> Every professor had a pitch for why his research was the most exciting but the lab I spent the most time with told me “when I was your age I also went shoppin

> Every professor had a pitch for why his research was the most exciting but the lab I spent the most time with told me “when I was your age I also went shopping for labs like you are and one of the professors told me he was studying quantum magnetism. So I thought to myself ‘that sounds like something that could impress girls at bars’ so I went to work there.” That reasoning made a lot of sense to me so I signed up for his lab right there and then. This is fine for undergraduate research assistants since it's unreasonable to expect an undergrad to be able to judge a research program on its merits and you're expected to switch labs in the future anyway. It's much more concerning that graduate students usually select research labs without being able to assess the basic scientific case on the merits. The issue is that once you pick your PhD topic, it's logistically very hard to change research focus more than slightly for the rest of your career. So research programs can get perpetuated across multiple generations even if no well-informed student would start down that path.