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

juillet
Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:54:16 +0000

Hm, I wouldn’t say any of them is the single most important factor in a graduate school choice. You want to pick a school on a combination of them. Say, for example, you are choosing between the #2 school who has a famous PI but you don’t get along with him very well, whereas the #4 has a less-well known PI that you really click with. The PI at the lesser known school, other things being equal, will be more useful in your job search than the first PI even though the first school is better ranked, you see? Rankings/prestige are only really important in clusters, not by numbers. I really doubt that a degree from Johns Hopkins (#1 in public health) will net you so many more opportunities than Emory (#6) or Minnesota (#10) – they’re all top 10, they’re all good.

I’d say post-doc at a top university doesn’t help as much because in order to get that, you need to go to a great program for grad school anyway. That’s how people get into those post-docs.

It’s also field-specific.

In general it’s tough to decide whether you need to wait for another year – it’s a highly personal decision. It also depends on what kind of academic setting you want to work in. If you want to be a professor at an R1 school carrying a 2/2 with lots of time for research, obviously you’ll have to aim for a top school. If you’d be perfectly happy becoming a professor at a small liberal arts college or a community college, the school doesn’t have to be so prestigious.

The best way is to investigate and ask where in the past have graduates tended to go? I’m in a joint program; graduates from one department tend to go into government and industry research more often (which I like!) and graduates from the other really tend to become professors and research associates within academia more often, with a liberal sprinkling of industry persons. Your prospective departments’ websites should have a listing of where alumni go afterwards; if they don’t, you should be able to obtain this information from them by asking. (My department’s is useful in that it lists both their first position right out of grad school and their current position, if they can find them.)

If your school is graduating a lot of professors at the kinds of places you want to be, then great. If most of them are going into other kinds of work, then the professors may have those kinds of connections elsewhere and it may not be where you want to be (unless like you’re in an engineering or management/business doctoral program where most graduates don’t become professors anyway).