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Unsolicited advice for any potential PhD students choosing between schools/advisors: you should try very hard to talk to current PhD students, preferably in per

Unsolicited advice for any potential PhD students choosing between schools/advisors: you should try very hard to talk to current PhD students, preferably in person or at least over the phone or video call (at any rate, not in writing). Try to talk to as many as possible. Good advisors will probably have a few students who will speak up for them, and great advisors almost certainly will. In contrast, bad advisors will probably have a few students who give middling recommendations, cryptic comments, or outright warnings. Good departments typically have meet-the-current-students-without-faculty-present events to facilitate exactly this discussion. If the potential advisor does not happily put you in contact with current or recent students, that alone is a red flag. This is not foolproof. Even a great advisor may have one bitter student, and a generally terrible advisor might still have some good student relationships. But having a bad advisor will make grad school so much harder. This is a situation where doing a bit of due diligence can have a huge impact. I was lucky; I had a great advisor, and I was always happy to talk to potential students, since I wanted my advisor to have more good students. Talk to students!

wiredfool 6y ago
Another bit of advice, see if the lab has had any suicides in recent memory. Also, if one or more occurs, gtfo before the stress gets you.
- neolog 6y ago
  Are there labs with more than one recent suicide?
  - wiredfool 6y ago
    I’m a little hazy on it now, but my sister's lab had at least one while she was there, and it directly led to her death a few years later. It was ... not a healthy environment. Some warning signs would have been easier to see from the same coast, and some of them were obvious in hindsight.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      That's horrible. I suppose there's a poetic irony that even in places where you can really transcend people still find a way to hurt eachother.
    - marvin 6y ago
      So sorry to hear that.
    - totemandtoken 6y ago
      My deepest condolences, very sorry to hear that
  - Balgair 6y ago
    My former lab has had 2 since 2012. I know of other labs at the school with more than that. I left, but not as the person I thought was going to leave when I started. The advice on talking to students is absolutely correct. And to be very clear, if you do not find any good labs in the schools you were admitted to: Do Not Go To Grad School At All. Reapply to other schools and wait. A year waiting is worth the 4 on the backend being a drone in a bad lab.
- ColanR 6y ago
  How would you check that? I remember there was a (rumored) suicide at my school while I was there, and it was hushed up really well so that even a lot of students wouldn't have heard about it. Far as I know, there isn't a searchable database of 'suicides per school'.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Web search for obits. If someone dies young and the reason isn't clearly stated, it's suicide.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Or overdose.
  - gumby 6y ago
    MIT does not cover the, up, to my knowledge. Quite the opposite. The only one I knew personally died for reasons unrelated to the Instititute— in fact it was one of his bright spots in some ways (though he suffered dreadfully from the imposter syndrome as well so in other ways it made things worse). However MIT can be a very difficult place and I don’t want to gloss over that. And I think the institute could do a lot to improve things.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    I suppose I can't say for sure but I remember plenty of them in the school newspaper, at least a few a year usually. Sometimes the reason was easy to deduce, sometimes it was ambiguous as is often the case in possible suicides.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Divorces, too. A family member was applying to med schools, and during one of the visits there was a boast of a >100% divorce rate among students. Every married student who entered that program was divorced by the end, as were some who got married during the program. To have such a stressful program is bad enough, but to boast about it as a sign of prestige and dedication is even worse.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    That's scary because being married is positively correlated with success in professional school.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    > to boast about it What the actual fuck? Why would anyone who loves their wife or husband choose to enter such a program? (Best-case scenario: a few years of data produced this anomalous result, someone noticed it and decided to draw attention to it, and it has since scared away all married students, so that there will never be any future data points to contradict it.) Still, from what I know about medical school and residency in general, any place that periodically assigns 24-hour work shifts just because is ... perverse. Edit: Ok, it's not 100% "just because"; there are some rationalizations. https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/residency/3-tips-new-med-school-grads-facing-old-24-hour-shift https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/residency/3-tips...
    - jseliger 6y ago
      Still, from what I know about medical school and residency in general, any place that periodically assigns 24-hour work shifts just because is ... perverse. It's worse than you think: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-nurse-or-physicians-assistant-instead-of-a-doctor-the-underrated-perils-of-medical-school https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-n... Once a person has taken on the debt from med school, it's extremely difficult not to continue. Residency programs know this.
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      That was more or less my reaction as well. I could understand there being a few years of anomalous data as a result of small sample size, but to then boast of it rather than taking it as a sign of very serious issues doubles down on a bad sign. I agree that the 24-hour shifts are ridiculous. I could see some potential benefit for reducing the number of shift handoffs (e.g. 12-hour shifts expose patients to 2 shift changes per day, but 8-hour shifts expose patients to 3 shift changes per day), since shift handoffs have been shown to be the source of miscommunications. However, as your link points out, there is no decrease in standard of care resulting from removing 24-hour shifts, so that is not a reason to keep 24-hour shifts. Also, thank you for the link on it, though the tone of that article was definitely odd. It took the lack of effect of shift duration on patient care as a reason to extend shifts back up to 24 hours, rather than concluding that there is no reason to keep shifts at 24 hours. Similarly, it takes as a given that after a 16-hour shift, you only get 8 hours off, rather than treating that as another sign of poor shift scheduling. (From the article, “When you’re on a 16-hour shift that ends Monday at 11 p.m., you still have to come back to the hospital on Tuesday at 7 a.m.,” she noted. “When you’re on a 24-hour shift, you leave on Tuesday at 7 a.m., and you don’t have to report back for duty until Wednesday. That is a better arrangement. You have the rest of the day to do things.”)
wegs 6y ago
Former students too. Talk to them, and look up what they're doing. If a lot of former students ended up where you see yourself in 10 years, that's a great sign. If a lot of former students are in dead-end careers, that's a bad sign. Of course, that discriminates against tenure-track faculty, but avoiding tenure-track faculty is good advice too. Tenured professors have the luxury of being able to care about you. Tenure-track need to do what it takes to succeed.
- dgacmu 6y ago
  Speaking as a tenured professor, I disagree with this -- the trade-offs are more varied than you present them, and the individual differences are probably larger than the categorical differences. It's probably true in general that the younger professors are more likely to both stay up until 3:00 in the morning writing a paper with you and expect you to stay up until 3:00 in the morning writing that paper, but I don't think there is any difference in how much they care or don't about their students. (The flip side of this advice is often presented as the junior faculty are more likely to help you write a lot of papers, if that's your goal. But again, look at the person. ) (I agree completely with talking to former students, of course. More information is always good. )
  - wegs 6y ago
    I agree the individual differences are larger than the categorical differences. From my time in grad school, I don't mind working at 3 am (and most other grad students I knew, at least without families, didn't mind that either). The problem was the abusive nastiness. You're presuming student and faculty interests are otherwise aligned. They're not. The most successful paths to academic success I've seen include: * Spending time raising money, hiring a ton of students, and getting a few good publications by law of large numbers * Attaching students to many projects, and when one shows promise, sprinting to do most of the work to claim first authorship on a breakthrough result (at the expense of collaborators), and neglecting the rest of the projects / students (at the expense of the rest of the lab). * ... and so on. There is also a question of who becomes associated with the breakthrough: the student or the advisor? Yes, the first/last author split in publication helps, but at the end of the day, someone goes out and gives talks, media interviews, etc. I've seen plenty of student s-ed because the faculty member (who often did minimal work) takes credit for their work. And there are megaprojects, where there's one nice result at the end, and a half-dozen graduate students who work on it doing menial engineering/lab work. Labs like that end up with zero students going for faculty (or other highly-competitive) jobs. In other words, aside from baking data, most tactics to academic success involve carefully optimizing the odds, and burning a number of students and/or collaborators to have tenure-granting results associated with the faculty member. As a footnote, back in the day, I was blessed with a terrific advisor, but the MAJORITY of faculty at MIT are abusive douche bags, and the system is set up entirely to protect them. And most students I know who left MIT into faculty slots did that by cheating at least a little bit, whether through credit theft, baking research results, or otherwise. Most MIT grad students don't cheat, mind you, but most highly successful ones do (and yes, I am in a position where I've seen many of these case play out at MIT, and a few at other institutions). Those go into tenure-track positions, and abuse their students the same way they were abused. Former students also have a better viewpoint. Many people don't realize they were abused until years later, when they can look back on an experience objectively. Among my cohort, the number of people who would say they were abused today are much greater than the number of people who would have said it at the time.
m463 6y ago
I think this is how Steve Jobs worked out who was good. He would go to people and say "I heard so-and-so sucks" and if he didn't suck people would adamantly stand up for so-and-so, but if he DID suck, there would be a lackluster response.
- harry8 6y ago
  Good way to find out who is liked. Terrible way to find out who is good. Stalinist managment style. Pretty vile. I heard Steve Jobs is totally amazing and wonderful and cool and wise but sucks so hard at noticing talent he has fall back on techniques like randomly claiming people suck and seeing the response. Bet you'd get a lacklustre response from that.
  - z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
    He wasn't that wise either though, his only real talent was and marketing and being able to give a charismatic speech
    - not2b 6y ago
      He was an abusive jerk, but he did a lot more right than marketing and speechmaking.
Upvoter33 6y ago
This is great advice. Talk to as many people as possible, including those who didn't make it through to PhD. If you talk to those who made it, you are getting a very biased sample. Ask to talk to some students who left with a masters or otherwise.
Gibbon1 6y ago
Two friends of mine who went to grad school said there is one and only one metric to select a graduate advisor. How many of his students complete their PhD and how long that takes. That's it. There is no other metric. None. You might think 'but...' No! Don't do that.
kkylin 6y ago
As a tenured professor (math), I generally agree but would say it a little differently: yes, definitely talk to students and avoid advisors when there are warning signs. OTOH, even "great" advisors that everyone loves may not be a good fit for you. Like any other personal relationship, advisor-advisee is a function of both you and the advisor, and you need to find one who fits you well. This goes beyond intellectual interests into personality, advising style, etc. For example, some advisors are very hands-on in terms of giving guidance on projects, while others (like my own) are very much hands-off and lets the student find their own way. The latter worked for me, but isn't everyone's cup of tea. The former is great for students who like more guidance (esp at the beginning of research) but is not for every student. The same goes to other areas of advisor-advisee relations: paper writing, job hunting, etc. Edit: to address a main point in the article: don't get me wrong, there certainly is such a thing as abuse. "Compatibility" isn't everything. I was just pointing out that it is an important consideration in choosing advisors; a great advisor for your friends may not be great for you.

wiredfool 6y ago

Another bit of advice, see if the lab has had any suicides in recent memory. Also, if one or more occurs, gtfo before the stress gets you.

neolog 6y ago
Are there labs with more than one recent suicide?
- wiredfool 6y ago
  I’m a little hazy on it now, but my sister's lab had at least one while she was there, and it directly led to her death a few years later. It was ... not a healthy environment. Some warning signs would have been easier to see from the same coast, and some of them were obvious in hindsight.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    That's horrible. I suppose there's a poetic irony that even in places where you can really transcend people still find a way to hurt eachother.
  - marvin 6y ago
    So sorry to hear that.
  - totemandtoken 6y ago
    My deepest condolences, very sorry to hear that
- Balgair 6y ago
  My former lab has had 2 since 2012. I know of other labs at the school with more than that. I left, but not as the person I thought was going to leave when I started. The advice on talking to students is absolutely correct. And to be very clear, if you do not find any good labs in the schools you were admitted to: Do Not Go To Grad School At All. Reapply to other schools and wait. A year waiting is worth the 4 on the backend being a drone in a bad lab.
ColanR 6y ago
How would you check that? I remember there was a (rumored) suicide at my school while I was there, and it was hushed up really well so that even a lot of students wouldn't have heard about it. Far as I know, there isn't a searchable database of 'suicides per school'.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Web search for obits. If someone dies young and the reason isn't clearly stated, it's suicide.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Or overdose.
- gumby 6y ago
  MIT does not cover the, up, to my knowledge. Quite the opposite. The only one I knew personally died for reasons unrelated to the Instititute— in fact it was one of his bright spots in some ways (though he suffered dreadfully from the imposter syndrome as well so in other ways it made things worse). However MIT can be a very difficult place and I don’t want to gloss over that. And I think the institute could do a lot to improve things.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  I suppose I can't say for sure but I remember plenty of them in the school newspaper, at least a few a year usually. Sometimes the reason was easy to deduce, sometimes it was ambiguous as is often the case in possible suicides.
MereInterest 6y ago
Divorces, too. A family member was applying to med schools, and during one of the visits there was a boast of a >100% divorce rate among students. Every married student who entered that program was divorced by the end, as were some who got married during the program. To have such a stressful program is bad enough, but to boast about it as a sign of prestige and dedication is even worse.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  That's scary because being married is positively correlated with success in professional school.
- waterhouse 6y ago
  > to boast about it What the actual fuck? Why would anyone who loves their wife or husband choose to enter such a program? (Best-case scenario: a few years of data produced this anomalous result, someone noticed it and decided to draw attention to it, and it has since scared away all married students, so that there will never be any future data points to contradict it.) Still, from what I know about medical school and residency in general, any place that periodically assigns 24-hour work shifts just because is ... perverse. Edit: Ok, it's not 100% "just because"; there are some rationalizations. https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/residency/3-tips-new-med-school-grads-facing-old-24-hour-shift https://www.ama-assn.org/residents-students/residency/3-tips...
  - jseliger 6y ago
    Still, from what I know about medical school and residency in general, any place that periodically assigns 24-hour work shifts just because is ... perverse. It's worse than you think: https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-nurse-or-physicians-assistant-instead-of-a-doctor-the-underrated-perils-of-medical-school https://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-n... Once a person has taken on the debt from med school, it's extremely difficult not to continue. Residency programs know this.
  - MereInterest 6y ago
    That was more or less my reaction as well. I could understand there being a few years of anomalous data as a result of small sample size, but to then boast of it rather than taking it as a sign of very serious issues doubles down on a bad sign. I agree that the 24-hour shifts are ridiculous. I could see some potential benefit for reducing the number of shift handoffs (e.g. 12-hour shifts expose patients to 2 shift changes per day, but 8-hour shifts expose patients to 3 shift changes per day), since shift handoffs have been shown to be the source of miscommunications. However, as your link points out, there is no decrease in standard of care resulting from removing 24-hour shifts, so that is not a reason to keep 24-hour shifts. Also, thank you for the link on it, though the tone of that article was definitely odd. It took the lack of effect of shift duration on patient care as a reason to extend shifts back up to 24 hours, rather than concluding that there is no reason to keep shifts at 24 hours. Similarly, it takes as a given that after a 16-hour shift, you only get 8 hours off, rather than treating that as another sign of poor shift scheduling. (From the article, “When you’re on a 16-hour shift that ends Monday at 11 p.m., you still have to come back to the hospital on Tuesday at 7 a.m.,” she noted. “When you’re on a 24-hour shift, you leave on Tuesday at 7 a.m., and you don’t have to report back for duty until Wednesday. That is a better arrangement. You have the rest of the day to do things.”)

wegs 6y ago

Former students too. Talk to them, and look up what they're doing. If a lot of former students ended up where you see yourself in 10 years, that's a great sign. If a lot of former students are in dead-end careers, that's a bad sign. Of course, that discriminates against tenure-track faculty, but avoiding tenure-track faculty is good advice too. Tenured professors have the luxury of being able to care about you. Tenure-track need to do what it takes to succeed.

dgacmu 6y ago
Speaking as a tenured professor, I disagree with this -- the trade-offs are more varied than you present them, and the individual differences are probably larger than the categorical differences. It's probably true in general that the younger professors are more likely to both stay up until 3:00 in the morning writing a paper with you and expect you to stay up until 3:00 in the morning writing that paper, but I don't think there is any difference in how much they care or don't about their students. (The flip side of this advice is often presented as the junior faculty are more likely to help you write a lot of papers, if that's your goal. But again, look at the person. ) (I agree completely with talking to former students, of course. More information is always good. )
- wegs 6y ago
  I agree the individual differences are larger than the categorical differences. From my time in grad school, I don't mind working at 3 am (and most other grad students I knew, at least without families, didn't mind that either). The problem was the abusive nastiness. You're presuming student and faculty interests are otherwise aligned. They're not. The most successful paths to academic success I've seen include: * Spending time raising money, hiring a ton of students, and getting a few good publications by law of large numbers * Attaching students to many projects, and when one shows promise, sprinting to do most of the work to claim first authorship on a breakthrough result (at the expense of collaborators), and neglecting the rest of the projects / students (at the expense of the rest of the lab). * ... and so on. There is also a question of who becomes associated with the breakthrough: the student or the advisor? Yes, the first/last author split in publication helps, but at the end of the day, someone goes out and gives talks, media interviews, etc. I've seen plenty of student s-ed because the faculty member (who often did minimal work) takes credit for their work. And there are megaprojects, where there's one nice result at the end, and a half-dozen graduate students who work on it doing menial engineering/lab work. Labs like that end up with zero students going for faculty (or other highly-competitive) jobs. In other words, aside from baking data, most tactics to academic success involve carefully optimizing the odds, and burning a number of students and/or collaborators to have tenure-granting results associated with the faculty member. As a footnote, back in the day, I was blessed with a terrific advisor, but the MAJORITY of faculty at MIT are abusive douche bags, and the system is set up entirely to protect them. And most students I know who left MIT into faculty slots did that by cheating at least a little bit, whether through credit theft, baking research results, or otherwise. Most MIT grad students don't cheat, mind you, but most highly successful ones do (and yes, I am in a position where I've seen many of these case play out at MIT, and a few at other institutions). Those go into tenure-track positions, and abuse their students the same way they were abused. Former students also have a better viewpoint. Many people don't realize they were abused until years later, when they can look back on an experience objectively. Among my cohort, the number of people who would say they were abused today are much greater than the number of people who would have said it at the time.

m463 6y ago

I think this is how Steve Jobs worked out who was good. He would go to people and say "I heard so-and-so sucks" and if he didn't suck people would adamantly stand up for so-and-so, but if he DID suck, there would be a lackluster response.

harry8 6y ago
Good way to find out who is liked. Terrible way to find out who is good. Stalinist managment style. Pretty vile. I heard Steve Jobs is totally amazing and wonderful and cool and wise but sucks so hard at noticing talent he has fall back on techniques like randomly claiming people suck and seeing the response. Bet you'd get a lacklustre response from that.
- z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
  He wasn't that wise either though, his only real talent was and marketing and being able to give a charismatic speech
  - not2b 6y ago
    He was an abusive jerk, but he did a lot more right than marketing and speechmaking.

Upvoter33 6y ago

This is great advice. Talk to as many people as possible, including those who didn't make it through to PhD. If you talk to those who made it, you are getting a very biased sample. Ask to talk to some students who left with a masters or otherwise.

Gibbon1 6y ago

Two friends of mine who went to grad school said there is one and only one metric to select a graduate advisor. How many of his students complete their PhD and how long that takes. That's it. There is no other metric. None. You might think 'but...' No! Don't do that.

kkylin 6y ago

As a tenured professor (math), I generally agree but would say it a little differently: yes, definitely talk to students and avoid advisors when there are warning signs. OTOH, even "great" advisors that everyone loves may not be a good fit for you. Like any other personal relationship, advisor-advisee is a function of both you and the advisor, and you need to find one who fits you well. This goes beyond intellectual interests into personality, advising style, etc. For example, some advisors are very hands-on in terms of giving guidance on projects, while others (like my own) are very much hands-off and lets the student find their own way. The latter worked for me, but isn't everyone's cup of tea. The former is great for students who like more guidance (esp at the beginning of research) but is not for every student. The same goes to other areas of advisor-advisee relations: paper writing, job hunting, etc. Edit: to address a main point in the article: don't get me wrong, there certainly is such a thing as abuse. "Compatibility" isn't everything. I was just pointing out that it is an important consideration in choosing advisors; a great advisor for your friends may not be great for you.