<p>The blog post is about Physics Ph.Ds, but even when I look at CS departments, I see that people who obtained their Ph.D's from the top 5-10 ranked institutions dominate most of the faculty positions in the top 20-30 universities (probably where all the good research happens). Even when you look elsewhere - conferences, media articles, documentaries - all the names you see are from a few top universities.</p>
<p>Your right about pedigree opening up a lot of options for where you can find positions, however, your postdoc pedigree will matter a lot more than your grad school one. In searching through the individuals that are on faculty at to 20-30 schools, did you happen to notice that they postdocced at top places?</p>
<p>Realistically, everything matters when you’re talking about a career path like academic research that’s so incredibly selective. You have to be outstanding to get a faculty position in a good program, and in order to get that position, you have to demonstrate outstanding work from a postdoc. In order to get that postdoc in the first place, you have to do great work as a graduate student. In order to get into graduate school in the first place, you have to do great work as an undergrad. Everything builds on everything else.</p>
<p>I don’t think that means you have to work under the top person in your field as a graduate student or as a postdoc in order to get a faculty position. But having those kinds of resources as your disposal does make it easier to show that you’re outstanding enough to make the cut.</p>
<p>PhD pettigree does matter. During school, the program reputation (and to a much lesser extent, univeristy reputation) influence research funding and faculty salary - which in turn influence the caliber of faculty hired. After school, the reputation of your university will influence those outside your field, the reputation of the department will influence those in your field, and the reputation of your advisor will influence those in your subfield.</p>
<p>I think what most people are trying to say on this forum is that reputation matters less than fit. All of that reputation is not going to help if you are studying your 3rd choice subfield with a professor who doesn’t really work with others. The rep is not going to help you if funding and opportunity is steered to the top 3 students when you are going to be top 10. All that rep is not going to help you if you spend 6 years of your life toiling towards a thesis that you were not that happy with at the onset, and now just want to get away from.</p>
<p>Pedigree matters. It does. If you find yourself happy at 2 different schools, go for the one with the better rep. But don’t go for Harvard just because it is Harvard.</p>
<p>Case in point - my wife is interested in historical archaeology. Harvard was at one point a possibility she was considering, but they are only strong in classical archaeology. To get the Harvard name she would have had to given up her passion - and what is the value in that?</p>
<p>On the post-doc thing - not all fields do post-docs as a matter of course. One engineering prof I talked to indicated that US citizens never do post-docs, just foreign nationals.</p>
<p>This is true. To gauge what the top programs were, I merely had to look at where my Professors at my undergrad went for grad school. For structural engineering, the usual suspects of UIllinois, UTexas, Cornell, Princeton, abd Berkeley were common.</p>
<p>If you weren’t in a top 25 university, wouldn’t it be in your best interest to go to a school for your PhD that is on the upswing? Maybe a school that is beginning to devote more resources to research and attracting quality faculty…
It seems that you would be able to make more of an impact, personally, than if you were in a program that was ranked high and established.</p>
Placement and pedigree are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, I wouldn’t even say that placement and academic quality are the same. In my field, Johns Hopkins easily has the best placement, whereas Penn has poor placement because certain professors in the department are known to be obstructive to young scholars.</p>
You might be able to. Then again, the school’s push to develop the department could fail. A similar logic exists when deciding which advisor to choose: do you choose to be the first graduate student of the rising star who could be great or who could fail miserably, or do you choose to be one in a long line of graduate students who worked with the already-established head honcho?</p>
<p>All of this is a numbers game, and you’re absolutely free to choose high-risk, high-reward situations. Just be honest with yourself about the risk involved.</p>