<p>I'm new to CC. The web site seems very helpful. Please let me know what you think I should do in this situation. I'm a new Ph.D. student in a type of engineering. I got accepted to a top top school in California that I never should have been accepted to mostly because of my work experience and GREs. My grades were good, but probably not as good as most other people who got accepts. </p>
<p>Anyway, I got accepted with a professor's support. He is an assistant professor, and I am/was genuinely interested in his projects. He said he'd get back to me on funding. He never really did, so I pushed the accept button hoping for a late funding offer. I wasn't planning to go to this top University unless they funded me. Anyway, at the beginning of August I actually got funded with a "needs-based" fellowship through an entirely different part of the Department without the original professor who recruited me even knowing I got an offer. </p>
<p>So I arrive and I found out the professor who recruited me took another student as an RA already. Ironically, I have a fellowship now. I talked to this professor again, and he is still interested in taking me as a student though. I'm not sure what to do. I'm ticked that I never heard back from the original professor who recuited me when he pretty much said he'd get back to me, but I don't have all the facts. I also acknowledge that my grades were erratic. I made lots of A's, but also made some C's during some bad semesters. I'm not surprised or necessairly holding it against anybody that I wasn't the first funded.</p>
<p>easy, find another professor that you like to work with—this assistant professor does not open his/her heart to you so it’s not worth to invest 5 years with him</p>
<p>it sucks to work with an assistant professor anyways</p>
<p>Rest assured that it has nothing to do with your past grades or any deficiencies you perceive. You were accepted to the program; therefore, you are considered as qualified as the next student.</p>
<p>I suspect that what’s going on is a loss of funding – for example, a grant that seemed likely to go through and didn’t. Or maybe he was named on a large department grant and expected to get more support, only to find out that senior faculty members took a larger cut. Or it could be that he had only enough to fund one student, and that student was more aggressive than you.</p>
<p>Whatever the issue was, you need to look out for yourself. Find a professor who does interesting research and who has the means to support you for next year.</p>
<p>Assistant professors are hungry for papers, yes, but they may still be navigating what it means to be a faculty member. It’s not inherently bad to work with one – unless he gets denied tenure partway through your thesis research – but they are usually only a few years out of grad school and therefore may be naive to how they should behave.</p>
<p>Thanks Momwaitingfornew. I appreciate your comments. I certainly heard from reliable source that there were some pretty huge controversies regarding funding of new Ph.D.s in my program. Something like you described may very well have happened.</p>
<p>I will say that I thought I was very appropriately aggressive. They even paid me to fly to the University where I met with this professor. I thanked him accordingly afterward by e-mail too. </p>
<p>Yes, I do need to look out for myself. It seems like an assistant professor not getting a major grant and having to limit the number of students that he has already recruited seems like a bad omen, but I don’t know. Maybe it is more normal. </p>
<p>I also don’t know how to broach the subject with this professor. I mean I’m a lowly Ph.D. student who hasn’t passed quals yet, and I’m going to go confront the professor about what happened and why he didn’t get back to me on funding. Nothing good can come out of this. The thing is that I’m concerned for the future and whether he’ll have RA money in the future. I’d really like to have the funding discussion with him, but I’m not sure how or what is appropriate.</p>
<p>Didn’t you say that he was still interested in working with you? If so, do it. Or talk to another professor. You have a fellowship, so you’re more flexible than perhaps other students in your department. </p>
<p>Your future support will depend on the quality of your research. If you work hard, with appropriate initiative, he will want to renew your support.</p>
<p>for an assistant professor, you have to do some “background check” on him first. Do you think he will get tenure soon? If he/she fails to do that then you will be left in a really bad situation. This is a bigger problem in top programs, because the tenure ratio is much lower at these places. I’ve heard at Stanford, only 1/10 of new coming assistant professors will get tenure position.</p>
<p>Also like mom said, AP (assistant professors) are just out of the PhD or post-doc, so they have never or very poorly trained on managing people. Often times they do not demonstrate good people managing skills/attitudes. And yes they are craving for papers, so they may stop by the lab once 3 hours to check on your work or even do experiments with you (consider he/she was just working in lab few years ago). They don’t have a lot of students so you will be “bugged” a LOT, a positive way to look at this is you will get massive student-and-professor interactions along the way.</p>
<p>Anyways working with AP is just different, some students may prefer it while most don’t. Bottom line is you will be pushed and don’t dream of an relaxing 5 years. And of course it depends strongly on the specific AP too. good luck</p>
<p>a fellowship is better than an RA. better on your CV and as someone else said, it frees you up. there’s no need to confront or yell at this professor because he didn’t get back to you. it happens. work with him if you’re interested in his work, or work with another faculty member if they’re willing to take you on. you actually have more options because of this turn of events, not less. make it work for you.</p>
<p>I’m not complaining. It is just that I am genuinely interested in this guys research and think the guy is a decent guy. I’m just not sure what to make of this turn of events. If this professor would have gotten back to me, I would gladly work for him in a second.</p>
<p>Of course I would not yell at anybody. The issues with me are whether I trust this guy and whether he has good judgement. I’ve have found working in the coporate world that if you don’t trust your manager’s motivations, things go badly. I personally have a hard time hiding my true feelings about somebody. I consider this a fault, and try to work on it. I’m also concerned about the professor’s future at the University. I’ll certainly try to do some sort of “background check” as Mr. Zoo described. </p>
<p>Along these lines. If a prof has been at a University for three years, how many papers should he have published? How long do papers take to be approved by journals?</p>
<p>Yes, this is a UC. I’m well aware that the UC’s are having massive financial troubles.<br>
The field is a type of engineering. Sorry, I would like to keep this as anonymous as possible.</p>
<p>In graduate school, the students need to take the initiative. Don’t wait for the prof to get back to you. Go to him. Profs rarely go after students for several reasons: 1. they don’t want to “steal” prospective students from colleagues 2. they want students who are interested specifically in their research and 3. they don’t have time. </p>
<p>As you know, the UC system is a little wonky right now because of the budget crisis. If you got a fellowship despite this, consider yourself marked as one of those worth keeping.</p>
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<p>He should have a few publications in submission, at the very least. Most publishing occurs between the three and five year marks, when the tenure process begins. It takes a while to set up the research, get worthy results, write the papers, get them accepted. </p>
<p>The length of time from submission to acceptance depends on the journal.</p>
<p>My concern with the papers is that there have been 0 papers published since this prof has been an AP. Maybe the prof has lots of papers in submission and things just take a while to get rolling, but 0 papers published just doesn’t seem right after 3 years. I’m I misreading this about the lack of publications? Aren’t tenure track profs evaluated after three years usually?</p>
<p>Also, if the new Assistant Prof has had a post-doc vs didn’t have a post-doc, are the expectations the same? Will the dept cut the prof some slack if he didn’t have a post-doc and was straight out of a Ph.D. program? Will the dept expect more from the guy if he has had a post-doc?</p>
<p>3 years with no papers?? if you look at his CV, does you see anything is “under submission” or “under veview”? if not means he … failed</p>
<p>If he can manage to pull off a paper in Science or Nature can change everything… best thing you should do is just ask his other students what’s going on</p>
<p>I’d just like to offer a counter-argument to the negative stuff about assistant professors. My advisor is an assistant professor; he’s been at my top program for 3-4 years now, so he’s about halfway to the tenure review process. I think he’ll probably go up for tenure review around the time that I’m in the middle or nearing the end of my dissertation.</p>
<p>He’s an <em>excellent</em> advisor. Sure, he’s new and he’s still learning about managing people, but some people are naturally good at that - and besides, everyone has to learn somewhere (and having graduated and mentored graduate students is important for tenure review. I am his third student; by the time he goes up for tenure review he’ll have graduated two others and possibly me). I’m a pretty assertive person and I like to make my own way, so perhaps it’s just a matter of match that I’m working with an assistant professor who won’t have the time to check up on me extensively or mentor me more aggressively. I check in with him, we work on projects together, but I don’t need him to plan my classes or tell me how to do my assignments. We also just have a personality “click” and our research interests are very, very close - I’m working on an ideal project. And since he’s churning towards tenure, he’s helping me churn towards getting a good amount of publications (I’m working on two papers this year, once on which I’ll be first author) and grants.</p>
<p>But if you do have an assistant professor as your mentor it’s important to have other formal or informal mentors who have tenure. My secondary mentor in my other department is a full professor, and I have another more informal mentor who is an associate professor.</p>
<p>On another note, I’d advise against ‘confronting’ this professor about not getting back to you. In graduate school, most of the onus is on the student to forge connections. If there is money to be had and it involves contacting someone…that’s on you. It’s much better to apologize for the missed connection, and then discuss the possibility of working with him including funding in the future for when your fellowship runs out, if it will. Look forward instead of back, and ask questions that gauge his level of progress and commitment just like you would any other professor, tenured or not.</p>
<p>Oh, and having a post-doc or not doesn’t matter when going for tenure. On the tenure clock anything you published during the post-doc (according to many professors I’ve conversed with) doesn’t matter; a lot of professors who got post-docs actually hold some of their papers till the end and them submit them once they get a professor position so that they’ll count.</p>