Decision Factors

[leagueGirl]

I'm curious how people would rank the following factors in terms of importance in their decisions about PhD programs:

 

- research interest

- weather

- cost of living 

- school overall ranking

- school program ranking

- having worked with (AND LOVING) your advisor prior to application

- professor status (e.g., well-known or not)

- distance from home

 

Please feel free to add anything not on the above list and, if you don't mind, your intended major

 

 

[eeee1923]

Intended Program: Pharmacology (Cancer Research focus)

 

1) Research Interest/Fit and PI's available (i.e with funding)

2) Research Facilities

3) Cost of living

4) Program Environment (do the students and profs get along, collaborations, etc.)

5) School Program Ranking (Higher rank tend to have better facilities and networking opportunities that will help with future goals) 

6) Weather (I want to live somewhere warmer)

7) Distance from Home (I wouldn't want to go ridiculously far from my family for 4-5 yrs, maybe for postdoc)

8) School overall ranking (name only gets one so far)

9) Professor status (e.g., well-known or not) - PIs having funding and conducting cool research is more important IMO than how famous they are

10) having worked with (AND LOVING) your advisor prior to application (This is almost of no real concern since I've never worked with any of the PIs I looked at)

[jujubea]

I am working on a spreadsheet of this, which includes more or less the following, so far (not by any particular ranking yet):

 

Money:

Moving costs

Cost of living (Housing, property taxes, food)

Stipend amount

Tuition waiver

Tuition costs if any

 

Quality of life:

Transportation options

Pollution

Outdoor recreation

Weather

Parks and open spaces

Other recreation

 

Program:

School ranking/prestige

Job placement statistics

TA training and support

Cohort fit

Range of skills I'd leave with

Number of faculty matches

Quality of faculty matches

Quality of faculty, period

Average time to completion

Array of specialties

Department environment (building, rooms, office spaces for TAs)

 

Specific to my situation (spouse and children):

# of hours in class per week

Schedule flexibility

Class times and days

Job market for spouse

Salary range for spouse in that area

Ease of transferring his professional license

 

Schools for the kids:

Open or closed districts

Proximity to home

Proximity to my school

Proximity to spouse's likely work area

School quality

Availability of specific extracurriculars

 

As for how you rank them, it depends on what's most important to you. Only you can know which factors really matter. Are you more concerned with have a decent quality of life for the next 5-7 years? Or more concerned with finding a job immediately after graduation? etc.

Edited February 5, 2015 by jujubea

[TXInstrument11]

Psych - social

 

1. Research interest

2. Having worked w/ & loving advisor (not actually applicable to me, but would be something I'd consider 2nd if so)

3. School program ranking

4. Professor status

5. Urban vs. rural (prefer at least developed suburban)

6. School overall ranking 

7. Cost of Living

8. Weather/Distance from home -- literally everything is colder than where I live now, so no point in separating these two. Either way, I don't care. 

The only caveat with 8 is that I am only referring to US schools. I would maybe consider other English-speaking countries, but anything else is out of the question right now.

[TakeruK]

I'm curious how people would rank the following factors in terms of importance in their decisions about PhD programs:

 

- research interest

- weather

- cost of living 

- school overall ranking

- school program ranking

- having worked with (AND LOVING) your advisor prior to application

- professor status (e.g., well-known or not)

- distance from home

 

Please feel free to add anything not on the above list and, if you don't mind, your intended major

 

Planetary Science. I made my decision in 2012, and out of your list, I would rank them:

 

1. Program Ranking

2. School overall ranking

3. Weather

4. Cost of Living

5. Prof Status

6. Research Interest

7. Distance from home

 

N/A: Experience with prof (none of my schools had this)

 

Note: I only applied to school where the research fit was really really high. So "research interest" only meant the specific planetary science project I would be working on at each school. I put ranking up high because for the choices I had to make, the ranking was directly related to the amount of resources I needed to do what I wanted to do! 

[djh101]

1. Research Interest
2. Cost of Living
3. Weather/Location
4. Distance from Home
5. Everything Else

•  Distance from home is the only above factor that didn't disqualify any schools. I would like to take all my stuff with me without any hassle (TV, computer, clothes, books), so I would very much like to go somewhere <1000mi. I would also like to live close to my family, but I live in the Los Angeles area so this directly conflicts with cost of living and weather. Anywhere outside Southern California is flying distance to me so might as well all be the same.
• There's enough schools out there with good whether (I prefer cold to hot) that I mainly applied to those. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado were my top picks for weather. Arizona was not eligible for my list (I have no desire to live in Phoenix).
• Stipends seem to factor in the cost of living, so this isn't a huge issue. There were some significant differences, though. At MIT I might be sharing a minuscule two bedroom while in New Mexico I could get my own fairly large two bedroom with a balcony and swimming pool for a similar price (adjusted for stipend size). I would like to live comfortably during grad school and I'm willing to make sacrifices in other areas for this. I intend to bring my girlfriend along, so I would like to have a second bedroom separate from the living area that I can turn into a study.
• Weather, cost of living, etc. are all important factors, but the deciding factor is always going to be research interests. I'll live somewhere less than optimal and will abstain from somewhere wonderful for the sake of research interests.

That being said, all of the above are important enough factors that they could end up overpowering any of the others. Most of my schools were pretty even in all areas, so it's going to be a tough call for me. Optimally, I would like a few professors with similar research interests in a mountain town, 20-80°F, <1000mi from L.A. with affordable two-bedroom apartments and politically similar people/government. If I could take U. Michigan or U. New Mexico and stick it in Boulder, that would be perfect.

[Kleene]

Order of importance:

- school program ranking (I would never go somewhere that is not excellent in my field, but how wide you interpret a 'field' to be allows for a wide range of universities anyway.)

- research interest (Obviously, if I am going to work on a project for years it had better had my interest.)

- professor status (It is good to know that he is publishing on an active basis, also with his students.)

- school overall ranking (It cannot compensate for the previous points, but some prestige outside of the field has never hurt anyone.)

 

Sort of:

- having worked with (AND LOVING) your advisor prior to application (Have met him, and will do my MSc project with him before starting.)

 

Do not care about:

- weather (Pretty much everywhere the weather is better than where I come from.)

- cost of living (I am not going without full funding.)

- distance from home (I restricted myself to non-US areas where one of my three languages is the official language, most of which happen to be in Europe.)

 

I am in CS.

[GhostsBeforeBreakfast]

In Order
- How many people are employed at places I would like to work who went to this university?

- An Advisor who gets my research interests
- Do they have connections to museums?/Will I have the opportunity to do curatorial work as a candidate?
- School overall ranking
- Professor's status
- Program ranking
- Location/in or close to metropolitan area
- Ease of transportation 
 

Edited February 5, 2015 by GhostsBeforeBreakfast

[bsharpe269]

I would rank them:

 

- research interest

- professor status (e.g., well-known or not)

- safety of area - (As a woman who will be around campus at potentially late hours, this is very important to me)

- school program ranking

- cost of living

- school overall ranking

- distance from home

- weather

[leagueGirl]

Thanks for all your replies! Would anyone care to elaborate on why they place more importance on school/program ranking than on research interests or vice versa? (Other than that all the programs you applied to have same research topics -- lets assume they are somewhat different: e.g., social psych vs developmental psych)

And for ranking, lets say its top 1 vs top 4 in the nation in their respective fields.

All comments are appreciated!

[jujubea]

In my humble and inexperienced opinion (I have not been to the other side of a grad program yet), when you're rankings are above 10, they're all the same.  That's if you're talking about PUREly ranking.

 

If you're talking about the difference between the correct or best equipment or facilities (right type of telescope, right collections in the library) and rank above 10 reflects that, then it matters more.

Edited February 6, 2015 by jujubea

[BiochemMom]

My most important factors are very different than a more traditional student.

In order prior to applying:

Location--must be within an hour and a half of either my family or my husband's family. After doing undergrad and an MS without anyone we knew around, and wanting more children which will have to happen during the phd program due to my age, we need the support of family as backup childcare.

Location--must be within thirty minutes of a branch of my husbands company so he can transfer his job to a new location same job/benefits

Location--must have a private Montessori school for my daughter

Research--must have X-ray crystallography equipment and / or protein structure labs that utilize NMR for structural elucidation

Funding--my current school is very short on funding and the limits on graduating on time simply due to lack of money is not something I want to deal with again

(Thankfully both our families are in metropolitan areas with a vast array of schools in the top 100 for my field)

Those were factors for where to apply. Since I only applied to schools that fit that criteria, my factors for deciding in order are:

Lab and school culture--will my PI be okay with me needing to leave if my kid gets sick and okay with me coming in super early (4-5 am) to leave by four thirty - five instead of what a lot of people do which is roll in around noon and work til 8 (at least in the phd program at my current school that's what everyone does)? Is the school environment supportive of families? Will I lose stipend if I take six week maternity leave later into the program?

Research--how many potential PIs would I have? For example: At Ga Tech there are only two I would want to work for. At UNC Chapel hill, I can list 12 of the top of my head.

And that's about it for me.

Edited February 6, 2015 by BiochemMom

[djh101]

Rank certainly helped me decide which schools to look at (I wasn't going to look through every single school listed on U.S. News), but after that I didn't consider it at all except for estimating my chances of acceptance. There are certain factors that tend to correlate with rank (better known professors, more expensive equipment, etc.) but once you've honed in on individual schools, you can determine all those factors exactly (either the professors there are known or they aren't and the school either has a particle accelerator or it doesn't). Correlations are what you use when you don't actually know the information that you're trying to extrapolate. There are still some factors that may not be known exactly enough, such as chance of acceptance and future job prospects (if you believe in such a correlation and it applies to you), though, where taking rank into account would be appropriate.

[TakeruK]

Thanks for all your replies! Would anyone care to elaborate on why they place more importance on school/program ranking than on research interests or vice versa? (Other than that all the programs you applied to have same research topics -- lets assume they are somewhat different: e.g., social psych vs developmental psych)

And for ranking, lets say its top 1 vs top 4 in the nation in their respective fields.

All comments are appreciated!

 

I don't have such specific research interests that I needed to find a school that did exactly what I wanted. Today, I submitted my research statement for candidacy and I had no idea this was what my thesis would be on when I was applying to graduate school. Instead, my thought was to find a school, program, and advisor that I liked and then do whatever research they would pay me to do. Obviously it would all be in the subfield I want to work on, but I didn't have any preferences beyond that subfield. In addition, I searched for schools based on their ability to train me in a specific set of skills (in my case, observational astronomy) instead of working on a specific problem. I didn't care what my thesis was on as long as I was able to develop this particular skillset.

 

Top 1 and Top 4 are basically identical rankings in my opinion. The cutoffs would vary by field. In mine, there are about 5 schools that are clearly the best in the country so I would say they are "Tier 1". Then there are about 20 other schools that are also very good but just lack one small thing that the top 5 have--I'd call these "Tier 2". And finally, everyone else is "Tier 3". I would say that I only considered ranking between these "tiers", not within them. I think in bigger fields, there might be as many as 20-30 schools considered "Tier 1", and perhaps more than three tiers!

[lxwllms]

As a potential student currently in the application process, I would rate these as:

 

1) Research interest (It was super important to me that I find POI(s) working on something I found interesting. I would be doing this for the next 5-6 years of my life.

2) Cost of living (I live in Boston right now as an undergrad and boy is it hard. I just want to make sure the stipend is sufficient to live wherever I end up).

3) Weather. (I'm sure you've heard of the snowpocalypse in Boston right now. Yeah. Over it).

4) School Program Ranking. (Who doesn't want to go to a well-ranked program? IMO that usually means better facilities).

5) Professor status. (As in how often they/their students are publishing, overall success rate. Not so much how famous they may be).

 

The last three (school overall ranking, having worked with (AND LOVING) your advisor prior to application, and distance from home) were not of any concern to me. The ranking of the program itself was more important to me than the ranking of the university as a whole. I've never worked with any of the POIs I've applied to do my PhD under, although I have spoken to and even met some of them (at conferences and interviews). And for the last one, like I said I'm kindof ready to leave Boston, but it's not a big deal if I end up staying, so not really a concern. I don't have any reason to try and stay close to home (and I'm ready for nice weather!)

[rising_star]

lxwllms, Worcester, MA is now leading the Golden Snow Globe Awards. The Boston area has really stepped up its game in the last 2 weeks!