lab choice?

[Jarwulf]

Alright, I decided to try out working in a lab. I'm faced with the choice between several labs I know little about besides what little I'm able to glean off the net. Its far from certain that any will take me but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

 

I'm interested in bioinformatics/computational in the context of biomedical type work. Unfortunately bioinformatics/computational stuff is the kind of thing that is too new to have many practitioners in most academic institutions.

 

There's one place which focuses on computational studies and evo morphology. Not really interested at all in the evolution part.

 

There's another place that fits the bill but from research appears to have no funding and perhaps no students either.

 

Other than that there are three other labs which are more of your traditional wetlab biomed focused, one of them at least appears to have funding and a healthy team, the other one has a younger PI who as an advisor might be better positioned to help me, the last focuses on a topic slightly more to my interest but information about it is hard to come by and from second hand sources the PI may not be as approachable.

 

I've been thinking about a decision and it isn't easy. I've heard horror stories about picking a lab with an ahole or one where you go nowhere. I keep worrying about bad consequences if I contact/reject too many and I'm caught between a desire to probe for as much information as possible and simply playing it safe and making up my mind sooner. Anyone else experience this sort of situation?

Edited September 3, 2011 by Jarwulf

[spin-1/2-nuclei]

I've been thinking about a decision and it isn't easy. I've heard horror stories about picking a lab with an ahole or one where you go nowhere. I keep worrying about bad consequences if I contact/reject too many and I'm caught between a desire to probe for as much information as possible and simply playing it safe and making up my mind sooner. Anyone else experience this sort of situation?

 

Hello,

 

Are all of these labs at the same UNI? Picking the wrong lab can definitely be a nightmare, politics are a big part of graduate school, and if for whatever reason you do end up joining the wrong lab (assuming all these Profs are at the same school) then you will be best off leaving the lab in your first semester before you've done too much research.

 

To avoid picking the wrong prof, try to sit through the group meeting of each prof before you select a lab (assuming these are all at the same school). Going to one or two group meetings (assuming they have weekly meetings - some groups don't) will give you a very good idea of how the professor interacts with his/her students and what they consider important...

 

Personality clashes with you advisor are unfortunate - but they don't have to be the end of the world as long as you like your project.

 

That being said,

the first thing you will want to do is make sure that you know exactly what kind of advising style you are looking for. In my experience (Chem PhD) there are typically 6 major types of advisors at every school.

 

1. The micromanager (he/she will NEVER let you have - let alone work on - your own ideas)

 

2. The BFF (this person will be so chummy there will be no clear lines between where the PI begins and the student ends, seems fun at first, but trust me it gets old really quick) - an unfortunate variation of this is the touchy-feely/overtly flirty BFF advisor (run don't walk away from those)

 

3. The who are you and what are you doing in my office advisor (this person has a group managed mostly by an army of post docs and there are so many graduate students nobody actually knows/cares/or can remember your name. If you are independent and like to be able to have your own creative input on your project this kind of advisor is actually ideal.

 

4. (Incompetent) - The shut-up and try the experiment again advisor, (this person is a variation of number 1 only the change is deadly. It is possible to work for a micromanaging advisor but the incompetent advisor is impossible to work for. He/she has wandered dangerously outside his/her field and didn't bother to prep for the transition (why should they, they know everything that is what PhD means?) and they will make you do all the work for them. You will likely be taking classes in areas not related at all to your desired field of study, you will spend most of your PhD getting half-competent in an unrelated field under the guise of a collaboration whilst your skills needed to advance in your chosen field get rusty.

 

5. The asshole - this advisor typically has at least one or two minions and they will be the bane of your existence all through your PhD if you don't get in good with them. They are unfortunately typically incompetent and love to steal other ppls research. Often the asshole advisor is incompetent as well, but that is not always the case. This guy sees graduate students as replaceable lab equipment. That is why there are only 3 hoods available in his lab but he took 5 of you. Somehow you will work it out - sink or swim bitches! - this is the guy who forgets to fill in your paperwork so your pay gets delayed, puts the minions on your paper for their "input" into your project (which is typically none), and pretty much makes your entire grad school experience suck in any way that he possibly can.

 

6. The professional - this advisor is also one of my favorites. They are typically willing to help you as much as they can, but at the same time give you the freedom to try out your own ideas. They have a healthy mix of accepting responsibility for training PhD students whilst balancing their commitments to their career. They are typically - but not always - tenured profs. They typically have group meeting once a week or twice a month. They don't micromanage, but will provide you input when you present them with the required data in support of your project at meetings. You typically have to address them as Dr. so and so and you're typically only ever invited to their house during Christmas parties and other such holidays.

 

How to spot them - to the best of my knowledge:

 

1. The micromanager - when you meet them - will already be planning out your entire PhD. They will not bother to ask you what you like to work on, they will show you what they EXPECT you to work on and even go about telling you how they expect you to do it. Students in their lab will spend about 40% of their week getting prepped for group meeting presentations or 1 on 1 daily interviews with the advisor. Just ask the students in the lab how often the advisor comes around, and what they have to present for group meeting. If it is much more than a chalk talk, or some slides with relevant data - be forewarned - you're likely to get bogged down doing busy work. If you're hyper-efficient you can probably survive in this group, although you might not like it too much (my advice would be to only venture there if you LOVE the research).

 

2. The BFF, will be really chummy with you when you meet with them the first time. Their other students might possibly act inappropriately with them as well (if they are the really bad touchy-feely kind). Pretty much on day one they will ask you to drop the Dr. and call them by their first name. They will spend most of the meeting asking you about your personal life and you might walk out of the interview with them having no idea what they actually work on, expect from you, etc. Expect group meeting to take place at a local bar or restaurant - if you have meetings at all.. So long as they're not the inappropriate kind of touchy-feely advisor you can survive in this group too.. Just don't expect your advisor to take too much interest in your work or help you all that much. Again, if you're independent you can do well in this group too and it is a plus over the micromanager in the sense that you will have basic free reign over your project in many cases..

 

*note, simply being friendly is one thing, when I say BFF, I mean your advisor is mid 30s still acts 20, asks you if you want to go get a beer, or hang out at his/her place (and it's not a group outing), never talks about research or your project etc.. most of group meeting is spent planning all of the social functions for the group (there are typically many - sometimes multiple times a month etc)..

 

3. The who are you and why are you in my office advisor - is my personal favorite honestly. If you're independent this works great. The group is usually too large to have a chance of getting too chumy, post docs are frequently recycled so there is a constant stream of new knowledge coming in, the advisor is mostly hands off and as long as you are getting good research results you won't really see him unless you are at group meeting or lucky enough to get time to meet with him/her.

 

*note, if you are expecting to learn from your advisor this is a bad bad bad bad bad setup. A lot of people can do really well in a group where the advisor functions more as a mentor and offers support to the graduate students. If you haven't done a lot of undergrad research / holding an MS in your field this group might be a little challenging to enter.. There are all kinds of setbacks when joining a new lab, in this case expect to set up everything you need for your work alone, and expect people to get annoyed when you ask questions and annoyed when you break things.. this is not the kind of group for people that are new to doing research in the lab..

 

4. The incompetent advisor speaks for itself.. don't join that lab. You can sniff this out easily by doing a quick Sci-Finder search. If the advisor has few publications in the past 3 to 4 years (and they aren't a newly minted prof) and they used to have a lot of publications in one specific field that were in decent journals and now nothing - stay away.

 

Or

 

If the advisor has publications in crappy journals for the new field that he/she has branched out to - also consider staying away.

 

Or

 

If they have most of their publications listed from their post doc and they are more than 4 years into the prof job at your UNI - stay away..

 

5. The asshole - This guy is sometimes hard to spot if you look only at your interaction with him in your one on one meeting before group selection - BUT - if you look at how many people graduate from his/her group with a PhD, how many get screwed over by extra classes, are on PERMANENT TA, take longer to graduate than others, if he/she has a pet grad-student. This is typically easy to figure out too - although admittedly not always - because the pet grad-student's name will always come up - pretty much every third sentence - and if you visit a group meeting the pet grad-student (surrounded by the loyal minions) will be tearing whomever's presentation apart. Typically the errors in the presentation will be minor and/or obvious typos/irrelevant but the pet grad-student and the minions will harp on it anyway. Unfortunately, due to their incompetence they won't have any real/useful suggestions of their own - but that isn't really the point is it? The point is that the acronym for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance is NMR not nMR.

 

In groups like this - presentations are usually done in a hostile environment - and lots and lots of second years quit and take a masters. So if all else fails check the graduation stats and don't be afraid to ask how many students have elected (not failed and were forced to take) the masters, although the failure rates are important too - because sometimes those have more to do with the advisor than the student if the lab is a graveyard for PhD hopefuls..

 

 

*Note, this next thing has nothing to do with competence - BUT - if you are joining a new prof's lab - make sure you know what your UNI's policy is for people who are studying under a prof that doesn't make tenure. I had a friend who had to start over when her prof was not tenured and it sucked for her really bad because she was just far enough into the PhD to finally be rolling along and not far enough in to be able to just write when the guy was kicked by the university. In this particular case the denial of tenure was political, his research was good and he immediately got taken up by another school - and the friend had to transfer to the UNI and meet some of their basic requirements due to her not being a senior member of his group at the time of transfer.

 

So yeah, that pretty much sums up everything I know about advisor selection from my personal experience and seeing what other ppl have gone through.

Hope this was helpful..

 

Cheers

Edited September 3, 2011 by spin-1/2-nuclei