Badger123

I am going to a STEM PhD program this fall. When is a good time to contact professors about joining their group? I am considering doing it early because it seems a lot of people are interested in the same professors that I am, but don't want to email too early and not receive a response.

I know this is late, but I would actually suggest that if he continues to push after you say you need more time, you should turn him down. There is a reason that most graduate schools agree to not force applicants to make a decision before April 15th. In this case, if he pushes you to make a hasty decision, he likely does not have your best interests in mind. Any professor or advisor I know would totally respect wanting to receive a funded offer. It looks like you are in industrial engineering and statistics? I don't know about statistics, but for engineering my professors always tell me that one should never have to pay for graduate school; I would imagine similar may be true for stats. That said, if this advisor is being pushy for you to make a major life decision, forgoing all other outcomes well before you should have to make a decision, imagine working with that individual over the next year. or two years. or the next five years if you end up doing a full PhD with him. It sounds like he would not really care how things affect you if it meant helping his career. Maybe I am extrapolating too much, but I would not want to work with the person. Edit: that said, you should definitely ask for more time. if he agrees to give more time, I wouldn't consider it an issue.

So when invited to attend open houses for PhD programs, what is the etiquette on bringing one's significant other? My girlfriend and I plan to go together wherever I end up accepting admission to, so it would be good for her to be able to check the places out too. Would it be unprofessional to bring her with to the open house? I assume that we would have to cover the travel cost without reimbursement, which is fine.

I gave general ideas of what I was interested in for research in my intro paragraph, and tried to tie my past work/research experience into what I was interested in. I didn't want to go too narrow in the SOP because then I might look like no PI would be a good fit for me, even if my interests match very closely with my own interests. My situation is a little different since my past experience generally had to do with what I want to do a PhD in. So, in my intro paragraph, I had a sentence like "I am very interested in (A), with especially high interest in (B) and (C)" where (B) and (C) are somewhat narrower subsets of the broad category (A). That is as much I chose to speak on saying exactly what I wanted to do, and mostly let the rest of my SOP tie into that sentence. Somewhere in the essay I also stated the professors I am interested in working with, tieing them again into the broad interest statement.

I have been just doing broad-brush searches on sites like Indeed. I have occasionally looked at individual sites, but not in great detail. Thank you for that tip, I will try being more precise with my searches.

First time posting here, and am considering getting a PhD in chemical engineering. I understand that getting a PhD lowers the number of positions that one can be considered for in the job market, but that getting a PhD allows one to specialize in a certain area. I was just doing job hunt keyword searches for positions matching my desired specialization, and it did not look like many jobs were available, despite my specialization being a pretty broad topic. I am curious how one typically gets a job in industry after earning a PhD? Is it usually the same as after getting a bachelor's? Or does one rely more heavily on networking to get jobs in their specialization?