Hi everyone. I am currently in a dilemma about which school to go to.
I got an offer letter from a PhD program for pharmaceutics and my graduate advisor is already determined. She does the exact research that I want to do and she has a lot of funding. I am not completely sure, but I think I will be able to start my research pretty early. However, I did not have the chance to go on a campus tour, because my advisor is really busy, and the city is known to be one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Also, they want my answer by the end of February.
For another school that I want to go to, I had an opportunity to have a campus tour during the interview and I really liked the professors and the school and the area around the campus seemed really safe. This school is also ranked a lot higher than the first school (as in 10+ difference). However, there is no guarantee that I will get in and even if I do, there is no guarantee that I will work under a professor that has a lot of funding.
Which university would you guys choose between these two?
Thank you!
Well, first of all, you have no choice to make yet because you did not get into the second school yet. As of right now, you only have one offer.
To answer the question on face - personally it’s my opinion that if you could see yourself happy doing the research at School B even if it’s not exactly what you want, you should select on atmosphere rather than research. I say the same thing about PIs. Your research interests will continue to morph over time, and you can always find ways to get a little bit closer to what you want to do through collaborations and side projects. And after you graduate you’ll have the freedom to return to what you wanted to do, potentially through a postdoc. However, a miserable PI - or a miserable personal life - can extend your time to degree, stress you out immeasurably and even derail your career.
To be clear, I’m not saying that you should go from, say, wanting to study HIV in LGBTQ individuals to studying obesity in women. But if your original idea was studying HIV in LGBTQ individuals and your PI studies mental health of LGBTQ individuals or HIV in straight women…there are ways to tailor or expand the research the PI does to get to what you want to do.
Two things, though:
Don’t let a “really busy” advisor keep you from going on a campus tour to School A. Book a trip and go. Even if you can’t meet with the advisor the week you are there, you can still visit campus, talk to other professors, meet the students and sit in on a class. I firmly believe PhD hopefuls should visit their departments before going. And I’d keep trying with that busy advisor - even if it’s a 30 minute Skype or phone interview. You should definitely talk to the person chiefly in charge of your education for the next 5-6 years before you commit. Busy isn’t a good excuse, because if you’re too busy to talk to me now when you’re trying to woo me to attend your program, how much time will you have for me as a student?
There are so many things tied up in “dangerous.” While there are places that are notorious for being dangerous and actually ARE dangerous, there are also lots of places that have a reputation for being “dangerous” because they were 30-40 years ago, even though things have changed; or because of the kind of people that live in that place; or because of skewed media reporting. The other thing is that even aggregated crime statistics may not be a good indicator of how safe you’d be, because perhaps the violence and crime in that city is really concentrated. As an exaggerated example, consider a city with a large Mafia presence in which all of the murders and robberies in the past 7 years were committed exclusively on known Mafia members.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you want to LIVE amongst that, mind you, lol. But there are lots of successful graduate students in St. Louis and Baltimore and Birmingham, which are some of the most dangerous cities with large universities located in them.
Wow. Thank you for such a detailed response. I’ll probably go to the school I already got accepted into, so I’ll try to contact the PI more before I go there.