<p>After looking at some professors, it seems a lot of their graduate students tend to be students from their country of origin. Is it common for professors to favor accepting graduate students from their home country? We’re talking about professors who weren’t born in the US.</p>
<p>it’s conceivable that one would prefer to work with somebody who speaks their language (culturally too), especially if they’ve never quite gotten english.</p>
<p>however, i doubt it’s a perk of greater magnitude than, say, 168 vs 169 on the GRE</p>
<p>A few of the profs at my school are like as I described. There’s an Indian professor and 6/8 of his graduate students are from India. The professor has been living in the US for quite a while though. Another eastern Asian prof has only eastern Asian graduate students. This could just be a coincidence though.</p>
<p>In my experience it’s usually the other way round: students prefer advisers who they can relate to. That’s how the Chinese professors end up with the Chinese students and the female professors with the female students. I’ve never personally felt discriminated against by a professor, even if I was very unlike the rest of their research group. (That doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel out of place socially…)</p>
<p>I’ve heard occasional stories of faculty with clear prejudices, but in the vast majority of cases, it seems that “unbalanced” research groups are due to choices made by the students.</p>
<p>Probably unconsciously. People have unconscious race biases - if you ask them explicitly if they prefer people from their own race, they’ll probably vehemently deny it because they don’t even realize it themselves. There’s a good amount of research on this in the psychological literature (I do some dabbling myself). But the truth is, people perceive themselves as having more in common with people who look like them and come from their country of origin, and people think that they work better with people they have more in common with, so it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that professors of all races and national origins tend to unconsciously prefer to work with people of their own races. However, it’s not going to get unqualified scholars in.</p>
<p>Personally, as an African American woman in a field where we’re underrepresented - severely - I would like to have an African American mentor, or a female mentor, who I can get real advice about navigating the academic world as an ethnic minority and/or how to be a woman in academia balancing a family life. And as an aspiring professor, I do hope to be a mentor and role model for other African American women entering my field. Many Indian professors may feel this way, too, either consciously or unconsciously. But one of my advisors is a white man and he’s fantastic, and I’m willing to work with anyone who shares research interests with me.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that some assistant profs from other countries do this… not sure why though? Maybe easier communication?</p>
<p>However, most established profs don’t I think… my current supervisor has a really diverse lab group.</p>