware of that going in. Everything that @juillet said is quality advice. I will add a few more points to consider.
[ul]
[li]Newer professors aren’t guaranteed to receive tenure. One of the risks you run by signing on with them is they legitimately may be denied tenure before you graduate, which is obviously a mess when it happens. It usually gets obvious when that will happen and you can jump ship before it causes too much grief, though.[/li]
[li]Especially when working with experiments, working for a new professor may legitimately end up causing you to take longer to finish than working out of an established lab that is already running like clockwork. New professors typically have to spend a fair bit of the first few years getting their new labs up and running, meaning there isn’t a tone of active science being performed just yet. On the plus side, it often means their early students get a lot of experience working with and designing labs around the relevant equipment, which can be a very marketable skill.[/li]
[li]Younger professors aren’t as likely to have strong connections with industry like some more senior faculty do (though this is also not guaranteed). However, as a student of one of the newer professors, you are more likely to be more involved with developing those relationships (depending on who the professor runs his or her group, of course).[/li][/ul]
Thank you for adding those points @boneh3ad.I will share this with him.
My daughter is in a situation similar to @spectrum2’s son, with multiple funded grad school offers. It is going to be interesting to see how she makes her choice. As always @juillet, thanks for all the detail regarding grad school.
^Thank you, ScienceGirlMom 
Good points @boneh3ad! Especially about the tenure assessment. Every student considering working with an untenured assistant professor should have an exit plan - aka, what am I going to do if my PI does not get tenure and leaves the university? In my case, my professor was still very new when I started, so he went up for tenure the same year I was writing my dissertation and planning to defend. His denial wouldn’t have affected me. However, I had originally thought he would go up earlier, but while I was an advanced doctoral student, so I planned to stay at my institution and had identified other people I could work with to finish up.
There’s also always the possibility that an untenured assistant professor leaves earlier - like third-year review, if they are doing quite poorly; or if they get poached by a higher-ranked department, if they are a rising star; or if they apply elsewhere for personal or professional reasons (better city, closer to aging parents or to a partner, more money, better department, more resources, any other reason). Professors are most mobile before tenure, and a lot of professors realize that if they are going to move on they’d better do it before tenure.
Anyway, that goes back to the point of having more than 1 PI who could advise you. That’s the case regardless of the professional career step your professor is on - people die, get sick, get poached, leave academia and leave universities for all other kinds of reasons.
Also this
Is so true. When I was an advanced doctoral student I suddenly realized how many connections I had with public health institutions and people in New York through helping my professor set up and run relationships for his research. The downside is that that, and helping the professor get his lab set up, takes an enormous amount of time and can hurt your publication record if you’re not careful.
Thank you again for your replies. He is wrapping up his last school visit this weekend. It looks like there are 2 schools where he describes the perspective poi as famous in the field. Their students are very successful upon completion of their PhDs. He is also very drawn to the research and there is good funding for him. He is less enthusiastic about the locations of these schools but more importantly he thinks these profs are amazing but more distant than at least one of the newer professors who is a poi in a location he loves. He seems to have really clicked with this professor and is again enthusiastic about the research and will have good funding. You have spoken about the pros and cons of a new professor but does it make sense to attend a strong but lower ranked program (usnwr) in his major under a new professor when being offered admission under a top professor in the field. Personally I can see the pros and cons of both but don’t have any real experience to understand the implications of each. Any thoughts?
Well, it depends, I think, on his reasons for wanting to attend the “lower-ranked” program and how much “lower-ranked” the program is.
I am skeptical of USNWR rankings for PhD programs because they are based on a single rating by professors, deans and provosts within the field. It’s not a very…valid way to measure rankings of PhD programs. I think the broad groupings probably generally track within people’s estimations of program comparisons, but absolute numbers are probably a bit worthless. I say that to say: how different are the programs on USNWR? If it’s a matter of #1 vs. #6, it probably doesn’t matter that much. But if the difference is, say, #6 vs. #57 - that’s something more to consider.
Were I him I’d ask my own professors about their estimations of the reputations of the graduate programs and how likely they are to get him to his goals.
In the sciences, PI trumps department. Department is important, but a famous PI has connections and can grease the wheels. My famous PI was my connection into my postdoc without even applying for it. Of course, I had to be good on my own, but his name helped get me in the door. Having a well-known PI brings a lot of perks with it. It’s important to carefully evaluate how involved that famous PI is with his graduate students, though.
Having a professor you click with is really important. There does need to be a balance, though, between really clicking with the professor personally and wanting to work with that person professionally. It’s important to feel comfortable with your professor, but a good professor isn’t necessarily a “nice” one - it’s one that’s going to make you work and give you necessary, crucial feedback. Having a professor who feels a little distant is not necessarily bad UNLESS that “distance” is experienced as “my PI never meets with me and doesn’t return my drafts.”
It’s a fine line. The best people to ask are the graduate students in each lab.