Please - some advice on choosing grad school!

Graduate School
1

Hi all,

I was hoping you can help me with some advice. I basically have two possibilities that I need to choose from 1) continue directly to a PhD at my lab at my undergraduate institution (McGill University) or 2) do like I’ve always wanted and apply to an Ivy League school (I am American).

A bit about me:
GPA - 3.86
GPA without first year - 3.96
Research experience - 2 years as lab tech, summer undergraduate research program at Albert Einstein Medical School, 1 year independent thesis course with no direct supervisor aside from the P.I. (no PhD student/postdoc telling me what to do).
Publications - 1 (probably insignificant) paper in my university’s undergraduate research journal, several projects that are publishable as first author in my laboratory…will take some time

I have almost no doubts that I will get into McGill’s PhD program. The pros are:

  1. I have a very interesting project that could lead to a number of good quality publications
  2. I am very friendly with the P.I. and post-docs - very good relationships. It is a small lab so I feel like I have a large role.
  3. The fact that I have spent a year already doing this research means that my PhD time will be shortened.
  4. McGill is generally considered a good school and my P.I. is rather famous in his field

Cons:

  1. Montreal is far from home (NYC). Far from family, friends, and girlfriend. (Also kinda cold)
  2. McGill is a foreign institution with lower prestige than the Ivy’s…no matter what Canadians like to believe. I do want to return to America to work when I am done.
  3. Low-budget, both as an entire institution and my lab itself.

Pros of Ivy League:

  1. As vain as it may be, it has always been my dream.
  2. Big-budget, famous labs that I am interested in (most of which are at the Broad Institute) would provide both good ideas and the means to employ them.
  3. A Harvard (for example) PhD is a stamp of approval on your resume, even if you didn’t publish anything too great. It offers connections and earns respect, which may lead to good employment opportunities.
  4. It may be more exciting to work with many accomplished individuals.

The cons of going to Ivy League:

  1. I may not get in
  2. I would have to take a year off, study and take the GRE
  3. I would be starting a new project, which may or may not be as good as my current one, and have to learn the procedures of a new lab…basically starting from scratch.
  4. A large powerful lab may mean that my time with the PI will likely be much more limited, and my individual success may not be so important.
  5. It will probably be more stressful.

It seems to me like Ivy League, for me, is more of a gamble. Any opinions???
Is there more value in perhaps doing a PhD here but a postdoc at an Ivy? What is valued more by employers?

Thank you everyone! :slight_smile:
I really appreciate it.

2

well, first you need a GRE score. And no, you do not need to take time off. You can develop a study plan for evenings and weekends. The math is not much more than high school level, so that should come quickly. Vocab is a little more work.

Nothing wrong with applying to US grad schools, but the Ivy League is not the end-all, be-all. There maybe a better match in your field at another top private (NYU?) or even public, such as Michigan and Berkeley.

When you mention “employers” are you thinking of industry or academia. The former doesn’t much care for PhD’s, while the latter is prestige-driven.

btw: if the only reason that you are applying to the H et al is for prestige, you are wasting your time and money, since they’ll smell that a mile away.

3

It can’t hurt to apply but if you are graduating this year then you will have to wait a year since applications deadlines have already passed. However, consider that your research career is primarily affected by who you do your Ph.D. with instead of the the school you are graduating from. If your current advisor is highly regarded then getting your Ph.D. form McGill will be perfectly fine (McGill is a very good university after all).

4

@bluebayou I do not need the GRE for McGill, and I am graduating. Thus I will need to take a year off (it is too late to study and take the GRE for admission this fall).

5

@xraymancs McGill’s deadline is March 15th. I have time.

What would you say is more important then…high quality publications (first author, good impact factor) with a less acclaimed advisor or worse publications with a more reputable advisor? In other words…what is more important…advisor or publications?

6

A good advisor will have a good publication record. That is what makes a good advisor. For example, my university, Illinois Tech is not ever ranked at the level of Harvard or even McGill but my students have always found excellent postdoctoral positions or industry jobs. One of my former students is even a named Chair at Oxford. Of course, Harvard faculty are quite good and you can do well after having a Ph.D. from there but you can do equally well from other schools if the advisor is top notch.

7

This is the wrong question, and likely an irrelevant one. A reputable advisor publishes a lot and will help you get good publications. You already have a project at McGill, so you may get publications a bit earlier if you stay put, but if you go to Harvard or Yale and you know you want publications you can get them.

It’s unclear which field you are in, and that would help a lot. In my field, McGill is a very good program - top, really. One of the postdocs in my Ivy League psychology lab was a a McGill PhD alumna and she’s now teaching at a good small private university in New York. I also know that McGill is rated as an excellent research university in a lot of other areas. You’re thinking about prestige in an undergraduate’s sense of the term; get rid of that notion. Prestige and reputation is very different in the graduate world, and it’s a bit more international than the undergraduate sense, and in that world McGill is excellent in a lot of fields.

I’m not being mean or anything when I say this, but attending an Ivy League school specifically is an odd goal. The Ivy League is an athletic conference - one made up of academically superior schools, no doubt, but in many fields Ivy League schools aren’t always in the top. In my field, all the Ivies that have great departments but there are some other private and public universities that have much better departments than some Ivies. In fact, even my Ivy psychology department - despite being top 15 - is bested by private schools like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and public schools like Michigan and Wisconsin.

Your goal should be to go to a top department in the field that will help you reach your career goals, whatever those are (sounds like it might be academia). That department might be an Ivy League department, or it might be at a different private school, or it might be at a public school.

My opinion is that your choice should not be constrained by location or time to degree if we’re talking about a difference of a few months to a year. This is especially true if you are going into academia. The choice should be determined by

  1. What is the BEST department for me in terms of the kind of research I want to do?
  2. What department is going to help me achieve the career goals I have set for myself?

You’ve already started a research project at McGill - but is it the kind of research you want to continue doing during your PhD? Do you want to change gears a little bit? Or maybe completely? You need to find the advisors that are doing the work you want to do and getting published and known for that work, and who have full excellent programs of research going on in those areas. Who has the funding? (Check out NIH RePORTER for American programs. NSF likely has a similar tool.) Who is publishing? Who is giving the keynotes at conferences? Who’s students and postdocs are speaking and organizing symposia and such?

That place could be McGill. Already having a place in the lab, some level of independence and an interesting project that can lead to publications should not be underestimated. And you say that your PI is famous, which is always a good thing. But that place could be somewhere else, too. (And a larger network is never a bad thing.)

Secondly, and equally importantly, do people from that department get jobs? You can have a conversation with your PI about where his graduate students and postdocs end up after working with him career-wise. Are those places like where you’d want to end up (or better)? Do the reverse, too. Look up the institutions of people who have the jobs that you want. Where did they get their PhDs? Who did they work for, if you can figure that out? Lots of faculty put their CVs online on their personal website or the school’s.

You’re not wrong about the prestigious name giving you a stamp of approval on your CV; it totally does. But it doesn’t have to be Ivy. In my field, Stanford or Michigan or Wisconsin means about as much as a Harvard or Yale or Columbia name. It needs to be a TOP department in your field and athletic conference is more or less irrelevant to that.

Anyway, I think the solution to this problem is a relatively simple one. It sounds like you are almost assured admission at your current department. That’s not going to change in a year. So take a year off, and apply to start in fall 2017 - to both McGill and to some other dream departments. You’ll almost certainly be accepted to McGill, and then you can make your choice having all of the options in front of you. I wouldn’t rush and try to go now just because you can; this is a decision that needs to be made with as much information, care, and time as possible.

8

@juillet Wow thanks for taking the time to write all that.

First of all, my field is life sciences - molecular biology/biotechnology/oncology/pharmacology etc. (there are many names attributable to my work)

Regarding the advisor reputation vs. publications - the advisor I speak of has had success in the past (several Nature papers) and he is famous in his field…but his broad reputation is questionable. When I think of fame, I think of Feng Zhang at Harvard/MIT, who publishes many dozens of Nature/Science/Cell (the big 3) publications every year.

And to be clear, I am thinking of specific departments. I just did not want to be specific. And yes, other universities than Ivy League are equally as important to me…mainly Stanford, MIT, and the UCs. Though I must admit that “stamp of approval” is important to me, a good publication record and a good supervisor are also key…and I have looked into many departments because their names appear in the articles I read. In any case, the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT (as well as several specific departments) and other departments as schools like UPenn and Stanford ARE the best in the field…I do not think of it as an athletic conference. The location and time to degree are not major factors, but they are factors.

I have very broad interests in the topics I mentioned before. The most important factor for me is the reach of my research. That is to say, I do not want to be stuck in a niche, researching just how Protein X works. I want to do something has implications in many different areas. I have that at McGill. I do not know what I will have elsewhere.

9

Nothing wrong with a year of additional research experience. But just know that for Harvard and their ilk, you need to ace the GRE. For bioscience-related field, that means 165+ on the Quant portion (which is only 90%, and not much lower for the V.

10

Regarding the advisor reputation vs. publications - the advisor I speak of has had success in the past (several Nature papers) and he is famous in his field…but his broad reputation is questionable. When I think of fame, I think of Feng Zhang at Harvard/MIT, who publishes many dozens of Nature/Science/Cell (the big 3) publications every year.

It took me a while to figure out what you meant. Your advisor doesn’t need to have broad recognition across many fields, unless you think you might want to do interdisciplinary work or switch fields or something. He or she just needs to be reputable within his field. Of course more famous can be better, as long as the advisor is famous for the right things. But that’s not the most important part. Also important is whether you can form a working relationship with the person and whether they are willing and able to shepherd you towards the publications and other work you need to do to get your own job.

11

Seems like prestige does matter - http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005

12

Yes, prestige matters a whole lot in academia.

But again, that’s prestige within field. Note that the first figure includes Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and Washington alongside Ivy departments for reputation in computer science. And the supplemental materials also indicate that UIUC, UCLA, UT-Austin, Wisconsin, NYU, Toronto and Rochester do well in the prestige/reputation department for computer science.