Preparing for Visits

[mkxz]

I'm an international student visiting a couple of grad schools I have offers from soon. I've got 1/2 hr 1-on-1 meetings with several professors.

How do meetings with professors usually pan out? How much will they expect me to know about their research? Would I be expected to lead the discussion? What would be reasonable things to discuss? Would I be going too far if I asked them how positive they would be to me joining their group?

Also, what are the sort of things I should be aiming to learn from the trip? Currently I haven't got much apart from asking them about how much they support their grads in finding jobs.

Thanks in advance, any advice, related or not, would be much appreciated!

Edited March 8, 2010 by mkxz

[UnlikelyGrad]

I'm an international student visiting a couple of grad schools I have offers from soon. I've got 1/2 hr 1-on-1 meetings with several professors.

How do meetings with professors usually pan out? How much will they expect me to know about their research? Would I be expected to lead the discussion? What would be reasonable things to discuss? Would I be going too far if I asked them how positive they would be to me joining their group?

Also, what are the sort of things I should be aiming to learn from the trip? Currently I haven't got much apart from asking them about how much they support their grads in finding jobs.

Thanks in advance, any advice, related or not, would be much appreciated!

Generally speaking, they ask about your research interests (most of them don't remember, even if they read your app folder) and tell you what they do. You wouldn't necessarily lead the discussion--for the most part, they tend to drive it. But do have a couple of standard questions ready to ask people (could be about the school in general, not just their research) in case the conversation flags.

With that said, if there is someone that you REALLY want to work for, read their papers before you go and write down some questions about their research. Better yet would be to suggest a tack you could take that would grow their research in a new direction.

What should you be aiming to learn from the trip? I would suggest the following as starting points:

(1) Whether you could actually work with those potential advisors. (At least one person I'd earmarked as "really want to work for" ended up being a jerk)

(2) What the "personality" of the department and/or potential advisor's lab is like

(3) Whether you think you could bear to live in the town

(4) Whether current grad students enjoy the program--if not, why? (Some reasons for dislike are very personal, like "I can't stand snow" whereas others, like "We have to TA 3 sections of lab" would be true for everyone.)