School's prestige / Publication / PI - to be a professor?

molliebatmit
Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:04:33 +0000

In a fundamental sense, the institution doesn’t matter for either graduate school or postdocs – it’s the PI under whom you’re working who matters. There tend to be more top-quality PIs at top-quality programs, but there are still mediocre PIs in all top programs, and superstar PIs in mediocre programs.

But if you go to a superstar PI’s lab in a great program, you still have to produce an outstanding publication record – no PI will hire you for a postdoc based merely on the fact that you were in Superstar X’s lab for your PhD. You have to produce the goods. Given the resources available in a top lab, this is somewhat easier to do than in other places, but doing good science is never actually easy.