juilletmercredi

Edit: I'm not quite sure how, but the post I meant for a completely different thread ended up in here - so I'm editing it to remove that!

I sure hope nobody is out there judging me on the basis of my acknowledgements section, the least important part of the 130-page research document I spent 2 years of my life on. If a non-academic employer manages to find my dissertation through a Google search (unlikely), has access to ProQuest to read it (unlikely), actually decides to read the acknowledgements instead of, you know, the actual science (unlikely), and decides not to hire me because I thanked my husband for telling me funny jokes and because I called a grad school colleague my "partner-in-crime", then dear God, I didn't want to work for them anyway. The day that employers start using acknowledgements sections of dissertations as another tool in dissecting employment profiles is the day I build a cabin in the woods and go off the grid. Also, I have no idea how your Facebook correlation makes sense...wouldn't you be less likely to write a goofy acknowledgements section if you knew that anyone in the world could search your thesis? One of my committee members, who received his PhD in 1993, wrote a 2.5 page acknowledgements section that included an extended narrative about a friend of his who died from a serious illness (that almost made me cry reading it). My sponsor, who received his PhD in 2004, wrote a 2.5 page acknowledgment in which he spent a page thanking his immediate family in great (and really sweet) detail. Another committee member, who also received her PhD in 2004, has a two-page acknowledgment section that cryptically references some hijinks. The committee member who graduated the latest - in 2010 - was the one with the shortest acknowledgements; they were half a page, and exclusively acknowledged funding sources, his committee, and collaborators. My own acknowledgements, written in 2014, were a page and a half and primarily acknowledged my funding, my committee, and my lab members. I spent two sentences thanking my mom and my husband. I gave a bound copy to my mom as a gift and it made her cry, so, that was a good outcome for me. (And yes, I was a super stalker and tracked down all of my committee members' dissertations while I was writing. The only one I can't get is actually my chair, who completed his dissertation in 1987 - it's on ProQuest but not full-text.) Well, first of all, it's totally a matter of personal taste. You don't like them and other people think they are fine. That's personal. But secondly, that actually very well may be. The acknowledgements are generally not included as part of the back-and-forth of drafting and editing and revisions. The acknowledgements were the last thing I wrote before I submitted my dissertation to the graduate school, and I think I spent about 10 minutes on them. Seriously, though, I can't imagine anyone (employers, future collaborators, T&P committees, etc.) caring about this. I liked reading people's acknowledgments. The dissertation can be an isolating process and people tend to conceive of academics as these stuffy, constantly serious people. It's nice to remember that we have lives and passions and people that we love - and yes, senses of humor - that exist separately from our science. Writing a few goofy lines about beer and hijinks doesn't diminish the science that they did, and I'd wonder about someone who questioned the value of the work of a person - let alone an entire department - based on a few lines from their acknowledgments section that are clearly meant to be humorous and personal rather than the actual dissertation and, more importantly, the book/articles/conference presentations that emerged. On a positive note, I'm glad I'm not the only crazy doctoral student who read other people's acknowledgements for laughs while trying to phinish.

I was afraid of this too because I had heard horror stories of students going through endless rounds with the dissertation office, fixing minor formatting issues and page numbers, but it turned out to not be an issue. My dissertation was accepted like a day or two after I submitted it. If you follow the formatting instructions that the graduate school provides, you should be fine. If your school doesn't provide formatting instructions then they probably won't care. (And even if they do, these things are usually very minor that are easy to change - margins, font size, page numbers - so I can't imagine abandoning the submission of my thesis because the graduate school wants me to fix some formatting stuff, unless there were more substantial problems that we're not hearing about). I don't remember how long the revisions to my master's essay took, but the minor revisions to my 130-page dissertation took me a month. However, I had also already started my postdoc and was working on some other projects at the time.

It's definitely school dependent - it's funny that each of the foregoing posters had different definitions and I have yet another. At my school, graduate assistants had other responsibilities. Teaching assistants taught; research assistants did research. Graduate assistants often had administrative or other supportive responsibilities in other areas of the university. For example, there was a GA in the office of fraternity and sorority life (usually from our higher ed administration program); there was a GA who worked in the office of diversity; there were GAs who worked in residential life, etc.

Whether or not you're considered an employee depends on your classification and what you are doing that semester. Sometimes TAs and RAs are hired by the university and sometimes they are not. But also there are doctoral students who are neither. I was only formally hired by the university for the first 2 years of grad school; after that, I was on fellowship, so I was not an employee. That's kind of a moot point, though. Every PI - regardless of whether you are an employee or not - has expectations for the student. I also wasn't trying to imply that there's not a power differential - there certainly is. That doesn't mean that you're not collaborators coming to mutual agreement, as TakeruK framed it. I was in the social sciences, but my social science functioned like a laboratory science (with lab spaces and laboratory groups of students, equipment, experiments that needed to be run by a physically present person...) In my first two years, I had an employment contract and a salary, with technically specified vacation time and required work hours per week (although in my case it was not arranged between me and the grad student - I was employed by the department and the university. If you are an employed GRA, it is likely with the input of the department and university, unless your PI has set up an LLC or something). Ultimately it's really going to depend on the working style of the PI and the student. Some PIs have very stringent hourly requirements and require students to approve time off before leaving; the student can choose to work under those conditions or work with a different PI. And other PIs have a more flexible way of working; the student, again, can choose to stay in the lab or leave to work with someone else. Also, minor note...the NLRB ruling applies to grad student employees regardless of whether they form their own independent ruling or whether they organize under the UAW union. The university doesn't have to bargain with the grad students if the NLRB rules that they're not employees, regardless of whether they are under the powerful UAW or a less powerful independent group. The NYU grad students were organized under the UAW and petitioned the UAW in 2010 to overturn the 2004 decision that denied Brown et al the right to collective bargaining; it didn't stop the university from winning that case. (The university now bargains with the NYU grad workers/UAW "voluntarily".) And on the flip side, the grad student union at Columbia organized under the UAW, had a card drive, and voted to unionize; Columbia simply refused to recognize them. Affiliation with the UAW doesn't protect students from not being recognized. (I was minimally involved with the union organization at Columbia when I was there.) The UC students are more successful because they are public university students, and there was an older ruling that said that public university students could unionize. That's why the vast majority of successful grad employee unions are at public universities.

I also take a break. Sometimes you have to lean into the slump and just wait for it to get over. Freewriting by hand doesn't work for me because I write incredibly slowly by hand, but I do often just clear my mind and allow myself to write whatever relevant nonsense comes to head. A zero draft, if you will. A lot of times the "block" comes from insecurity and perfectionism about our work. It's hard to let go, but you're more productive without it. You do have to go back and edit, but it's better than having blank pages for weeks on end! I wrote a lot of the dissertation this way, especially the last part. I was actually surprised at how much sense my discussion made because I felt like I was half-sleep through most of it and half-drunk through the rest

I wouldn't mind not receiving a thank you but most of the students I corresponded with did send me a thank you note, and it was always appreciated. It doesn't matter whether you wait until April 15; they're busy too and whenever it comes it will be appreciated. It won't piss them off to say you went somewhere else.

All of what TakeruK says is true but #3 and #4 were RealTalk for my experience. I have first cousins who are older than my graduate advisor, lol. We had a more personal/friendly connection that has persisted after I've graduated - we still collaborate on projects together, and I can talk to him from a place of comfort and collegiality. My more senior mentor, though excellent, got his PhD before I was born and I don't think we'll ever shake the Obi-Wan/Luke dynamic. Recently Formerly Junior Mentor has also been dishing out some really timely job market advice.

I want to add to TakeruK's point on two levels, because I think this is important. I agree that name alone won't get you an academic job, but the short of it is that academia is a very prestige-focused field and the university and department at which you studied DOES mean a lot. One, it matters directly. There was recently an article in Science Advances (that the academic community is buzzing about) that showed that the faculty at top research universities almost exclusively got their PhDs at other top research universities. Even within field, if you look at the professors at the best departments, you will note that they all got their PhDs from the same places. I once did this exercise in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT for someone with the same question, and noted that the CS&EE faculty at MIT mostly came from four programs: MIT, Stanford, and two others that I can't remember but were definitely top 10 programs in CS/EE. And there are a LOT of professors in that department. IN my own top 15 department,with two notable exceptions, all of the faculty got their PhDs at other top 20 departments. I was curious, so I checked the notable exceptions. One did three postdocs at successively more prestigious places; his third one was in my department. And he had tons of publications. The other one, I realized, got her PhD in a cognate field (e.g. neuroscience instead of psychology) and her PhD program was top 20 in that field. And she still did two postdocs for a total of 6 years. The point is, professors do pay attention to this. Where you go, and who you worked with, has a prestige impact upon hiring. Top schools will only hire from other top schools unless you spend a lot of time and effort working your way up; the "great scientist who teaches at an Ivy League but didn't even get a PhD from a top 100 school" is a rare bird. And even schools that aren't ranked "top" still like to say that the have professors in their departments from top departments/universities. I'm not saying it's right or good, but it is. Second of all, though, it matters indirectly. Well-reputed schools are well-reputed, in part, because they have professors doing high volumes of research, who win large amounts of grant money, and who have lots of resources in their department to facilitate that kind of research. I'm not talking about prestige in terms of street prestige, like Ivy League or somesuch, but legitimate research cred - I'm at a public university as a postdoc without prestigious street cred but that has positively tons of money and data for me to analyze and write papers on, and professors who are successful enough in their careers that they don't care (and, in fact, encourage) me to take their data and publish first-authored papers with it. So, yes, you can get an academic job from a mid-ranked or lower university...but your prospects are better coming from a top-ranked department, and a department that has a reputation and track record of placing students in good academic jobs (whatever "good" means to you). I just want to add the disclaimer that I'm not saying that this is how it should be - but for better or for worse this is how the academic environment has evolved.

I also want to chime in with a somewhat opposing view. It depends entirely on what the amount of the assumed debt is and what the starting salary, and the salary until mid-career (10-20 years) is likely to be for the career in question. I'm a bit unclear on the total amount that you are being offered (whether it's $16,000 towards tuition + $7,000 in stipend, or whether it's a total of $16,000 including $7,000 for stipend support). But let's say that the tuition is $56,000 at Syracuse and they're giving you $16,000 for the first year + $8,000 for year two (if you continue in the GA) = $24,000 in tuition support, which brings the total cost of tuition at the Syracuse program down to $32,000. Then with a $7,000 stipend in the first year, let's say that you only borrow $13,000 for living expenses for the first year and maybe half that - so $7,000 - for the next 6 months. $32,000 + $20,000 = $52,000 in debt for the entire program at Syracuse. That's about $600/month in student loan debt over the 10 year standard repayment plan, or $396/month over 20 years. Assuming no undergrad debt, you can reasonably expect to make $50K in your first year with a master's degree in international affairs. Even if you have a small amount of undergrad debt (<$30,000) you can probably manage an $80K debt load. American didn't even offer you enough loans to attend the program, but with Graduate PLUS loans you can probably secure the entire cost of attendance. So let's say that you borrow $62,000 for tuition + $50,000 for living expenses over the next 2 years = that's $112,000 in debt. That's over twice the cost of Syracuse's program, and is about $1288/month in loan payments over 10 years, or $850 a month over 20 years. Do you think that an IR degree at American will make you twice the salary you could've made had you gone to Syracuse? Or, phrased another way, do you think Syracuse graduates are making half as much as American graduates their first 10-20 years of their career? I highly doubt it! Even if there is a salary differential, it's unlikely to make up for the extra $500-600 a month you'll be paying in student loans after American. If you have to stretch out the loan payment over 20 years, the difference becomes even more pronounced - with standard interest, that Syracuse degree will cost you $95,000, whereas that American degree will cost you a whopping $205,000. If a program is a top 20 program, I am assuming that students are getting jobs out of it. Syracuse has employment statistics for the MAIR program online; anywhere from 20-25% of their students work in the federal government after college (2008-2012 data; 74% response rate). Maxwell says that they get 4-5 speakers per month that come to recruit and give career and information sessions with students; they have 500 organizational contacts that post 50 jobs a month. I think that if you go to Syracuse you'll have plenty of opportunities. First of all, not everyone who currently works in DC went to college or graduate school in DC. Second of all, there are summer internships. And third of all, not all international jobs are located in DC - there are international organizations scattered across large cities in the U.S. AND located outside of the U.S. In general, I think if one is making a choice between a funded offer and an unfunded one (for a master's degree*), one should calculate in projected future earnings based on realistic assessments of salaries in the field, what the cost differential is likely to be, and whether or not the other program is worth the additional cost. There are some low-tier or unranked programs that are unlikely to lead to employment post-graduation, so even if they throw lots of money at you it's not a good idea to go and might actually be worth paying full price somewhere else (especially in high-paying but very prestige-focused careers, like law or business). But when you're comparing a very good to great program with another good, just higher ranked program, where employment outcomes are relatively similar? I don't think it usually makes sense to go with the unfunded offer in that case.

I don't think there is a "typical" graduate student. There are many graduate students with families and/or who don't drink or like to socialize at bars. Personally, although I do drink, I loathe bars. They're loud and obnoxious, the drinks are expensive, and it's difficult to have a meaningful conversation when you're shouting over loud music and other people. Besides, that stuff about alcohol metabolism is real talk - these days if I have more than about 3 drinks I'm going to feel awful in the morning, so there's no more getting blasted at bars for me, lol. There was a guy in my program who didn't drink, and everyone knew he didn't, but he was still popular and invited out to things. When we had our monthly grad teas (which were basically us drinking alcohol and eating) someone always made sure to get a bottle of Coke for him because that's what he would drink instead. At a sufficiently diverse, progressive university, your religion, your headscarf, and the fact that you don't date shouldn't make a lick of difference when making friends. I went to a really diverse university and had friends from lots of cultural and religious backgrounds, and it was super awesome. A few of my friends covered with headscarves and it just...wasn't a thing that mattered to anyone. One thing you can do is be proactive and invite people to do stuff other than drink. So, for example, let's say that you're in the social area where grads gather and everyone's chatting and it's getting close to 5. You can pipe up and say "Hey, does anyone want to go get dinner?" Or you can ask folks if they want to see a movie, go bowling, or do something else over the weekends. If people ask you out to bars, you can say something simple like "No thanks, I don't really go to bars because of religious reasons." If you have considerate people in your social circle, a few times doing this might alert them to choose other kinds of social events (I'm the kind of person who would say "Wait, though, remember that Sarah doesn't go to bars - let's do something else.") Personally, I would be eternally grateful to the person who proposed alternative events besides bars because I dislike them* so much, and would much prefer playing board games or just chatting quietly at someone's apartment or a cafe or something to...bars. *New York bars, actually, are the worst. In my small college town I don't mind the bars, but they aren't as loud and crowded.

Okay, so sometimes you can get your jury duty postponed because you are a student. I lived in New York for grad school; some of my friends were successful and others were not. (I myself did serve jury duty - two days after I defended my proposal - but that consisted of waiting around the courthouse for 3 hours and then getting dismissed because there were no cases.) But the other alternative is to work with your department/class instead of the government. Trying to get things done quickly with the government is often like trying to run through molasses. But this could be resolved quickly by simply talking to your professor, explaining that you got called for jury duty this week and although you are trying to postpone it, you've already been denied. Then simply ask if you can take the midterm later. Most graduate programs are pretty flexible with this kind of stuff. (I once missed an exam because I overslept, and was allowed to retake.)

You might have been informally considered a graduate research assistant in your program. But were you formally hired by the university as a GRA and your position terminated because of performance issues? All PhDs do research during their programs but not all PhDs are actually hired as formal employees of the university on GRAs. Even then, I still think it's a grey area. Your employment as a GRA is contingent upon your student status. You could be performing fine at your job and still be terminated simply because you left the program; that's not really the same as getting fired from a formal job because of your performance. The important question is - if you list your PI as your supervisor, what would he say?

If your friend has already been rejected for institutional aid at Columbia and most of the external fellowships she's applied for...then no, there really aren't any other alternative nonrepayable aid options. Most people pay for journalism school through student loans. I have a friend who went to the J school and his financial aid was primarily, if not solely, loans. If she already has large loans from a prior MA and doesn't foresee making crazy money sufficient to repay the $120K she'd probably borrow at Columbia plus whatever she already has (which, with a journalism degree and a Shakespeare degree, I don't see happening)...then she should turn it down.

I'm a psychologist (although not in clinical or counseling, but I am familiar with the fields) and the answer is YES, many clinical and counseling programs do offer more funding. The best programs offer full tuition coverage, health insurance, and livable stipends in the $20-30K range. With that said I would totally reject an offer based upon funding, and I would definitely reject that offer. $7K is not enough to live on, and neither is $15K - and that's not even accounting for the fact that you will have to borrow money to cover tuition for 5-6 years. There's no reason to go into serious debt for a PhD. So I would turn them down, and try again next year. When you apply next year, do some deeper investigation into the funding mechanisms of these programs. There's more variability in clinical/counseling; some lower-tier programs offer virtually no funding at all, and some mid-ranked programs offer some but inadequate funding. Because of this, most programs in clinical/counseling offer some information about their typical funding structure on their websites. Even if they don't, you can write the departmental secretary and ask how students in the program are typically funded. What you want to hear is that every student receives a full five-year funding package with tuition coverage, health insurance, and a stipend of at least around $20K. I wouldn't attend any psych PhD program that didn't offer this at the very least.

I posted about this in a different thread more extensively, but I worked with an untenured assistant professor who was beginning his 3rd year when I started the program. He got tenure the same year that I defended and finished (tenure process at Grad University is long). Even if he had been denied tenure, I would've been finished before he left, so it wouldn't have impacted me. That said, what you can do is form relationships and collaborations with more senior, established people in your department (even if their research interests are only tangential to yours - you'll be surprised at how much they evolve over time). This will not only help you finish in the even that your advisor leaves, but can also help you with the network you need when on the job market. But TakeruK is right - if this is an elite institution, your untenured POI might already be well-known in the field even as a junior person and will just continue to build relationships and a reputation.

I offer a general yes, although it really depends on the field. The number of programs in a field is going to impact this a lot. For example, one of my fields (public health) is relatively small with a small number of PhD programs, so top 15 programs are definitely perceived in a different light than the 16-25 programs. But my other field, psychology, is very large with a lot of PhD programs in many different subfields. There's not huge perceptional differences between the top 20 programs, I would say - a top 25 program graduate with publications and an otherwise outstanding package would have good prospects on the market. I mean, yes, there's definitely a prestige premium for Stanford and Michigan and Princeton (top 10), but I have seen grads from Duke, Ohio State, Penn State, Indiana and NYU (20-30) teaching at great schools as well. The other factor is going to be how tight the market is in your field. I've read in areas that English literature is such an impacted field that even graduates from the top 10-15 programs sometimes have trouble finding good positions, which means that people from outside the top 25 really have trouble entering academia at all. But I've also read that economics PhDs even from top 50 programs are getting good jobs, because economics is such a lucrative field that many PhDs leave for industry and so the academic job market is not as tight. And right now, several top research universities have standing open ads for nursing professors. I mean that they basically have a permanent advertisement on their website saying that they need nursing professors, and by "top" I mean place like Penn and Emory - because there is such a shortage of faculty in that field. It also totally depends on what YOU want to do. It's definitely true that prestigious departments tend to hire only from other prestigious departments - that's true across most fields (there was just a minor academic kerfluffle about a Science Advances paper that showed just that). If your goal is to be a famous sociologist doing cutting-edge scholarship at a top university - training the best doctoral students, teaching a few graduate seminars per year, organizing speaker series and colloquia of top sociologists, and maybe only occasionally teaching undergraduates - that #10 Ivy is probably going to be better at getting you towards that goal (although going to a top 20 school won't necessarily prevent you from doing it - it'll just be harder). But if your goal is simply a good academic job - and non-elite departments, teaching colleges and regional comprehensives are also on the menu - a top 20 school will work just fine for that.

If you want to go into academia but very few NEU graduates go into academia, I would say that's a red flag. I think I would ask more questions before turning them down - you're in a field where industry pay is a lot more and it's quite common for PhDs to enter industry. So are NEU PhD grads not going into academia because more of them prefer industry jobs - but they could get academic jobs if they wanted? Or are they going into industry because they can't get academic jobs? Ask some advisors in the department. But if you aren't enthusiastic about the program and you have reservations about what it can do for you professionally, it would be better to wait and apply more broadly next year.

I would mention it briefly, but only if you were also going to contact them with other, more substantial feedback. I wouldn't say anything about them being the only school who did it or that this is "not how schools operate" - keep it personal and how it affected YOU and your decision making. I would more say something about how the weekly contact felt overwhelming, that you felt pushed to make a decision way too early, but that the contact was too general and impersonal to really contribute positively to your outlook on the program. Keep it focused on your feelings and thoughts (and not objective statements about what other schools do or don't do) and how it affected your perceptions of the program and university.

I would reconsider, and potentially rescind acceptance. If your PhD program belongs to the Council of Graduate Schools, then you can change your mind until April 15. You said that your funding after around year 3 is uncertain, and it sounds like your advisor gave you only a vague indication of what might happen then - that he will "try his best" to fund you after candidacy IF he gets grants. Right now, grant funding rates are at historic lows. And what does "try his best" mean? Does it really mean that he will try his best or does that just mean if it's easy for him and he doesn't have other things he'd rather do with the money, he'd fund you? So ask some questions - how often do students who start get enough funding to finish? What sources do they get it from? What resources are there at the university to help you seek external funding to finish? FWIW I went to a program with only 3 years of guaranteed funding and found enough external funding to finish the program. However, I had also made the deal with myself that if I didn't find post-candidacy funding, I would leave with an MA.

To me, the goal of graduate school is to get gainful employment in the field/role you want to be in making the kind of money you want to make, or working up to it. It sounds like you love your organization and are excited about this job; and you are making crazy money (we're the same age; $85K is pretty crazy money for someone under 30) with the potential to make even crazier money. Graduate school is always going to be there, and if you got into the master's programs at these places this year you will probably also get in in subsequent years - perhaps when you're more ready to go back, or when you have decided that you are tired of your industry and want to move back into international development. People are also bad at forecasting how they will feel about things in the future. I'm not sure that you will necessarily live a lifetime of regret and unfulfilled dreams if you don't go to grad school right now. First of all, not going now doesn't mean that you won't ever go. Second of all, I feel like most people can be happy in a variety of roles and positions - so even in the event that you never move back into ID, if you are happy with your role and industry at that point in time (and your salary!), who really cares?

Well, the first question would be would you rather work on security policy or education policy? The two are very different. Yale's MA program just seems to be a more general international relations MA. So would you rather a more general degree, or a specialized one? Columbia does have the advantage of being in New York with tons of international organizations and NGOs located there, and I think international security is a hot area right now. So personally I would choose that.

I worked under an untenured assistant professor for my PhD program. He received tenure the same year that I finished. I was his first PhD student (he had another doctoral student in a similar, but different program, who entered the same year as me and finished a year before me). Note: Associate professors are usually tenured, or very very close to it. Risks: 1) Of course, the biggest is the risk that they will not receive tenure and need to leave during your PhD. The counterpoint, though, is that there is always a nonzero chance that your advisor (tenured or not) will leave while you are finishing. Tenured professors get poached by other universities, or lose their grant funding, or decide to move for family reasons or because they want to move into administration. More on how to deal with this below. 2) Newer/less advanced professors are (on average) less connected in the field, and thus their networks are smaller and less likely to bring advantage to you when looking for postdocs and jobs. There are exceptions to this too, though - there are lots of advanced/tenured professors who are not famous and don't network well; conversely, there are some junior people in my field who are very well known and recognized amongst their peers, and others who did the networking thing well in grad school and their postdoc. There are ways to mitigate this, too. 3) Untenured people are, by definition, trying to get tenure. Getting tenure is time-consuming - you have to publish like mad and bring in grant money, and at top/elite institutions you also have to build a reputation as an (inter)nationally known scholar in your field who can successfully solicit supportive letters from people you don't know. That involves lots of conference travel and speaking at other universities so that you can build that kind of reputation. The result for a grad student is that your untenured advisor may be gone a lot and at least a little distracted, particularly around the time of third-year review and around the time they go up for tenure. 4) A more minor/smaller risk is that newer professors on average have less experience mentoring graduate/doctoral students than established professors, and so they are learning how to mentor you at the same time that you are trying to get through grad school. That means that there may be some missteps, and that your newish professor might not yet know how to shepherd you through difficult phases of the program or help you connect to get post-grad school stuff. Of course, some people simply have a knack for mentoring and others learn very quickly, so this isn't necessarily absolutely going to be a problem, just something that could potentially be one. 5) They might have less money because they have fewer grants, which means less money for you to buy equipment and software and travel. It also may mean that they have fewer people in their lab yet because they haven't yet fully established it, so you might have to do some 'grunt' work you wouldn't do with a more senior person. Case in point: early in my advisor's lab there were few admin people, so I and the other doctoral student had to assist in recruiting participants for our studies. Now my advisor has a machine with a community outreach coordinator and a bunch of master's students, so towards the end of my program I only went to recruitment events if I wanted to - the data just rolled in without my involvement, and I could focus on data cleaning and analysis and writing. BUT, I could see how being his doctoral student right now would be even better. He has tons of data, and a sufficiently motivated new doctoral student of his could start working on papers right away - no need to wait for more data. Fixes (in my own experience): The best fix, IMO, is to have a more senior person serve as a secondary mentor/advisor, whether formally or informally. This solves problems #1-4 above: you have a more senior, tenured person who can potentially mentor you if your untenured primary advisor has to leave during your program; the senior person is likely to be better connected in the field and can use his network to your advantage; tenured senior professors sometimes (but not always) have more time since they are working at a less frenetic pace, meaning more time to spend cultivating you; and more senior people will have graduated several if not dozens of doctoral students and will have learned best practices for it. This is what I did. I had a primary untenured advisor whose research interests matched my own, who I worked with most closely, and who served as my primary dissertation sponsor. But my secondary advisor was a full professor in another department (my secondary department - I attended an interdisciplinary program) who also has research interests aligned with mine, and is a well-known figure in my field and related ones (people know his name when I mention him at big conferences). The funny story is that Tenured Senior Mentor was on Untenured Primary Advisor's dissertation committee back in the day Both served different functions with me and all three of us authored a paper together. Other notes: 1) Think ahead to what you might do if your advisor has to leave at different points of the program. Make a plan. I was at a university and a department I loved, and that was top 10 in my field, but one that is also notorious for not tenuring its junior people (people tend to view this as a great place to start a career). I decided that if my advisor left, I would most likely stay where I was; if he left before year 4 I would find someone else to mentor me and if he left after year 4 I would work with him remotely from where he was. The corollary is that you have to cultivate relationships with other (tenured) people who might be your advisor/sponsor for your dissertation should your main advisor have to leave. There was another tenured person in my primary department who I had in mind as a potential dissertation sponsor should my main advisor have left, and other people who did similar work who I could potentially turn to. And then, of course, my Tenured Senior Mentor (TSM) in my secondary department was there and had an established long-term relationship with me. 2) Some young professors don't have this problem. If they are an elite/top institution, likely they are traveling all over the universe trying to establish their reputation, so they know some people. Having a TSM as a secondary advisor is a good fix for this because you can use his network. The other fix is to do the networking you need yourself. Honestly, I kind of did that, too - I found my postdoc by attending a summer training and reaching back out to the director a few years later when I was looking for postdocs. I'm also a pretty outgoing person, so I stalk find people at conferences and talk to them if I admire their work or want to do what they do, and I applied for every early career/training/networking/career building thing EVER at conferences. I was joking with a friend earlier that I have an uncanny knack for always sitting next to program officers in scientific sessions. 3) There are two fixes. First of all, you must meet with the advisor before agreeing to attend and gauge their level of commitment, poise, organization, and time management skills. My advisor was a well-organized and committed mentor who always made time to meet with me, occasionally on short notice, even when he was really busy. We met biweekly when I was in grad school, and occasionally more often (when I was preparing for my defense, for example). Second of all, you have to be okay with the knowledge that you will need to be a little more independent and self-directed than perhaps if you had a tenured advisor. I was okay with that. However, keep in mind that tenured professors don't always have more time. Some associate professors are gunning for promotion to full, or trying to move into administrative positions. Others have acquired grant portfolios so large that they have to keep up the pace to manage the grants and publish from them. And some just love to keep up with the academic hobnobbing. One of my friends has a famous senior tenured professor who is literally gone doing fieldwork 4 months out of every year (luckily they do fieldwork in the same country). My advisor just got tenure and I can't say he's less busy than he was before, although he probably feels more settled. 4) Same as above, really - the major fix for this is to realize that you will need to be more self-reliant. To me that was a good thing, as I largely wanted to be left alone to do great research and come to my advisor when I had problems or needed guidance. If you function like that, I think you'll be fine. The bonus is that I learned how to learn a LOT of stuff on my own, so I feel even more independent and self-reliant now (although the cost was definitely a bit of floundering in the middle of my program). If you need more hand-holding, then a tenured professor with more time might be a better choice. The other thing is the same as above, which is interviewing your potential mentor ahead of time and asking specific questions about their mentoring style, how they view the mentoring relationship, and what they want to get out of it - as well as what they want to impart to you. You want to find a mentor whose style matches your regardless of their tenure status, but what you're looking for are junior folks who have at least thought about the way they want to mentor and have ideas that sound like they make sense. 5) One fix for this is collaborations - if your advisor needs time to ramp up and has no data yet, you can collaborate with other people in the department who do and want someone to analyze it or write it up. One of the things I've learned is that as professors get more senior, they get more data than they know what to do with and are always looking for a good grad student or postdoc to analyze it and/or write it up into a paper. Plus, collaborations help you grow your network, so they're a net good. Another thing is that when you do more 'grunt work' you actually learn more about the research process and get a feel for what's necessary - for example, I now realize how important the structure and function online survey tool is for web-based research because ours absolutely sucked and it impacted the data that we got. Being involved in the data cleaning meant that I got really close to the data and am very familiar with it when I do analyses. One potential BONUS for having an untenured assistant professor is that they are hungry for tenure, and - if they are doing what they are supposed to be doing - they will be publishing a lot of papers and going after grants. This can lead to you also publishing lots of papers and learning the mechanics of grantwriting. But you have to be proactive and ask about these things. I was young and unaware when I began my program, but one of the things I do wish I had done more was been proactive about asking my advisor what he was working on and asking if I could jump in on a paper to help (and get authorship). I think he's the more retiring type who felt like he didn't want to overwhelm me by asking me to help on papers, but I really WANTED to and just thought he would let me know when he had something interesting. This led to some missed opportunities. So be a go-getter and ask, ask, ask.

^I agree with the above. If at this point the schools are so similar to you that you really cannot decide, you might as well go with Columbia - especially if its cheaper.

I went to Columbia SMS for my PhD. This is an extremely broad question. Do you have more specific questions? Generally I found the academics to be excellent, the reputation to be excellent, faculty to be generally approachable and accessible, staff to be overburdened/overworked/often inaccessible, and the school's culture to be collegial and friendly but also fast-paced and intense.