Comments on: On Choosing a Graduate School: A Dialogue

By: rasharasha

rasharasha — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:04:55 +0000

i agree with you(”b”) 100%, ALL THE WAY… Cindy wasn’t ready for you anyway!!!

By: ts

ts — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:21:04 +0000

A decision on whom to date here should really depend on what you want to be doing several years after you leave behind that girlfriend.

I do agree that the match is definitely very important for your sanity and happiness while dating, but, as many have mentioned, a hot (i.e., ranked higher, better reputation, etc.) girl tends to hang around with a lot of other hot girls and friends. In academia, hot, high-maintenance girls do have more substance, in general.

If your goal is to become a professor at a kind of college you attended as an undergrad, you can just see whom your former professors have dated — mostly smoking hot girls or very pretty girl-next-door types. Who’s better to date for your goal? No brainer there.

Once you leave academia, your potential employers in industry, without any appreciation of your work, often measure your coolness by whom you dated in the past. And they only look at how good-looking they were, and none of substance, unless you develop good skills relevant to the employer while dating your girl.

I feel that some well-meaning people are not very honest in undervaluing the great advantage that students with the hottest girlfriends enjoy. These people ignore the fact that most beginning graduate students do not have sufficient experience and expertise in the field to know what their great matches really are to begin with! They figure that out after they score, at which point they might learn better matches are elsewhere — reason why abstinence can be bad.

In general, hotter girls give you more opportunities or values for your future success one way or another, especially at an early stage of career when you need help most. I do strongly agree with Julianne’s recent post that in the end your can always control your own destiny to a great extent, by working even harder and being goal-oriented than your peers with hotter girlfriends. However, beginning students often need to figure that out themselves or be well-informed by those already in the know when deciding on which girl to date. Most average, matching girlfriends wouldn’t frankly tell you that you might end up needing to crawling up so hard in struggle, once your good days together are in the past. And who knows some might even transmit you an STD without telling you about it…

Good thing students now have Google to gather a lot of information these days.

Also, I disagree that playing around with boyfriends in between undergrad and grad schools can be awkward. Experimenting with boys helped me tremendously in figuring out that I do prefer girls, hot or not. And I’m a guy.

By: Massimo

Massimo — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:40:12 +0000

Funny, but the analogy is completely off the mark. Tell the kid that, no matter how great his romance and how much fun he has with Alyssa, in five years she’ll tell him “buh-bye” … thereafter, his chances of dating anyone else are much better if he dates Cindy…

By: Mike M

Mike M — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:16:16 +0000

I frankly find such a view surprising, as I would have thought that most people who had risen far enough to lead a research group would be smart enough to realize that getting in good postdocs whose research complements the skills of the group is far more worthwhile than any arbitrary measure of “pedigree.” As I said, I have been on such search committees, both as a junior and the senior member, at two different institutions, and have never encountered such a star-struck near-sighted attitude.

By: amused

amused — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:52:15 +0000

It’s good to know that there are people out there who don’t let their judgements be influenced by the school someone attended, but i have to say that that is quite unusual from what i’ve seen. To give an example: Someone i know who is a temporary faculty at Faraway U. was involved in assessing postdoc applications for a position in the group he belongs to. (And if the “someone” is me i sure as hell won’t admit it since shouldn’t be talking about this kind of stuff on blogs, even under pseudonym.) In the group of candidates that were seriously considered there wasn’t a whole lot to distinguish between them as far as research goes — they had comparable productivity and comparably nice recommendation letters. (I expect this is quite common. The discussion above in this thread gives the impression that one can clearly differentiate between peoples research records, but in practice this is often not the case.) Two candidates stood out however. One, X, because his area of expertese was a good match for the group. The other, Y, worked on stuff not directly related to what the group does, but stood out on “pedigree” grounds — he had been a postoc at Top-5 U. and worked with big-name people. The prof of the group, himself a phd holder from a Top-5 U., was in no doubt about who he wanted: “Wow, look at Y, he was at Top-5 U, worked with famous dude A and then famous dude B…” At this point the person (P) that i know tried to point out that Y’s actual research record wasn’t any better than the others, and that X’s expertese was a better match for the group. But the prof just didn’t hear it. Literally — he continued as if P had not spoken “Hmmm, to get Y we might have to offer him a tenure-track faculty postion…could be complicated…but I expect he will get other faculty offers from elsewhere…”
The outcome was that Y withdrew from the shortlist because he did indeed get a faculty offer elsewhere. None of the other people, whose research records were comparable to Y’s, received any faculty offers themselves as far as i can tell.

By: Garbage

Garbage — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:11:45 +0000

Sean, honestly, didn’t you decide to go to caltech on a *soft* position rather than going for tenure (or track) to a lower ranked institution?

Top places are good for a simple reason, they are good. Tons of smart people around to talk to, students are good, postdocs are good, etc. Research wise there is no comparison, lots of seminars, visitors to talk to and learn from.

That being said, having a fun advisor and a good research project counts as much as hanging around with the Ivy league. If you do well, you’ll be fine and get a postdoc and faculty job in a good place you’ll enjoy your life and do good job at. Smart people are recognized no matter where they are, but there are a lot of smart guys out there, and not that much to share, so sometimes it boils down to the fine print…

By: Influence | Cosmic Variance

Influence | Cosmic Variance — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:39:26 +0000

[...] of the April 15th angst that Sean described comes from student’s questioning “Will I be a success if I go to [...]

By: Richard E.

Richard E. — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:47:02 +0000

If you posit two otherwise equal candidates, one of whom has a “Top 5″ PhD, and the other being from a second tier school, I don’t believe the Top 5 person has a big advantage. In fact, it might even go preferentially to the second tier person, as someone with a bigshot advisor (which is more likely for the Top 5 person) always raises the question of whether they are truly intellectually independent.

On Wall Street, I am guessing they would tend to go for the prestige value of the school — and that is probably the prestige of the school as a whole, and not the department or subfield.

The bottom line is that is not an inherently foolish move to accept an offer from a somewhat less prestigious place — but you should have a good reason for doing so. (And this is what happens in practice — most students with an offer from Harvard and a second tier school DO go to Harvard).

The one complicating factor here (at least in my post), is that we have cast the decision in terms of your fit to the PhD program. However, if you are thinking of declining Harvard not because your specific interests are better met at some lower-ranked school, but because other factors in your life (your actual girlfriend or boyfriend, children, family, a fondness for sunbathing, etc) then you possibly ARE trading off more explicitly, I think. And that is indeed a tough problem, since you are not asking “What is the best school for me?” but “How do I balance these two competing desires?”

By: Mike M

Mike M — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:19:42 +0000

Question to Richard E and Sean: If two good but not stellar people with comparable research records are competing for a job at a 2nd/3rd tier uni or at a Wall Street firm, and one has phd/postdocs from Decent U. and the other from Top-5 U., do you dispute that the latter will have a big edge? (assuming they are more or less similar in other regards)

Having been in a position to offer positions at both postdoctoral and faculty level at a couple of “second tier universities,” I can say with some confidence that where the applicants obtained their PhDs is not something I really even consider. Apart from making sure that their research area is a good match and that they are capable of delivering a lecture with some degree of competence, my main criterion for offering the job is their publication record. That is not to say that there isn’t a strong correlation between the quality of PhD institution and who gets the job offer, but, as I am sure you are aware, correlation does not imply causation. In this case, as argued above, it simply shows that top schools do quite a good job of selecting good candidates and training them reasonably well.

When it comes to Wall Street, however, I suspect that the story could well be different. They are really not in a position to judge an astronomer’s job application on its scientific merits, so could well use the fact that top schools are quite good at picking and training top people as an indicator of merit, albeit a rather crude proxy.

By: amused

amused — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:13:14 +0000

I agree with a lot of what Richard E (#18) wrote, and don’t see much contradiction with my #15. Of course it is not simply the name of the top-5 institution that makes the difference, but rather the default assumption that those with PhDs from there are better than those from Decent U. Which they generally are. So if you choose Decent U. over Top-5 U., people in the future are going to assume that, other things being equal, you are less good than the other guy with the Top-5 PhD. Of course, if you can ensure that other things *aren’t* equal — by doing great work and outcompeting the Top-5 folks — then all will be well. But that’s kind of tough, and not something you can count on doing from the beginning. Or if Decent U. has a group at the forefront of a hot topic and you join it and do very well then that can also set you up nicely. The problem with this though is what happens if you end up being good but not stellar. Like i said before, the “best” people won’t have trouble finding faculty jobs regardless of their background. But if you end up not being one of them, then the places where you did PhD and postdocs will really count for a lot as far as your opportunities go.

Question to Richard E and Sean: If two good but not stellar people with comparable research records are competing for a job at a 2nd/3rd tier uni or at a Wall Street firm, and one has phd/postdocs from Decent U. and the other from Top-5 U., do you dispute that the latter will have a big edge? (assuming they are more or less similar in other regards)

Also, what Aaron (#23) said is so true. Before switching to physics i started off doing a maths phd in one of the best math depts in Europe, and the inspiration value of being in such a place cannot be overstated.
Not just the people but the atmosphere as well — it’s like “great things get done here, and you could end up doing some”. In fact I’m sure it was only by internalizing some of that that i managed to keep going with research at the subsequent places.