You seem so clueless that you shouldn’t really be in a position to advise a student! If the ghost student was signing up for credit, just fail him/her. Or at the very least you should just drop the student email asking what’s up and what your plans should be before taking any nasty action (like above).

Damn!

As a prospective student, you should not be afraid to ask for exactly how the graduates from the specific program/lab/advisor have been performing on the job market. For some advisors you can do this by looking at his/her CV and a bit of googling on the web, stalking those whom you have never even seen before. I think getting that info really is the only way to predict how you might typically end up after getting a degree with the advisor. If his/her past students have been performing well, the advisor is often very happy to let you know that. If not, well, you will be taking a chance with that advisor.

And if you find out that you are not a good match with your advisor for your goal, you should not be afraid at all to switch advisors or transfer to another school at an “early” phase. I’ve seen so many students doing that to end up with a better situation for themselves. Good luck!!

HOWEVER …

Deciding that someone would make a great advisor for you based on one good meeting makes about as much sense as deciding to marry someone after a good first date. I think that the most one can hope for from these campus visits is to identify places that are obvious “no’s” (i.e. students seem uniformly unhappy, your dream advisor acts like a jerk, etc.). Beyond that, my advice is to go somewhere where there are at least two or three professors that you could see yourself working with. Then take their classes, go to their office hours, and after a semester of meaningful contact, make your choice.

Do students take 10 years to finish in that lab and still not get good jobs afterward?

Also, one more thing – it is vastly easier to get an academic job as an experimentalist in physics. There is no comparison – your life will be easier and smoother on average (fewer postdocs, far more likely to get a tenure track position, more positions to apply for, etc.).

This is essentially what I did. It most certainly doesn’t work against you. The biggest problem is that you might not get enough credit for it, in terms of waiving required classes, as you might like. Many schools will allow you to try to take their qualifying exam immediately (rather than after a year), and if you get some samples from them and practice over the previous summer, you’d probably be well prepared to do that. This would get you into research earlier.

Your higher preparation will be valued by potential advisors in general.