I am only two days into my second rotation and feel like it won't be a good fit for me. I set this rotation up about a month ago because I was interested in the research and really vibed with the PI. Additionally, he was really well funded, had a lot of publications in high impact journals, and is a department head. Upon closer inspection, after joining the lab and talking to current students, some potential red flags were raised.
1) There are three graduate students in the lab: 2 MD/PhDs and a PhD. One of the MD/PhDs is a 6th year and the PhD is an 8th. They are both scheduled to graduate sometime next year, but they are both well over the average in terms of graduation time (~5.5 for PhD, ~4.5 for MD/PhD).
2) To exacerbate the situation further, while the lab itself publishes pretty frequently (maybe twice a year), none of the current graduate students have any publications. All the publications are from either post-docs or staff scientists. Today, I looked up the publication records of the past PhD candidates in the lab and found that the only one in the past 5 years is a 2017 publication from a 9th year PhD student who graduated in 2015! This is a really big deal because my program (Neuroscience) expects us all to have atleast one first author paper before graduation.
3) On top of all this, two of the last 3 PhD students left with terminal masters. The third graduated in 6 years with no publications.
One of the current students commented that those two students left because they couldn't handle the grad school load, although I'm not so sure that's the case. Am I crazy for thinking that this lab would be a terrible environment for graduate students? I only have 3 rotations before I have to choose a lab and feel like every rotation needs to count. At this point, there's a 0% chance of me joining the lab no matter how much I like the research. Is quitting this early acceptable? How would I go about doing that without burning bridges with the PI? Is there any hope for me? Any help would be very appreciated.
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soloswag
I am only two days into my second rotation and feel like it won't be a good fit for me. I set this rotation up about a month ago because I was interested in the research and really vibed with the PI. Additionally, he was really well funded, had a lot of publications in high impact journals, and is a department head. Upon closer inspection, after joining the lab and talking to current students, some potential red flags were raised.
1) There are three graduate students in the lab: 2 MD/PhDs and a PhD. One of the MD/PhDs is a 6th year and the PhD is an 8th. They are both scheduled to graduate sometime next year, but they are both well over the average in terms of graduation time (~5.5 for PhD, ~4.5 for MD/PhD).
2) To exacerbate the situation further, while the lab itself publishes pretty frequently (maybe twice a year), none of the current graduate students have any publications. All the publications are from either post-docs or staff scientists. Today, I looked up the publication records of the past PhD candidates in the lab and found that the only one in the past 5 years is a 2017 publication from a 9th year PhD student who graduated in 2015! This is a really big deal because my program (Neuroscience) expects us all to have atleast one first author paper before graduation.
3) On top of all this, two of the last 3 PhD students left with terminal masters. The third graduated in 6 years with no publications.
One of the current students commented that those two students left because they couldn't handle the grad school load, although I'm not so sure that's the case. Am I crazy for thinking that this lab would be a terrible environment for graduate students? I only have 3 rotations before I have to choose a lab and feel like every rotation needs to count. At this point, there's a 0% chance of me joining the lab no matter how much I like the research. Is quitting this early acceptable? How would I go about doing that without burning bridges with the PI? Is there any hope for me? Any help would be very appreciated.
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