<p>Hey,</p>
<p>If you really can’t stick it out, then you have no choice but to leave. If you feel that staying at the top 10 and being far away from home would lead to sub-par performance, you should definitely leave. Going from a top 10 to a sub 50 is for all intents and purposes, career suicide. Transferring to a top 25 is not career suicide, but even this could hurt. You have to understand that academic positions are very much a rich get richer system and there is a limited amount of upward mobility. I think it’s career suicide in terms of an academic career. If you want to jump to industry, then that depends on who your adviser is and their connections to industry. While this is also true for academia, let’s take for example, the Cornell (a top 10) Chemistry faculty, and I will just list where they got their PhD’s and in parenthesis I will either list their ranking if it is really low, or if it is a big time program, how many PhD’s came from that program:
UNC-Chapel Hill (top 20), Cornell, Caltech (4), Rutgers (ranked 60), Cambridge (2), Stanford (5), Columbia (4), Scripps, Berkeley (4), Oklahoma (ranked 95), Oxford, MIT, Chicago, Yale, UCLA</p>
<p>A good postdoc is not out of reach strictly on where you go, however law of averages says that if you go to a better grad school you have a better chance of getting the better post docs. While a top 25 probably still enables you to get a postdoc at a good institution, the chances if you were at a top 10 just aren’t comparable. </p>
<p>It seems you just want a mediocre post doc, a mediocre post doc leads, on average, to a mediocre tenure track position, if you are lucky. Some PhD’s who go to top 10 programs and get top 10 post docs still end up getting tenure at sub 50 schools. Nothing is a safe bet, so you should try to get the best possible post doc and academic connections while you can.</p>
<p>Also, you must think of it from the perspective of the academic employer. Are you only going to consider jobs close to home? If you couldn’t handle grad school far from home, why would it be any different for post doc positions? Maybe you might not be so forthcoming in terms of why you transferred. But this is a question you should consider for yourself. If you want an academic career, you will not be able to choose where you work. You could go to grad school at school X and get your postdoc 1000-2000 miles away. I think this is something you should get used to. </p>
<p>I think you should stick it out because the opportunities you have at an elite chem program simply cannot and does not compare to sub 50. And while a top 25 is still pretty damn good, it’s not the same.</p>