What's more important: choosing your favorite program or mentor?

[gradschoolFTW]

I’m choosing between two social/personality phd programs to which I got accepted with similar rankings and who offer similar funding. I got a guaranteed fellowship at school A and a first year fellowship (that I need to reapply for yearly) at school B. My interests are definitely more aligned with the POI at school A, but school B has a much larger department and many great professors who I could collaborate with. Additionally, school B is in a much more favorable location.

The mentors I’d be working with at both schools are very respected researchers and from the feedback from their students they both seem like they would be great to work with. Assuming everything else is almost equal, would you decide to attend the program that you like overall more or the program with the mentor whose work you are more interested in?

I appreciate your advice!

[carlyhylton]

I'm still an undergrad, so I'm not going to try to advise. However, based on responses I've gotten in previous threads, having faculty with similar interests other than your supervisor. Are there any other faculty with similar interests at school A that you could collaborate with?

[svh]

That's a tough decision. Multiple interesting faculty is always good, just in case you don't jive very well with your primary advisor. But if the research interest fit is perfect at your other school... That's pretty important, too. However, from the grad student work that I've seen on my visits, it seems like you'll have a good amount of freedom to pursue what you're interested in (depending on how much freedom your primary advisor gives you, of course). But I've seen grad students do something almost completely unrelated to what their advisors are doing.

In the end though, you should pick the school that'll make you the happiest. And when the programs are similarly good, you need to decide based on other more trivial factors (like location).

[gradschoolFTW]

There are great professors at both programs (in addition to my mentors) that I could collaborate with. I just feel like School B would offer me more exposure to various areas of social/personality psychology because the department is very large. Since I'm sure my interests will change and expand a bit during my graduate studies, it seems like this could be helpful. However, the mentor at School A has work way more related to what I hope to eventually do. I just don't know how much weight to give to the particular mentor vs. the department as a whole.