Choosing an Advisor

[mmm35]

Hi everyone-

I'm trying to compare a few schools by the advisor I would chose at them, and I'm probably coming to the point of splitting hairs here, but how would you rank different ways of judging a professor's reputation? I'm an engineer, but feel free to offer advice relative to any field

I have been out of school for a couple years, so I have limited resources available in terms of asking professors (and my masters advisor wants me to come back so its a bit uncomfortable to ask him about it). So far I'm looking at numbers of publications and prizes won, but I get stuck with professors who don't list CV's. Does anyone have any other suggestions? Maybe I am over thinking this all and should be satisfied if they teach at a great school and have a good listing of publications and interesting projects (and of course, are a good fit personality- and research-wise)?

Thanks!

[socialpsychg]

Graduate placement is a big one for me - I'm always trying to figure out where graduates from a professor's lab have gone on to (which is what matters, in the end). You can also look up number of publications indirectly by using search engines (such as PsycInfo, PubMed, etc.). Lastly (and leastly), you could simply pull up the program's ranking on U.S. News World Report etc. to get a very vague approximation of the program (and indirectly, the person).

[rising_star]

I would be asking questions about what fellowships/scholarships/awards their students have gotten, whether and where there students publish and present, and the time to completion for those students.

[frogstar]

Graduate placement is a big one for me - I'm always trying to figure out where graduates from a professor's lab have gone on to

What if a professor doesn't have graduted students yet (e.g. he's at the begining of his career), but he/she has lots of publications in many top journals and conferences?

[socialpsychg]

What if a professor doesn't have graduted students yet (e.g. he's at the begining of his career), but he/she has lots of publications in many top journals and conferences?

Well first, a good metric might be to look at where graduates of the program in general have gone to. My general impression is that assistant professors are relatively high risk, high reward. On the one hand, they may not get tenure (in which case, you're s*** out of luck), are relatively inexperienced (in advising and publishing), and might not have connections. On the other hand, they'll be motivated to get as much work out there as possible, and they'll certainly be giving you a lot of attention as a result. With a full professor, the risks and rewards tend to be the opposite.

[a fragrant plant]

Is it a bad sign if a professor has only supervised two PhD students to date since he secured his tenure track five or six years ago?

[thinktank1985]

I look at H-index and citations per journal article. I actually tried to find out whether there was any correlation between the type of research/ideas a professor has, how well he deals with students, funding etc with his h-index. While I dont have any quantitative results (), it seemed the correlation is good.

However one of the problems with this approach is that this is good mainly for associate professors or above, because assistant professors really dont have the necessary time to get good quality journals published and referred. In that case, a good metric of future performance for assistant professors will probably be no of citations that their journal articles get per year per article, total funding, quality of journals.

[Synth]

If you're connected in terms of friends from uni who have gone to grad school, etc. asking them to ask around is definitely another good route to go.

I get a significant portion of my information from asking friends and friends of friends, etc. and eventually if all goes well they'll connect with someone who either 1. worked in the lab under the person, or 2. if it's a younger prof worked in a lab with that person (either postdoc or grad student) and can give you an idea of not only impact of the person, but also what kind of person that professor is like to work for.

[mmm35]

Thanks, everyone for the responses. I guess the second half of this question is how specific are you when ranking professors' prestige, and how much does this matter in comparison with how well you get along?

If all potential advisors teach at excellent schools and have a good reputation, should I then just focus on who I like better? At some point should I just say both advisors are good enough and then decide where I want to go based on other factors? Both advisors that I am currently thinking of publish frequently in good journals and are cited often, but one has won a big prize and the other hasn't. The one that hasn't is at the school I'm leaning towards, is this difference enough to base a decision on?

I mean, as much as this decision feels like it will determine the rest of our lives, in the end we still will determine our own success and if your advisor is slightly better known matters much less than the research you will do, right?

[Synth]

For me the ranking goes:

1. Do I like their work? If I don't, I don't care how famous they are, or how cool of a person, I would not want to spend 5 years working on a project that I don't care about.

2. Do I think they would be a good boss? (Would I be okay working under them- would they push me to do better, without driving me to quit? Are they good enough at their job that the lab is funded, or do we constantly have to recycle solvents, etc. etc.)

3. Where do they place their graduates? If you want to go into academia and this professor is really famous in placing people in industry, that's not particularly helpful.

4. And then finally within that, prestige is important as well. But I find that this is strongly correlated with 3.

Thanks, everyone for the responses. I guess the second half of this question is how specific are you when ranking professors' prestige, and how much does this matter in comparison with how well you get along?

If all potential advisors teach at excellent schools and have a good reputation, should I then just focus on who I like better? At some point should I just say both advisors are good enough and then decide where I want to go based on other factors? Both advisors that I am currently thinking of publish frequently in good journals and are cited often, but one has won a big prize and the other hasn't. The one that hasn't is at the school I'm leaning towards, is this difference enough to base a decision on?

I mean, as much as this decision feels like it will determine the rest of our lives, in the end we still will determine our own success and if your advisor is slightly better known matters much less than the research you will do, right?