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It depends a lot on who you're working for. You might think that every professor with interesting publications at a high-ranking institution is smart, intereste

It depends a lot on who you're working for. You might think that every professor with interesting publications at a high-ranking institution is smart, interested in their work, and invested in the success of their students. Or at least, this is what I thought when I was an undergraduate, when I did some research with some really great people. Since then, I've realized that some people of these professors are not particularly interested in science, but have big egos and are particularly skilled at promoting themselves. They're at top institutions and they are thus able to attract lots of money and smart, hard-working students, but their intellectual contribution to their lab's work is relatively small and the environment they produce within their labs (and institutions) is pretty toxic.

mcguire 11y ago
"You might think that every professor is ... smart, interested in their work, and invested in the success of their students. Or ... are not particularly interested in science, but have big egos and are particularly skilled at promoting themselves." In the first place, those two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the second, there are other kinds: some of the best scientists I know have essentially set up an assembly line: students are plopped on one end of the conveyor belt, papers are chiselled off of them just before the two major conference seasons of every year, and a skilled researcher is boxed at the end of the line and shipped off to a grateful academic or industrial research institution. The principle scientists are great people, they do excellent work, their students are good and well taken-care-of, and no one really has any reason to complain. The only down side is that the papers coming out are kind of incremental, given the schedule of publishing at conferences twice a year, and a student that goes in at the top of the machine is going to come out the bottom as a researcher on a particular topic. I have no idea how well they're doing, in aggregate, a few years after graduation.

mcguire 11y ago

"You might think that every professor is ... smart, interested in their work, and invested in the success of their students. Or ... are not particularly interested in science, but have big egos and are particularly skilled at promoting themselves." In the first place, those two categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In the second, there are other kinds: some of the best scientists I know have essentially set up an assembly line: students are plopped on one end of the conveyor belt, papers are chiselled off of them just before the two major conference seasons of every year, and a skilled researcher is boxed at the end of the line and shipped off to a grateful academic or industrial research institution. The principle scientists are great people, they do excellent work, their students are good and well taken-care-of, and no one really has any reason to complain. The only down side is that the papers coming out are kind of incremental, given the schedule of publishing at conferences twice a year, and a student that goes in at the top of the machine is going to come out the bottom as a researcher on a particular topic. I have no idea how well they're doing, in aggregate, a few years after graduation.