Going to graduate school in STEM? Choosing a PhD advisor / PI / lab / - Darren Lipomi - UC San Diego
Darren Lipomi - Professor of NanoEngineering & Chemical Engineering at UC San Diego. My thoughts on choosing a lab, advisor, and school for a PhD program.
Thanks to financial support from NSF CBET-1929748. My views do not necessarily reflect those of my institution or sponsor.
lipomigroup.org
Notes:
This time of year I get a lot of requests for advice on picking a grad school (PhD) and lab. Here are my not rules, but “considerations”
Consideration -1 - Should you go to grad school in the first place?
• Must LOVE research
• Not go just because you’ve always been in school and are afraid of the real world (I admit to falling into this category)
• You’re applying to a PhD knowing it’s more consuming than a full time job
• If you’re applying only to become a professor yourself, know that with this mindset, only around 5% of PhDs in all academic fields are employed as tenure-track professors.
Consideration 0 - Research topic
• The “right” topic will probably be a balance of what you’re most excited about (basic research or the longer-term application) + the PI + the group culture.
• Don’t restrict yourself to the topic of your undergraduate research
• The reason students-or anyone-don’t grow is that they spend their precious minutes doing what they already know how to do
• A good analogy is playing a musical instrument. The reason I’m not a better piano player is that I spend way too much time playing stuff I already sound reasonably good playing.
• There are some fields, however, where some PIs may not hire you unless you had a very specific undergraduate training.
• If you can’t get into these labs, it says more about the PI and maybe the field than you.
Consideration 1 - Established vs. up-and-coming PI?
• Big-name PIs and “superlabs” (say more than 20 grad students and postdocs) often get lots of papers and have a lot of funding, but they have disadvantages:
• Students must be highly self-motivated or they will languish
• Quality control and potential for deep scholarship may be limited due to lack of PI involvement. If a deep, scholarly paper emerges from a superlab, it is almost certainly because of an especially good postdoc or senior graduate student. In smaller labs, the PI is more able to guide you into deeper layers of scholarship.
• Better to look at the “derivative.” In which labs is the output/innovation/depth of scholarship actually accelerating?
Consideration 2 - Group culture
• Months may go by where literally nothing good happens. Maybe years. (E.g., 2008)
• Talk to as many graduate students as possible
• Are the students excited? Healthy? Happy with their progress? Collaborative? Values diversity of sex, race, religion, and perhaps especially personality types?
• Isolation is one of the surest routes to depression. Being united by a common mission-e.g., collaborative projects-is the surest bulwark against despair.
Consideration 3 - PI
• We’re going to assume that most PIs are competent researchers, topic experts, and doing something new and interesting. If the PI doesn’t check these boxes in your eyes, look elsewhere
• Choose the PI who will allow you to flourish
• A lot of what I said about group culture also applies to the PI, because the PI influences the culture by their hiring decisions
• Try to find out not only if people in the lab have gotten the types of positions you want (evidence that the PI will support you after leaving the lab and is invested in your success)
• Also try to find out the attrition rate, or whether students have left the group under less than amicable circumstances
• While PIs will put their best foot forward in the visitation weekend, and it’s thus hard to judge the future, but you can get a sense of trust and openness from an advisor
Consideration 4 - Institution and location
• I’m not going to say that a degree from a fancy school doesn’t matter, because in some superficial sense it does. It’s a type of pre-vetting that says if you got into this highly ranked institution, someone has already done the hard work of judging how good you are
• Some top-tier companies that I won’t name have already placed your PhD institutions into tiers and give a hiring and salary premium to people from those places. In some ways, you can understand this behavior in that it de-risks the process of hiring
• However, this mindset on the part of the applicant can be harmful, especially since PIs at “top” places are not often regarded as the most attentive mentors
• Also, the PI is far more important than the “program,” or “department,” which have very little influence on your life after the first year.
• As to location (cold, warm, distance from home, international), this is a highly personal decision, and I really don’t have any insights about it. Most people committed enough to research will find that they don’t have a lot of options, and just have to go where they got into grad school, postdoc, or job.
Пікірлер: 36
Thanks Prof. Lipomi for sharing this useful information. Here is my note for choosing a PhD advisor. 1. should you go to a graduate school for PhD? 2. research topics, don't restrict yourself to your undergraduate topics 3. super lab or smaller lab 4. group culture, talk to as many as graduate students as possible in the lab, ask if they are excited about what they are doing, if they are happy about their progress 5. PI himself/herself, long time relationship with PI, support from PI, drop rate in the group 6. school, department, program, location and rank
fyi, PI is Principal Investigator. Appears to be the lab head and person running the show. Something I had to look up:) Cheers everyone!
Thank you Prof. Lipomi! Can you also speak something about changing fields during grad school?
Stumbled upon this at the right time! Thank you so much!!
This video was so helpful! Thank you so much. I will be starting my PhD in chemical engineering in about one month. I recently realized I want to try going into a different research area than what I had originally planned, so this definitely made me feel a bit better.
Thank you Prof. Lipomi! This is a really great resource for a starting PhD student like me. Will be starting my PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry in UC San Diego this Fall 2020.
Thank you, professor. Very true what you have said, I can feel them as being a grad student.
Thank you Dr Lipomi for your informative videos. It would be a nice addition to your already extremely helpful advices if you would make a video on how to write a research statement for a PhD application. Thank you.
Great video, Dr. Lipomi. Thank you for taking the time and providing the world with some needed insight.
@djlipomi
2 жыл бұрын
Sure thing, thanks!
Thank you professor Lipomi! That was really enlightening. Grateful 🙏
@djlipomi
2 жыл бұрын
You are very welcome
Thank u very much Darren, I am studying my second master now at United States, before this I did not give priority to the things that you said and spent some valueable years of my life in misery. I was very close to leave the academia and start a cloth shop :D . But I decided to give it another shot as my last chance and made better choices, now although I have started my research in a completely new and different area of study, I am learning everyday and I realize how important is it to choose the best advisor and field of study and not only the best university.
Thanks professor Lipomi for your insightful comments. You seem to be a fantastic advisor yourself.
Thankyou so much Prof , this was really helpful and I hope you get well soon .
@djlipomi
2 жыл бұрын
Thank you! 😃
Thanks a lot, dear. This is really helpful and the best video covering every aspect of choosing the supervisor.
Really helpful video for our graduating Nano daughter. Thanks Professor!
Very very helpful! Thank you so much!!
Thanks for the informations! Really helpful. 😀
I see big red on your book shelf! I might just crack it open for a refresher. I miss P-Chem.
Thanks I understand some concept of my PhD topic
Thanks Darren Very Very encouraging
Thanks alot !🙏🏻
Great stuff!
Very insightful even for PostDocs
Very very helpful!!!
Hi Darren, can we say that our PhD topic also sort of determines what are we going to do in our postdoc phase - and later on? Should be only look into postdoc positions or funds which are directly related to our PhD specialisation? Thanks.
Thank you so much for the great video. For consideration 2, I’m not sure how to talk to graduate students about the lab culture. Let’s say that I like your lab and I reach out to arrange a meeting with you. Should I talk to your grad students then when I visit your lab? Should I just google their emails and ask? I’m just thinking that maybe some grad students won’t be very open about their experiences in lab, especially negative ones, as they fear their PI’s or for other reasons.
Thank you~
@djlipomi
2 жыл бұрын
You're welcome 😊
Dear Sir, What is the minimum contribution in a research work in order to be recognized once the work is published?
Hi Dr. Lipomi, watching this video again as I am reaching out to professors for PhD applications (please dont be surprised if I use your suggestions to email you :P). Thank you so much for making this content available to all the aspiring graduate students. I have a few questions about how to gauge the lab culture and the application process 1) Is it a good idea to reach out to current graduate students from a lab to understand the lab culture and other qualities of the lab that are not reflected in the website? 2) How advantageous it is to have or not have relevant experience, specially if your interests are interdisciplinary and you only have some of the required background? 3) Some departments discourage you from contacting professors and some professors discourage you to contact them before applying to the program, what are the reasons? Thank you once again. - Sanskar
I was just thinking… if the prestige of phd institution matters when it comes to tenure-track position application.
So am I literally supposed to call every graduate institution that has interesting work and quiz them on their attrition rates, student positions after leaving the lab, etc? Then do I plot those points out and run an algorithm to find the maximum amount of PhD goodness? Haha. I love the advice, but I don't know how to put that into practice. If someone developed a crawler through all of the college websites and aggregated the data and put it online and indexed it for each field, then visiting that site would be practically actionable. As it stands though, how hard is it to find out attrition rates or the feeling of a lab online? Much too hard to be actionable in polynomial time if the set includes much more than 3 labs. How do we narrow it down to those 3 labs? I think it's pretty silly for someone, who knows so little, to know exactly what field they want to go into. Most people end up studying what their did in their PhD program or as a post-doc because they are already good at those things. And if you ask them what specific thing they wanted to study originally, I guarantee that over 90% of them are not studying that. They're of course, likely in the same field (math, physics, etc), but that's my point. If people only end up broadly in whatever field instead of studying something specifically, then it seems silly to use what specific thing I want to study now as a metric to narrow down the PI/labs to the degree for your advice to be actionable. For all practical purposes, it really is a crap-shoot. And I know we want to have control over our lives, but honestly, it seems like an impossible problem to actually gadge.
🐳