<p>I was just wondering if it is hard to be successful in academia (obtain a tenure track position at a solid university/college) if you receive your doctorate from a lesser known program?</p>
<p>Do others in academia scoff at those who didn't go to respected universities? Can publications and other work/ research production offset this potential stigma?</p>
<p>Thank you for any insight!</p>
<p>A thing I’ve heard is that you can teach at a school equal to or less than the school your graduated from. Of course, if you’re really, really brilliant you could go anywhere. But an average MIT PhD would have a much easier time than an average PhD from an unknown place. The prestige of your advisor would also count for something.</p>
<p>Thanks for the reply. That certainly makes sense. I once worked with a professor who went to a top school for cognitive neuroscience and had a famous advisor. Despite this, this professor told me that they had trouble finding a tenure track job. This concerns me that someone with this great of a pedigree had trouble…</p>
<p>(though this prof ended up at an ivy)</p>
<p>in the end, what counts is research productivity. It really doesn’t matter where you came from. However, the top labs and top research programs are often the most effective in teaching these critical skills.</p>
<p>The quality of your research and your ability to present it are the most important; however, your network is also a factor. This begins with your program and your advisor, and it expands throughout your career. In a top program, you’re more likely to have worked with/know more than one influential researcher. But, of course, those connections are only your first ones, and the further you get from graduate school, the less they mean.</p>
<p>Cogneuro -> You should count on having a hard time securing a tenure-track position. You can come from the best lab, best department, and best school, and still get turned down many times. Getting tenure-track positions is very difficult, so don’t go into this thinking that getting a PhD from school X will land you that sweet job. Every field is competitive, some more than others, but in none is it at all easy to find a tenure-track position.</p>
<p>thank you all for the replies.</p>
<p>i’d really like to become a professor and do my own research but i constantly hear how difficult it is.</p>
<p>what other options are there for PhD’s in the sciences? I know industry is a one option but is this desirable at all? I am feeling like if I don’t find a nice professor job out of grad school i’ll be working somewhere that isn’t much fun. Why does anyone earn a PhD if the prospects are so grim? Is it really as bad as everyone says? Should I withdraw all my applications are apply for McDonalds?</p>
<p>Generally to be running labs in industry or to get the better jobs in national labs you need a PhD. The PhD lets you be the one designing experiments, while if you have just a BS you’ll likely be running experiments without a whole lot of room for intellectual creativity.</p>
<p>I think the main reason why a professorship is so coveted is that you can decide what sort of research you want to work on. If you’re tired of working on superconductors, you can switch to plasma physics. In industry you’ve got demands coming down from above, so while you get to lead the research, you’re going to have a fairly narrow scope of goals. In a government lab, you’ll usually have a broad goal to accomplish, and you get some leeway about how to look into it (though not as much as if you’re a professor).</p>
<p>Well, first off, you’re almost certainly going to be a postdoc for a bit after getting your PhD, whether in psychology or neuroscience. That’s anything from 2 to 5 or more years of working in someone else’s lab. You’ll generally get paid a little better than a graduate student, but you’ll have much less institutional support, probably less community, and will be expected to produce better work. </p>
<p>It does depend on the lab, but you’ll basically be doing “your” research as a postdoc. When you get your first professor job after the postdoc, you’ll almost certainly be starting off doing work pretty similar to your postdoc. Still, some labs and PI’s hire postdocs for a specific project, while other postdocs have more freedom to pursue what they want (within the overall goals of the lab). You basically postdoc until you land a faculty job. This is much like how humanities people often stay in grad school for long amounts of time as ABD: they keep improving and writing until they get their first job.</p>
<p>Why do people do it? If you’re in it for the money and job security, you picked the wrong field. Something like engineering or computer science would make you more money with a BS than you’ll be making with your PhD 6+ years later as a postdoc or even an assistant professor.</p>
<p>Thank you both for the replies.</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to come off as ignorant and superficial as I later realized my post was.
I do really enjoy cognitive neuroscience research and I would like to spend my life dedicated to research. I don’t care about money but I was just wondering what the job prospects are like. </p>
<p>I am just dreading that I’ll get my PhD and complete my post-doc but have no where to do the work I was trained in. Money and freedom of research topics are nice, but how likely am i to at least work somewhere related to my graduate training (and doing research in some capacity) at the start of my career? I am concerned that I would complete my training but due to no prospects I’d have to work at a job I could have got with a BS.</p>
<p>Well, it all depends on what your PhD is in. If you’re doing The Development of Agriculture in Poland from the Years 1200-1250, then you may have a difficult time finding a job relating to your exact topic. You can still use the skills you’ve built doing your research at whatever type of job you find.</p>
<p>If you’re doing work on, say, solar energy or aerospace, then I think you can come up with a few companies that would be interested in hiring you.</p>
<p>I’d be going for a cognitive neuroscience degree where I’m hoping to gain lots of neuroimaging training. Neuroimaging seems like its pretty useful… I hope :P</p>
<p>As a new faculty, you’re likely to be doing work very similar to what you did as a postdoc, but will more and more branch into new areas to distance yourself from your postdoc mentor. When you go from PhD to postdoc, you have a chance to switch tracks a little more. You won’t be able to do something completely unrelated, but you could, say, switch from memory research to more clinical, or keep at the same topic using new techniques (fMRI to electrophysiology or something).</p>
<p>Does your grad department really matter as much as people think?</p>
<p>Hm, okay. US News (and NRE) ranks my school’s AMath program as #2 in the nation. But many of the professors in that program have gotten PhDs from relatively weak schools. Many of them did their postdocs at places like Princeton though. So is postdoc sometimes used as a way of hopping from a non-prestigious grad school to an academic position at a more prestigious school?</p>
<p>Or put it this way: Which is more common: Grad student => Postdoc in better school, or postdoc => tenure-track in better school?</p>
<p>Another thing though: ratings CAN change a lot within 10-20 years, and some people joined the department when it wasn’t as prestigious.</p>
<p>The quality of your postdoctoral research is much more important than where you got your PhD when you are a postdoc applying for tenure-track jobs. However, to get into the best labs as a postdoc, you have to have done well in a good PhD program… and to get into that program, you had to do well in undergrad, etc. etc. Each step builds on the last, so they’re all important. But they’re important at different times in your career: no one is going to care about your undergrad after your PhD and postdoc when you’re applying for faculty jobs. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t important that you did well in undergrad.</p>
<p>Yea, Neuro is entirely correct.</p>
<p>That’s how all of life is: one cannot ride past successes for long.</p>
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<p>Good points. I think a good question to ask is this: how common is it for people to switch postdocs - and when they switch postdocs, how common is it for them to transfer from a “lower ranked” institution to a “higher ranked” institution?</p>
<p>I think your adviser and project and how you perform in the interview are all very important. When you get interviewed, the research you wish to pursue has to fit the goal of the growth of the department. Some very qualified candidates were turned down because what they wish to do research don’t not overlap with what the department wants. All of these factors are important. I think the fame of the school is important, of course, but less important than your adviser and project you do.</p>
<p>Ah, good response! I thought most physics PhD programs didn’t do interviews (and astrophysics ones definitely don’t). But what sorts of departments do interviews then?</p>