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

sakky
Sun, 25 Jan 2009 14:37:03 +0000

To the OP:

Criteria ranking tends to be strongly discipline-specific. For example, it is extremely common within the social sciences, i.e. economics, sociology, or business for even the very top PhD graduates to have no publications whatsoever. Heck, there are even junior faculty at the top schools such as Harvard who still don’t have a single academic publication. As a case in point, Sharon Katz has been an assistant professor at Harvard Business School for more than 2.5 years now yet still doesn’t have even a single publication (although he has an important one forthcoming). That’s not a knock on Katz but rather just an illustration that publishing within the business academic literature is a long and exacting process.

Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School;

The way to get placed in those fields is to have the strong endorsement from a famous advisor, as well as have an idea that has interesting potential, regardless of whether you have any papers. (Interestingly, even those rare graduates who do have publications, but that investigate ‘uninteresting’ research questions, probably won’t get placed at top schools, and the definition of ‘uninteresting’ is a subjective criteria that depends on the hiring committees). School prestige also helps immensely, at least in terms of getting initial job talks; getting your PhD in economics from a place like Harvard or MIT will mean that you will almost certainly get some job talks, even if only at lower-tier schools.

On the other hand, I certainly agree that in other fields such as the natural sciences, what really matters first and foremost are the the number and quality of your publications.