Florida State for biogeochemistry??

[ssynny]

Hi all,

 

I applied to grad programs this past application season and unfortunately did not make the cut. I had started to work a new job as soon as I graduated from undergrad, but it wasn't a good fit. I decided to look at other places for employment and emailed someone at WHRC to see if they were looking for a lab tech/research assistant and told him a bit about my experience and research interests and attached my resume. He informed me that in a month he will no longer be working there, but will be taking a position at Florida State and would like to know if I was interested in attending grad school. I told him heck yeah and he told me more about his research goals and potential projects at the university and how he wants to take on grad students very soon. He had to leave for a field campaign, but scheduled a phone/skype call for early August when he gets back. His research is very similar to what I would like to do, but I know nothing about Florida State! I've looked online for reviews and rankings, but it's such a big school that all I found was stuff about undergrad and football. So does anyone here know about the graduate programs in the geological sciences department? I don't know if they're more computational, theoretical, analytical, or anything. Is this a strong department? I know you pick graduate schools for the adviser, not the school, but I don't want to lead this guy on if I feel I won't get a good education or support from the rest of the department.

 

Thanks for the help!

-Ssynny

[geographyrocks]

Did you look at the department website and the graduate studies websites? Those usually give a good indication of what the dept is like. Read the other professors bios and check out the class schedule.

And rankings mean diddly squat. I have no idea what my school's rank is, but I do know that my advisor does great research, publishes a lot, and is active in finding grants. Those are the important things.

[ssynny]

That's the thing. They don't talk much about the program at all on the webpage. It's mostly undergrad stuff, how to apply and what's required, and one paragraph on graduate research. I've never seen a department page with so little useful information. I read some prof bios, but I don't really know what to gain from them :\

[GeoDUDE!]

http://www.eoas.fsu.edu/people/faculty

 

that info seems pretty useful.

 

Its a pretty nice website actually.....

Edited July 10, 2014 by GeoDUDE!

[ssynny]

I visited that page before, but how am I supposed to gather how strong the department is from that? Yeah I can see what research they conduct and that there's over 50 people there, but the number of people doesn't necessarily correlate with quality. 

[ssynny]

What criteria do you use to determine if a school has a strong grad department? The other schools that I applied to/will apply to are well know and I've heard nothing about this one. And thanks for the help!

[GeoDUDE!]

What criteria do you use to determine if a school has a strong grad department? The other schools that I applied to/will apply to are well know and I've heard nothing about this one. And thanks for the help!

 

 

There are a lot of criteria used to determine if a department is quality; Do they have a healthy number of graduate students to faculty ratio ( the ratio should be over 1 graduate student to faculty member). That largely means they are investing in graduate students, and that faculty grants are able to support a large number of them.  

 

You asked how you can determine if a department is strong by the faculty page: Did you google scholar any of the faculty there? Have you bothered to read any of their papers? Good scientists tend to write good papers (not just high impact, but also well written ect..). If there are people there writing good papers, its probably a good department. 

 

You know what kinds of stuff you are interested in correct? read the papers of the teachers you will most likely have. That might give you some insight in to what kind of education you will get.

 

If you get an admission offer, you might want to ask if you can get the emails/contact info of some graduate students: Are they Happy?

 

Is it possible for you to visit? 

 

Many great graduate educations don't come from "well known schools" (what does that even mean in this context).  It seems they have a little less than 50 faculty; Thats a fairly large department, which signals good funding. It might be poorly funded for its size, I don't know, but departments that are big and lose funding tend to downsize quickly so my bet is they are pretty well funded.

 

Another thing: Rankings do matter in academia. Its not a kiss of death, or anything, to go to lower ranked school, but it means getting through hiring committees might be a bit more difficult. There are professors who did not go to Harvard, Caltech, MIT, Columbia and Stanford, but there are many who have (this is from someone who isn't going to one of those schools, and apologies to the few other schools who should be listed there.) 

 

Another thing to consider is if its a PhD or a MS offer: All these things matter much more if you are spending 5 years there vs 2 years.

 

It seems to me that you didn't do much of this type of thinking (or perhaps you did, and you are just asking questions to see if you have missed anything) when you were applying to the "name brand" departments, but doing this kind of analysis is important even if it is Harvard. Every research degree is unique, and how good that education can be is largely determined by the people who you interact with there. At a large department, you wont likely interact with everyone day to day, you will have a small group of people / professors that you know well, and ones you know less. What if you were, by chance, lucky enough to get admission into two top departments? How would you decide? The same way you would evaluate any other department. 

 

My guess is that its a good department that one should be proud of earning a degree at, but I don't know much about it as they have very few solid earth people there. 

[ssynny]

No need to assume that I didn't do research on my own before posting in grad cafe. This department is large and has broad research interests. I looked at professors that had research that was kind of similar to mine and read their papers, but honestly, I've read a lot of scientific papers and very few have ever been bad. I get that decent papers can indicate a decent department, but not always. I looked into how many grants they received in the past year and how many people still are actively writing grants in my area. I also looked at the retention rate of the grad students, which was around 70%. Most of me posting this thread was to see if anyone had any experience with this department. All the other schools that I applied to were schools that my department had collaborated with and schools that I knew fairly well. I wasn't applying to schools for the name, because I know that's not what's important for grad school. These schools were "well known" for providing excellent graduate education, especially in my interest area and endorsed by my boss. I posted here precisely because I looked into the school and their work and found some stats and data, but I not much on personal accounts with the school. Your explanation of how to interpret the information I found on the school was very helpful. About the rankings, does it matter if FSU is ranked significantly lower than my undergrad department? I apologize if it seems like I'm wasting your time and not doing enough research on my own. I looked a lot into this school, but I started not knowing anything about it and everything is happening very fast. He's potentially interested getting me to be one of his first grad students and mentioned starting in the spring, but that would mean sending in my app by September. I started talking to this guy 2 days ago.... And I guess you're right about the large department interactions thing. My department has like 6 people in it, so such a large one is crazy. But I guess that also means that they probably have a lot of different instruments and facilities?? Are you attending a large department?

[geographyrocks]

I'm not really sure how what I said was in any way insulting.  If you don't say that you've thoroughly researched a department, how the hell are we supposed to know?  Some people aren't aware that there is a lot of information on the Graduate Studies webpage that isn't on the department webpage. 

 

Anyway, since I'm not ass, I'll still offer advice even though you seem to think I'm being a jerk:

How young is your potential adviser?  Since he will just be starting at FL State, will you be competing with him for papers?  That's a big thing to consider.  I've read several stories where the grad student was pushed to 2nd or 3rd author simply because the professor was still trying to make a name for himself.  Something to consider, at least. 

[GeoDUDE!]

No need to assume that I didn't do research on my own before posting in grad cafe. This department is large and has broad research interests. I looked at professors that had research that was kind of similar to mine and read their papers, but honestly, I've read a lot of scientific papers and very few have ever been bad. I get that decent papers can indicate a decent department, but not always. I looked into how many grants they received in the past year and how many people still are actively writing grants in my area. I also looked at the retention rate of the grad students, which was around 70%. Most of me posting this thread was to see if anyone had any experience with this department. All the other schools that I applied to were schools that my department had collaborated with and schools that I knew fairly well. I wasn't applying to schools for the name, because I know that's not what's important for grad school. These schools were "well known" for providing excellent graduate education, especially in my interest area and endorsed by my boss. I posted here precisely because I looked into the school and their work and found some stats and data, but I not much on personal accounts with the school. Your explanation of how to interpret the information I found on the school was very helpful. About the rankings, does it matter if FSU is ranked significantly lower than my undergrad department? I apologize if it seems like I'm wasting your time and not doing enough research on my own. I looked a lot into this school, but I started not knowing anything about it and everything is happening very fast. He's potentially interested getting me to be one of his first grad students and mentioned starting in the spring, but that would mean sending in my app by September. I started talking to this guy 2 days ago.... And I guess you're right about the large department interactions thing. My department has like 6 people in it, so such a large one is crazy. But I guess that also means that they probably have a lot of different instruments and facilities?? Are you attending a large department?

 

 

You, of course, are wasting my time (well, making it less productive is a better way to put it), but that is exactly what I come to grad cafe for! So no hard feelings =D. 

 

Its happening fast, but you still have to go through the admissions process. So take a breath and realize that all you have to do is submit an application: decisions can come when you have a contract in hand to sign. 

 

 

One thing that you might consider is how much power he has in selecting his graduate students: he's going to want to recruit as many people as possible to get through the committee. He is likely able to choose whoever he wants though; His lab will be flush with start up cash and you will get to play with all the new 'toys' he buys for the the new lab. That is very exciting. Another cool thing about your situation: you will learn how to build a lab from the ground up! Most of us don't get that experience, joining already established labs. Thats a very cool thing to consider.

 

Most papers that are published are fairly good to decent, that is true, but there are some clues you can look for on even a decent paper. For example, was the paper published on the normative time scale? Does the author thank the anonymous reviewers? How many revisions did the publisher require? Part of a good graduate education is learning how to publish, and people who have trouble getting papers through in a timely manner is almost as bad as publishing rarely because you have to expend much more energy than required.   

 

I don't think your undergrad department matters once you have a grad degree: I went from a reasonably high ranked liberal arts school to an unknown department for my masters degree, and then to a better known (though not sure how well known really) department for my PhD. I have been a part of a department much larger than FSU (about 3 times the size), and it was very very cool. Everyone was friendly, many social events to bring everyone together. You talk to people in your building mostly, but again, everyone comes together.  My new department has about 30 professors, it seems that everyone is friendly: social interactions with everyone, but again, since people are in research groups you mostly interact with people of the same interests as you. At my undergrad, I was in a physics dept with 5 professors and everyone talked to everyone, for obvious reasons. I actually liked that the most, and the most isolating department i've been in only had 10 professors, with much faculty politics getting in the way of student learning. I think the health of the department is more important to happiness than size, and health is almost always directly related to relative funding (what is expected of them and how much are they producing). It is really important to visit before you sign anything, in my opinion. Especially since you don't know much about the school or the area. 

 

So a few things:

 

Do your very best to on your FSU application (a given, but should put this down anyway)

See if your POI will pay for you to visit if you get accepted

Talk to graduate students there

see if you can live there

 

If all those things check out, I think doing a PhD or MSc there would be a good experience. Going to a lesser ranked department then before has its disadvantages and its advantages, but all you really need to do is make sure you do good work where ever you go.  When I evaluated programs, I ordered these criteria to make my decision:

 

Research Fit

Advisor compatibility (on a personal level) 

Happiness of the graduate students

Location

Stipend

Rank

 

Another thing to consider is can your POI teach you "general" skills. For example, as you can probably tell by this post, I am very scatterbrained and unorganized. My new advisor is perhaps the most organized person i've met: I am hoping through observing her work habits I can learn to be somewhere in between where I am now and how organized she is. 

 

Anyway, I hope some of this rambling helps you.  

Edited July 10, 2014 by GeoDUDE!

[ssynny]

Geographyrocks, I was not implying that you were being insulting or a jerk and I apologize for not saying upfront that I looked into the department a bunch already. I just assumed that everyone does that before asking such questions in grad cafe haha. The professor is not super young, but not old. He gave me his skype name and it has 1979 in it, so I'm assuming it's his date of birth. I never even considered that if accepted, I could be bumped down on authorship. I hope it's not common.

 

GeoDUDE, thanks a bunch for the advice again. I'm feeling at lot better about the school and really look forward to working on my application. This may not be the most prestigious school, but it seems like it might be a really good fit for me. 

 

Thanks a bunch guys! I'll get to work on my app and hope the interview goes well

[Usmivka]

The professor is not super young, but not old. He gave me his skype name and it has 1979 in it, so I'm assuming it's his date of birth.

If you are right about the birth year, he is, in fact, super young. 35. A couple post-docs or an intro-position away from having been in grad school--was his last position a post-doc or otherwise sans-independent lab? Anyway, close enough to being in my peer group that if he was at WHRC recently I've probably been to parties with this guy. So I'd think of him as a young prof, with all the extra caveats and warnings that entails.

Edited July 13, 2014 by Usmivka

[ssynny]

On the WHRC page, it says that he's an associate scientist but not if he was running his own lab. He listed about 30 publications on his page with about 10 being first author, so hopefully he doesn't feel a need to bump his students to second or third. If you have been to parties with this guy, that's actually pretty awesome haha. His profile pic is a little goofy so I'm looking forward to seeing how he is first hand.

[Usmivka]

On the WHRC page, it says that he's an associate scientist but not if he was running his own lab. He listed about 30 publications on his page with about 10 being first author, so hopefully he doesn't feel a need to bump his students to second or third. If you have been to parties with this guy, that's actually pretty awesome haha. His profile pic is a little goofy so I'm looking forward to seeing how he is first hand.

It isn't authorship that I'd be worried about with a young prof. It is mentoring ability, expectations, overwork on the way to tenure, uncertain job and funding future. He's coming out a part of his life where all he had to do was science, and entering a part where he has to be a manager of people and budgets. That isn't something you get trained for in grad school or as a postdoc, so he is untested and there could be complications. Search the forums for one of the many "old vs young" professor threads to get an idea of the pros and cons. Chemistry had a couple good ones last year.

[ssynny]

It isn't authorship that I'd be worried about with a young prof. It is mentoring ability, expectations, overwork on the way to tenure, uncertain job and funding future. He's coming out a part of his life where all he had to do was science, and entering a part where he has to be a manager of people and budgets. That isn't something you get trained for in grad school or as a postdoc, so he is untested and there could be complications. Search the forums for one of the many "old vs young" professor threads to get an idea of the pros and cons. Chemistry had a couple good ones last year.

 

Oh yeah definitely. Thankfully my POI has worked with some students before and had some undergrads over the last two summers. Thanks for the tip on the forums. There was some really useful advice!