UGA or Georgia Tech PhD (Developmental Bio/ Genetics)

[genes]

Over the past few weeks I've been pulling my hair out trying to decide between these two great schools! 

Research Interests: Developmental biology and genetics (and potentially evolution)

Career Goal: I would love a career where I could balance both teaching and research. I have experience teaching at the college level and have had training in pedagogy. I want to develop myself more as a teacher and also as a scientist. Regardless if I end up in academia or industry, I want to be teaching to some degree.

Funding: I will have guaranteed funding at both (don't mind TAing)

Faculty: Regardless of where I go, I intend to do rotations. I value a great mentor more than specific research focus. Both schools seemed to have faculty that would be great mentors, and also have interesting research. 

Here are my perceptions of the benefits of each school (correct me if I have any faulty perceptions):

UGA: Larger and more developed biology program. More developmental biologists. I got the impression that biology education is valued here and that the grad program encourages students to develop teaching skills if that's what they desire. Talked to many current grad students extensively and they loved the school. Interview experience was top notch and they sold themselves very well. I felt like the faculty and students were more cohesive here.

Georgia Tech: Smaller biology program and less dev. biologists (most of which are new and young faculty). It seemed that they were more research heavy here and do not support pedagogical training as much as UGA does. Given that GT is a highly ranked engineering and STEM school, they appear to be pushing their quantitative biosciences more. I do not have a strong computational background, but anticipate that I would get more training in that if I pursued a PhD here. Not many grad students to talk to during interview weekend. A few colleagues I've talked to think GT has better name recognition and that this could potentially open up more doors for me. Seems like it might be more cutthroat here. 

 

Hope you can help me with this! I've talked to friends and colleagues about this decision and they are also divided!

Edited April 2, 2016 by genes
typo

[genes]

On 4/3/2016 at 10:04 PM, PlanB said:

From the description you presented above, it seems like you like UGA more than GT, but you recognized that GT is, in general, a more respected institution in academia(in which case you would be right). I say go with UGA. It seems to fit your career goals better of balancing teaching and research and you would  most likely enjoy your experience more.  Plus for biology, UGA actually gets more NSF funding and according to US news rankings(for what it is worth), UGA is ranked higher than GT for biology. For Bioinformatics, however, GT > UGA. 

Thank you for your input! You are spot on about my feelings about this decision.

I'm curious where you can find out which schools get more NSF funding.

[Ferroportin]

Given your descriptions of the two school, I also think UGA is a better choice. The overall fit seems much better and it seems like there's a greater chance that you'll be happy there. Name recognition shouldn't matter too much - if anything you can do well at UGA and just do your postdoc at a name brand institution.