<p>I knew I’d have this problem when I made up my adviser list, but somehow I kept on thinking it would resolve itself by the time I got to the accepting admittance stage. Given, I’m not quite there yet, but it’s inching closer with each passing day.</p>
<p>My problem, is that it seems that a large number of the professors I want to work for are assistant or associate profs. I know. I know. I shouldn’t even be considering such people, but, generally speaking, their research tends to look much more exciting and, for some reason, closer to what I want to do. In my defense, the non-tenured professors I’ve been drawn to all have at least a year or two(or 4-5 in the case of associate) of academic work, though that may be bad in that their review would be coming up soon. Then again, they still have loyal M.S. and Ph.D. students working under them. </p>
<p>So is there anyway to tell who will make it and who won’t? I was thinking perhaps on the basis of published papers, NSF or faculty awards, patents, size of their lab, number of ongoing projects, etc. I have a feeling that because my focus is on NEMS and nanoscience, the novelty of the field means that the schools are recruiting a lot of new talent to play catchup even at the higher ranked schools.</p>
<p>UIUC has about 4/6 of the main mech E. nano people in the same limbo.</p>
<p>GATech, UT Austin, I could go on…</p>
<p>This too could be a good or bad thing, in that, it’s possible that they want to build a significant faculty roster for say a separate nanotech department 10-15 years down the road, like they’re doing for bioengineering right now. It could also mean that a lot of these will be out in a year or two. </p>
<p>Any thoughts? This is actually a big issue for deciding whether to go with MS or PhD - I applied for different degrees in different schools.</p>
<p>why should you not even consider working for assistant or associate profs? it either means they are young or don’t do good work. it should be pretty easy to tell the difference.</p>
<p>Because if they fail to get tenure and leave the university, I will have to go wherever they go, find a new adviser halfway or more through my research. Even worse, I may find no one and have to drop out because of inadequate support or financial reasons.</p>
<p>i know as “fact” (as published on a specific uni’s website) that associate professor has qualified for tenure at that university. distinguished assoc. profs get a professorship. i know this “format” exists, but i’m not suggesting the format is universal across all universities.</p>
<p>here’s a question for you all:</p>
<p>for tenureship - what specifically does the committee look at when deciding who gets tenure. do they look at ONLY</p>
<ul>
<li>the work done by the candidate during their time as assist. prof?</li>
<li>does it include whatever publications/work that came out prior to their hiring e.g. their PhD work?</li>
<li>would it include anything they do PRIOR to PhD? (suppose they worked in a lab for several years and produced 2-3 quality publications.</li>
</ul>
<p>i.e. during tenure review, is it the ENTIRE CV, or just the work done since they were hired?</p>
<p>for tenureship, it’s mostly depended on what they have accomplished during their time as a professor and, especially, a researcher at the university. Also, it depends on the department. For example, the department chair of UT CS said that our CS department prides itself in tenuring most of the professors they hire. </p>
<p>Believe it or not, there are upsides to working with non-tenured professors. They will drive you hard. Thus, you will publish many papers as a result.</p>
<p>Well, that’s not just an MIT thing. A LOT of schools do the same thing - hire far more assistant profs than they will ever give tenure to.</p>
<p>For example, I have it on good authority that over 75% of the new assistant profs at Harvard Business School will never get tenure. Granted, a lot of that is due to self-selection. For example, some will just quit in order to take jobs in industry (i.e. usually high-level positions in consulting or investment banking). Some will take tenured positions at other universities rather than wait for a decision from HBS. Yes, in case you are wondering, you can be offered tenure at a school that you’re not actually working at - this usually comes from lower-ranked schools. For example, Boston University and NorthEastern sometimes offer fully tenured positions to HBS assistant profs who are doing well, and if they are risk-averse, they might just take that rather than wait for a possibly negative tenure decision from HBS. </p>
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<p>Again, this depends on the department and the school. Some departments run a system where tenure decisions are decided while you are an associate prof. So the first hurdle you have to clear is the promotion from asst prof to assoc prof. If you clear that, then you still have to get tenure. Hence, a strong dichotomy separates associate profs with tenure, and associate profs without tenure, even though they all hold the rank of associate prof. </p>
<p>So the point is, it varies from school to school and department to department. </p>
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<p>I agree this can be problematic. But what may somewhat mitigate the issue is that often times you can still have that prof serve on your dissertation committee, regardless of where he ends up (even if he is out of academia completely). In fact, it is generally perfectly valid to pull your final committe from multiple schools. I know one guy at Harvard whose doctoral committee will have only a single Harvard prof - the rest will come from MIT and BU. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they’re all within a few miles of each other. </p>
<p>But it can indeed be problematic to have your main advisor have to leave halfway in. Hence, it is certainly safer to be in a group with a fully-tenured prof. </p>
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<p>This seems to be highly specific to your department and your field. I can immediately think of certain fields that will look at your ENTIRE C.V. - so much so that many doctoral students are actually * disincentivized * to graduate early, because the moment they do so and take an assistant prof job, the tenure clock starts ticking. Hence, it actually makes sense, strategically, to actually delay your graduation so that you can publish more papers so that you look even better when your tenure review is up. </p>
<p>The other aspect is simply getting a tenure-track job in the first place. I know a woman in her 40’s who is finishing her doctorate at Harvard right now. But she has basically spent the last 2 decades working as a researcher, and has published a huge stack of highly regarded papers. So in her last year, she didn’t even really need to go on the standard job talk around the country - as basically every single department in the country knew who she was and wanted to offer her a tenure-track assistant prof position, and she’s probably going to stay at Harvard. Now, one could say that she had an ‘unfair’ head start over everybody else who was trying to get a tenure-track job, as, unlike most doctoral students, she had already been publishing for decades. But the schools didn’t care about that. They just saw her highly impressive total list of publications and offered her the job immediately. In fact, frankly, she has more publications right now (as just a finishing doctora student) than do a lot of Harvard associate profs who just got tenure. Hence, that means that, presuming she maintains her pace and does all of the administrative tasks the school wants her to do, she’s probably a shoo-in to ultimately get tenure, just based on the strength of all her past work. Again, one could say that that’s not really ‘fair’, but hey, ‘fair’ has nothing to do with it. </p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame her. She’s worked hard and she deserves success. I’m just saying that a system like this does perhaps tend to create perverse incentives - i.e. students who decide to slow their graduation just to delay the tenure clock.</p>
<p>No, you can never tell whether a professor will get tenure. Often, the department itself is surprised when tenure is denied after it recommended it. </p>
<p>There are several stages to tenure review, and all in all, it takes about a year to complete the process. Some professors get fast-tracked for tenure when they come from highly regarded backgrounds — usually from another school or with substantial research and publications. These profs are generally hired as Associate Professors, but without tenure. (As someone else said, usually Associate Professors have tenure.) Assistant Professors are generally those who are in the first ten years or less of their careers. There are exceptions to this last, but I won’t get into it here.</p>
<p>In a nutshell, tenure committees take the following into account: publications (are they numerous? in respected journals? do they reflect innovative scholarly work?), teaching (evaluations, the number of grad students, if applicable, and the quality of the grad student work), research (this ties into publications for the humanities and grant money for the sciences and some of the social sciences), outside recommendations from experts in the field, and service to the university (committee work, advising, all the soft stuff that students never see). Students are rarely in the position of being able to evaluate the quality of research as compared to a national pool, of publications, and of service. That’s why you can’t predict success, although you <em>can</em> increase the odds by being another student.</p>
<p>If you are in the sciences AND an assistant professor supports you, you can be relatively certain that the prof has grant money, which is usually tied to quality research.</p>
<p>Not necessarily. I’m saying that if an assistant prof has money to support students, then he probably has grant money, which is an important part of getting tenure. (Some assist. profs do ride on grants that the entire department gets, so you can’t always be sure of this.) If you have a choice between assistant professors, go with the one who can support the most students.</p>
<p>There are so many politics within academia, however, that if a more senior professor wants to work with you, then you should go with it. A senior name also gives you better leverage in the job market since his recommendation will hold a lot of weight. However, not all students get the opportunity to work with the most famous profs in the department.</p>