"Prestige" vs. Professors

[Ilikekitties]

Ok, I have a question about choosing grad schools to apply to because some of my professors say that you should pick a program because of its reputation because professors can leave, get sick, die, etc. Others tell me that you should pick based on the professors there because their interests have to match yours. It shouldn't be about the "name."

Does prestige come in at all? Do USNWR and other rankings matter at all when it comes to grad school? Do faculty interests come before the name of the school?

I mean, it wouldn't make sense for a person who studies Ecuador to go to a school where no professors are familiar with Ecuador even if it was a top school, but besides that?

[TakeruK]

I don't think it should be one or the other. Why not both? I applied to about 8 schools and all of them had both.

 

In order to find places with both though, you can't be too stringent on the criteria: For some of my schools, the "name" of the school is only well known in my field, but for academic careers, the department/professor's reputation is far more important than the school's overall reputation--I think it is pretty difficult to find schools that have a great reputation in your field and a great overall reputation, unless you plan on putting all your eggs in the top 10!

 

I also defined my topic of interest to be pretty broad. I don't know what a good analogy to your field would be though. But perhaps we can compare it to our national society's annual meetings/conferences. I would say that at the start of grad school, my interests would be more specific than my society's entire annual meeting (~1000 people) but would probably span the same range of topics as a session with the title of my field of interest (perhaps 200-ish people).

 

In my opinion, it is a mistake to be so specific in your PhD studies that you can count the number of people that work on your topic on one hand. After all, if that's how many people are doing that work, that's how many people are interested in hiring you to do that work post-PhD! My advice would be to try to gauge your field and figure out what will be the topics of interest in 5-7 years and work on projects that will train you in the skills to be employable post-PhD. I think it's important that you have some interest in what you're working on, but it's not necessary that the topic is your favourite/most passionate interest. And I think it's much much easier to change/alter your own interests than it is to change the quality/usefulness of the grad program. So, pick a program that will best help you achieve your goals!

 

Finally, I also considered how my school name would look on paper if I were to work outside of my field/academia. So I did consider the prestige of the school overall, as perceived by non-academics, in addition to the school's standing in academic circles. 

[Ilikekitties]

^ thank you very much!

[rising_star]

I'm in the social sciences and all of my fieldwork/data collection was done outside the USA in a particular country. My advisor is not at all familiar with that country/context and neither was most of my committee. Two of them were familiar with the region, but neither with that country in particular. An example may help. Let's say that my work is on Cyprus (it's not, but we'll pretend). My advisor's specialties were USA and Brazil and two committee members were specialists in southern Europe or the Mediterranean. Does that make sense? So no, I don't think you have to go to a school with an Ecuador specialist to study Ecuador because I went to a school without Cyprus specialists and did just fine. That said, and this is important, my advisor is one of the top people in my subfield. Theyliterally wrote the book on it and it's cited by everyone all the time. Their name is perhaps even more important than the university's name, at least in my field, though my department is well respected as a PhD program. I went there to work this specific advisor but I also only applied to strong programs.

[Ilikekitties]

^ Thanks! I guess I just need to find a subfield then