Our first installment of unsolicited advice concerned the difficult question of how to get into graduate school; this one presumes that one has successfully leapt the hurdles of GRE’s and ornery admissions committees, and is faced with the perilous decision of which offer to accept. (If one has either one or zero offers, presumably the decision-making process is somewhat easier.) We will not, at the moment, be addressing whether you should be going to graduate school in the first place, or how to succeed once you get there. [Update: see also How to Be a Good Graduate Student.]
This is a much more difficult task than the first installment. Not that it’s more difficult to decide where to go than to get into grad school in the first place; just that it’s much more difficult to give sensible advice about how to do it. When it comes to getting into grad schools, everyone agrees on the basic notions: good grades, test scores, letters, research experience. Choosing where to go, in contrast, is a highly personal decision, and what works for one person might be utterly irrelevant to someone else. Rather than being overly prescriptive, then, I thought it might be useful just to chat about some of the issues that come up. Ultimately, you’ll have to decide for yourself how to weigh the various factors.
- Why do you want to go to grad school in the first place? Sure, maybe you should have already given some thought to this question — but now is the time to get serious. Is your goal to become a professor or other professional researcher (which is typically assumed)? Or is it just to get a Ph.D., and then see what happens? Or is it simply to learn some science?
As a general principle, the purpose of grad school is very different from that of your undergraduate college education. At least in the U.S., college serves multiple purposes: training in some concentration, to be sure, but also a broadly-based liberal education, as well as more general exposure to critical thinking, and crucially important social and personal aspects. Grad school is much more focused: it serves to train you how to be a working research scientist (or whatever, although I’ll be speaking as if it is science you’ll be studying, as that’s what I know best). In college it’s good to be a broad person and cast your net widely in the oceans of learning and experience. In grad school, however, there is a lot to be said for focusing as much as you can on the specific discipline in which you are specializing. Not that you should stop having broad interests, but it might make sense to sacrifice some of them temporarily to the goal of becoming an expert researcher.
The reason for this is that, like it or not, you are entering a competition. Not necessarily grad school itself (where grading and suchlike are notoriously relaxed, although there may be competition for advisors and fellowships and such), but the ultimate job market. Most people who go to grad school want to get jobs as scientists, probably in academia. There are far fewer such jobs than there are grad students, so most people who get a Ph.D. will ultimately not succeed in becoming professors. And the other people who want those jobs are also very smart and dedicated. So, if you are serious about choosing this as your life’s path, it makes sense to really devote yourself to your craft during your grad school years, and give it your best shot. I personally think that the rigorous training provided by a Ph.D. is extremely useful and rewarding even if you don’t become a professor, but you should certainly enter the fray with open eyes.
If becoming a professor is what you want to do, you should choose your school accordingly. At the same time, I’m a firm believer that your life doesn’t completely end just because you’re in grad school, nor that the process itself should be unpleasant. It should be extremely challenging, taking you to the limits of what you are capable of doing — but the days you spend in school are also days that you are alive, and you shouldn’t completely shut yourself away. That’s the difficult balance to strike. (Told you this wouldn’t be very helpful.)
- How prestigious is the school and the department? Prestige is something that is much more relevant (to the extent is is relevant at all) to your undergraduate school than your grad school. Not that it’s completely irrelevant, but the prestige of your advisor is more relevant than that of your department, which is much more relevant than that of the university as a whole. Of course, there are tight correlations between these different kinds of prestige, but they are not perfect.
Although we had a debate about this in comments to the previous advice post, I still think that the identity of the school/department from which you get your Ph.D. is essentially irrelevant to ultimately getting hired as a faculty member. This is not some utopian perspective that we live in a perfect meritocracy in which where you come from doesn’t matter; rather, what matters is where you are doing your postdoc(s), not where you went to grad school. Of course, where you do your postdoc might be affected by where you go to grad school! But more important is who your advisor is.
- What kind of advisors are available? So now we get to the nitty-gritty. The single most important influence on your graduate career will be who your advisor is. Sometimes you might know precisely who you will be working with before you actually get to the school; this is more common in chemistry and biology than in physics, where the “lab” you will be associated with is all-important. But in physics, it’s more common to first arrive at the school, and only once you are there will you try to hook up with some advisor. (I know that MIT accepts people into different research groups, but most schools simply accept you into the department as a whole, without any hard and fast rule about what group you will be in, much less which advisor you will have.)
Of course, picking an advisor means picking a specialty. Some people know exactly what they want to do before they arrive; that’s not necessary, but it helps. The point is, get some feeling for the faculty members who might realistically become your advisor. Are they active in research? Do they have personalities you could get along with? Do they have sufficient funding? Are they looking for new students, or over-subscribed? Do they let their students freelance, or guide them closely? Do they actively support their students in their later careers, or simply wish them well? Your Ph.D. advisor will very possibly be writing letters about you for decades to come — choose someone with whom you will be proud to be associated with, and who will take some interest in your well-being.
As far as choosing your field of specialty is concerned, many factors come into play. Of course you should do something in which you are interested. But you also want to get a job, and the job market can be different in different fields. (Most notoriously, it’s somewhat better in experiment than in theory.) The point is, what specialties represent the intersection of “things you think are interesting” and “things that might lead to a rewarding career”? If that intersection is empty, you might want to rethink this entire process.
Keep in mind also that some advisors are harder to get than others. They might simply be more popular, or have less funding, or about to switch fields or go on a three-year sabbatical. Find out! There is no rule that says that, simply because you’ve been accepted to a department, the faculty member of your choice must take you on as a student. All else being equal, it’s nice to maximize the number of faculty that you might possibly wind up with as an advisor. Much can happen along the way to your Ph.D., and it’s good to have options.
- What is the scientific environment like? Grad school is a crucially important time of your life, when you make the transition from being a student to being a researcher. You won’t do it alone. Are the other students in your prospective department and group people who you could learn things from? What about the postdocs? Postdocs, who are experts in their fields but were just recently students like yourself, are often the most valuable sources of insight as you are struggling to learn the ropes. What about other professors in the department — could you imagine dropping into their offices to talk about science, or are they overly intimidating (or, much more likely, never around)? Do people have lunch together, and hang out more generally, or does everyone go their own way? A supportive and useful environment goes a long way to molding you as an effective researcher in your own right.
- What are the departmental requirements? A couple of years ago the University of Chicago held a celebration for the centennial birthday of Enrico Fermi, who was a Chicago faculty member. The department brought back a number of people who were graduate students in the 1950’s when Fermi was there. Put them all in a room fifty years later, and do you know what they talked about? The candidacy exam, that hazing ritual by which a young student proves that they are ready to take on research.
Different departments put up different
hurdlesrequirements between you and your Ph.D. What are the required classes? Are there many breadth requirements? Are the courses interesting, and are the faculty good teachers? Is there a general exam? An experimental requirement? How long does it take to get a Ph.D.? (This last question is likely to vary significantly from advisor to advisor — some advisors like to keep their students as worker bees in their vast empires, while others consider students a burden and want to get rid of them as soon as possible.) - How is life as a student? Probably the single most useful way to learn about different schools is to talk to the students who are already there. Email them, or seek them out during visits. They will usually be willing to give you the inside scoop (and will be much more well-informed and honest than faculty members). Is there competition for the best advisors? What is the departmental atmosphere like? Do you get nice offices? The more students you can talk to, the better — people can have wildly different experiences in exactly the same environment, so it’s good to collect a bunch of data.
“Life as a student” includes life outside the lab. What is like to live in the location of this particular university? Is it a big city or a college town? (And which do you prefer?) What is the cost of living? Are there dorms, or do students generally live in apartments? Do you need a car? Details, details. Are the necessities of grad student life — movies, coffee, pizza — within easy reach?
- How would you be supported? Another crucial issue. At some point you may have had the happy realization that most grad students in the natural sciences don’t actually pay those exorbitant tuition bills — in fact, you typically get paid to be a grad student, either through teaching assistantships, research assistantships, or fellowships (in roughly ascending order of desirability). So, is there enough support to go around? Is the stipend enough to actually live on? What are the chances of getting RA’s or fellowships, so that you don’t have to teach all the time? Getting some teaching experience is extremely valuable and rewarding, and you shouldn’t avoid it entirely. But it’s not the reason you are in grad school. Research is hard, and takes a lot of time — if you have to teach a huge amount, it can slow down your progress towards a thesis.
- What should you do about your significant other? Now we’re getting serious. So you want to go to MIT, but your sweetie has the job of his/her dreams in Seattle. Should you suck it up and accept the offer from UW, or try to make a long-distance relationship work? Or forgo the temptations of romance, since your career is more important and love never lasts anyway?
Look, I can’t help you here. All I can do is sympathize and recognize that these are real issues, not trivia. Like I said, your years in grad school are years of your lives, and shouldn’t be sacrificed utterly to your work. But sometimes a long-term plan involves temporary steps backwards to achieve a better ultimate goal. You have to decide for yourself, keeping in mind that there are no objectively right answers.
That last little motto applies not only to romantic entanglements, but to choosing a grad school more generally. It’s really hard to know ahead of time what place will be right for you. Different people will have very different ideas from mine, and you should listen to all sorts of perspectives (which will hopefully emerge in the comments). Think about it carefully, but don’t be afraid to trust your instincts as well. Your comfort level is important. If, after making your decision, you feel as if a great burden has been lifted and you’re happy inside, you’ve probably done the right thing. Good luck!
Chad Orzel says:
And I’d bet that every person you hired came from a top university.
An issue that is not addressed by a lot of articles etc. on grad school is the role of good mental and physical health. I know that this is not a “politically correct” topic, but I’m going to bring it up anyways. Ask yourself the following questions:
* Can you survive on 4-5 hrs of sleep a night for the better part of a week?
* The other side of the above question – do you have the stamina to be on your feet for 12 hrs at a stretch?
* Can your eyesight withstand 12 hrs of reading a day?
* Can you write and type for extended periods of time?
* Do you have very specialized dietary requirements, or can you subsist (if necessary) on vending machine food and beverages until you can get to the store?
* Do you fall sick often?
* Can you withstand uncomfortable climates? (Even if your campus is in a comfy locale, you may be required to spend extended periods of time in a very different type of place where your advisor has collaborators.)
* Are you emotionally resilient enough to withstand a lot of frustration (best case scenario) and unsupportive or possibly malevolent colleagues (worst case scenario)?
Citrine — I don’t think that what all of you write is strictly necessary for grad school.
Yes, as an astronomer, I have lived on that schedule sometimes– but not much during grad school. It certainly wasn’t routine. Yes, in the crunch state of writing my thesis, I was easily working 12 hours a day… but I was still sleeping 8 hours a night. I just wasn’t doing much else. That was for perhaps 6-8 months of grad school. Most of the rest of the time: yeah, I almost always worked more than 40 hours a week, but probably it was rare to work a lot more than 50 hours a week. I managed to play in a school orchestra the whole way through, and to do a number of community theatre productions.
Some grad students do really work nearly that much, but not as many as the myth would have it, and it’s a myth that it’s necessary. The ability to get things done is more important than the ability to keep the nose to the grindstone at all times.
That being said, you *do* need to be dedicated; if you are only going to work 30 hours a week, you’re going to find it tough to finish or keep up. If you can’t focus through a lot of frusturation and a lot of tedious stuff, you’re hosed. And the last point you make is absolutely true– you have to be able to withstand frusturation and setbacks in the best-case scenario.
You can’t be a slacker, but you don’t have to be an utterly nutty workaholic. You can have a life, and you can get a healthy amount of sleep.
-Rob
As a student who just completed the application/selection process this time last year, I think it’s worth pointing out that there is one thing that helps you get into schools *and* helps you select a school — research experiences (especially over the summer, and especially in an REU-style program, and especially at schools other than your undergraduate institution). My experience with my undergrad professors could probably not even be compared to the experiences their grad students were having, and as an undergrad I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to come into contact with the grad students in my department or to really understand what their lives were like . But in summer REUs, you get randomly assigned an advisor, and then have to sink or swim with that advisor, while watching their other students struggle or succeed to get along. And you get a much better look at how grad school — not only a specific school, but the process in general — functions. Often the arrival of the “summer students” is a major event, and you get included in activities and get to see how stressed grad students are, how happy or unhappy they are, how balanced their lives are, and you get to hear all the department gossip. Without this experience, I don’t know that I would have known what to look for or ask about on my grad visits. I also don’t know that I would have “allowed” myself to prioritize the things that are personally important to me but may seem trivial to others — I realized that geography was really a major dealbreaker for my situation. And having experience with several different professors can help you out a lot when it comes to choosing an advisor, especially if you end up staying in the sub-field you were interested in as a young’un. I heard time and time again — from faculty and scientists, not just grad students — about really supportive, fantastic advisors in my field, and about really awful scientists that “nobody” liked, or horror stories about theses that never ended because of committees that could never make up their minds — all long before grad visits.
ksh95,
A quick check of the facts reveals the following PhD schools for professors at Union college:
Yale
SUNY Albany
RPI
Berkeley
NYU
Maryland
Rutgers
UNC Chapel Hill
Florida State University
Berkeley
George Washington University
Iowa State University
Case Institute of Technology
Rutgers University
(note the last 4 are emeritus faculty, so they presumably were hired many years ago)
Note that the current department chair got his PhD from Florida State, and the two current “lecturers” are from Berkeley and SUNY Albany. Berkeley I’ll give you, but do you consider Florida State and SUNY Albany to be “top universities”?
To try to keep things on topic: any other people want to share reasons why they choose the school they did?
Excellent post, Sean.
I would add that prospective grad students should ask themselves this question, “Do I have a burning desire to be a physics professor, or merely a deep interest in physics?”
If the latter, I would recommend skipping graduate school, investing your time and energy in becoming financially independent, and studying physics as a leisure pursuit.
One other benefit of going to a less prestigious school: the added motivation it gives to succeed and spite the ivy leaguers who turn you down. (You just wait, Columbia!)
Is Union College really such a good example?
Here’s # of faculty PhD alumni at Harvard (out of 63 faculty):
Harvard 22
Berkeley 7
MIT 6
Princeton 4
Cornell 3
Stanford 3
Leiden 2
Caltech 1
Oxford 1
Chicago 1
Columbia 1
Other 12
and also faculty at Caltech (total of 51 faculty):
Berkeley 9
Harvard 5
Chicago 5
Princeton 5
Cornell 4
MIT 4
Caltech 3
Cambridge 2
Stanford 2
Columbia 2
Other 10
Seems like at least in these two schools only 15-20% of faculty are not from top 10 schools (and some of those “other” are places like Tokyo University, Landau institute, Oxford – not too shabby either in terms of prestige).
Someone else could easily compute the same statistics for other departments that list PhD institutions of its faculty members. Not sure what it’s for U Chicago…
It’s worth examining the 10 ‘other’ at Caltech, and see how their origins play into this game.
#Drever (Glasgow); 1958.
#Goodstein (Washington); 1965.
#Phillips (Oxford); 1965, Astronomy.
#Tombrello (Rice); 1961.
These four are from a previous era, to whom the discussion does not apply.
#Kitaev (Landau); USSR.
#Ooguri (Tokyo); Japan.
#Sari (Hebrew University); Israel.
These three come from arguably the best places in their countries of origin.
#Scherer (NM Institute of Mining & Tech); joint w/ EE and Applied Phys.
#Zewail (Penn); joint with Chemistry.
Joint professors don’t count, as we don’t know what other fields are like. Although I must say the Scherer story (NMIT^3) is possibly a genuine exception.
#Kimble (Rochester)
*shrug*. Kimble’s a special case- he worked for Mandl, a founder of a subfield, before that subfield was sexy, and I’m guessing had the vision even then to know that it was awesome stuff. A cynic might speculate that the top-10 places in 1972 wouldn’t deign to accept someone from Abilene Christian University, too.
Also note that Kimble worked at Bell Labs before becoming faculty, too, and only got to be at a first-tier school after proving his awesomeness at a top-second-tier school. Someone of his caliber, though, needs little help in carving their own path.
So, the answer would appear to be: in the modern era, pure physics faculty at a top-tier place all come from top-tier places. Anyone want to do this same examination of Harvard’s faculty?
I am seriously considering this possibility: After a strong undergraduate physics education, why not forgo graduate school and become a high school teacher; spend 6-7 hours a day on high school teaching duties, have the entire summer off, and spend all of one’s free time absorbed in research of one’s choosing with 0 distractions?
It seems much more likely to me for a bright person who goes down this path to come up with truly creative and groundbreaking physics, then it is for somebody who enters the modern “publish-or-publish” world of modern grad students and postdocs.
Why am I wrong? (i.e., Why shouldn’t I do this?)
The horror.
You shouldn’t do it because you’ll become a crackpot and nobody will pay any attention to you. Even if you follow a grad curriculum ‘on your own’ the first couple years to get caught up with the tools you need, you’ll have nobody to ask questions of, nobody to bounce ideas off of, and (critically) nobody to tell you that you’ve become a crackpot recluse.
It should be obvious that you’ll have no access to experimentalists to collaborate with and keep yourself grounded as a physicist.
In the unlikely event you do discover some great insight, you’ll have incredible difficulty communicating it to people besides your long-suffering colleagues. You’ll become bitter and angry, and will end up taking it out on your students, who will thus carry a lifelong image of the Physicist as Bitter Crank, setting back the cause ever so much more.
6-7 hours a day on high school teaching duties is a fantasy disconnected from reality.
I’ve known a number of high school teachers, and my mother is one. Here’s the truth of high school teaching: you *do* in fact do 12 months of work, but you have 9 months to do it in.
Yes, over the summer, you can do other things, but for the reason Anonymous Bear says, you’re also kidding yourself if you think you’re going to make real contributions to modern science this way. If you want to do that, it’s possible — if you get the PhD first, and you have a research group at a real lab or University that will bring you in to work with them over summers. Even then, you aren’t going to lead groups, but will contribute to the work.
-Rob
Interesting post from you as usual. Btw I came across this quacky website where you are being misrepresented :-> :
http://www.aias.us/Comments/comments12082004b.html
Hope you enjoy it.
#33-34: Well, obviously faculty at top-tier universities tend to come from top-tier universities. I think what tends to get overlooked in these discussions is that there are lots of universities out there in need of physics professors. Just as we shouldn’t forget that being a professor is not the only way to be a physicist, we should also not forget that being at Harvard/Yale/Caltech is not the only way to be a professor. Sure, you get less time for research at non-Research 1 universities, but if a tenure-track position is what you’re after, there are lots of places to get it. This isn’t to say that the job market isn’t tight. I just want to make sure we all remember that there are lots of (to quote comment #60 from the first thread) “Joe Averages” out there doing good research and good teaching at good schools that just don’t happen to be “Top Tier.” And maybe they have a better chance of having a life while they’re at it. 🙂
Now I think we see the real issue (from Anonymous Beaver, among others). When Chad and Sean (and me) say “tenure track faculty” we mean that fairly literally. Maybe we count community colleges, maybe not, but we definitely count any accredited 4-year and up school (I teach at a master’s granting school, Chad at an undergrad school?). Anonymous Beaver, and some other commenters, mean Harvard or Caltech (presumably a few other places will do as well). Surely this argues for both sides being correct. To be successful in academia, you do not need to be a faculty member at either of those two institutions (although certainly the faculty there should be counted as successes). However, if that is your measure of success, then going to a less-than top tier university is probably a terrible idea.
But, you better get used to something. There are many more people who want to be that than there are spaces at that table. You will spend the next 6-10 years of your life fighting a cutthroat battle against your peers in your grad program for the 1 or 2 faculty spots that might open up at those schools when you are ready to go there. If you broaden your horizons slightly, you could find a great job at a nice place, where academic freedom actually means doing research that interests you, and getting to educate fine young men and women at the same time. However, I will agree with all that the pay sucks!
Oh, I’m totally aware (believe me) of the wide range of possibilities for tenure-track facultyin’. I just found the issue of where faculty came from at one particular high-end research place to be good procrastination fodder…
Thanks, Paul, you said it better than I did.
For the narrow reason I posted, it is the *only* example 🙂
Chad said that in the faculty searches he’s been involved in, the PhD school wasn’t part of the hiring decision. ksh95 accuses him of hypocrisy. I just wanted to point out that the charge of hypocrisy was unfair.
But even in general I think Union is a good example. There are a lot more Union Colleges out there than there are Harvards.
Sorry Hack, I’ve been working in the “real” world and I disagree with your assessment-at least partially. While “prestigious” institutions get a lot of air play in the media, working in the national labs I haven’t seen one iota of evidence that where a person went to school made the slightest difference. In fact I have met plenty of people from Stanford who didn’t know their stuff all that well or demonstrate any intelligence, while plenty of people from universities like Kansas State have done very well in the labs. I’ve met plenty of people from places like Kansas State that know their math and physics better than people from Stanford or MIT, and they have no problems moving up the career ladder. The bottom line of the world outside of academia is what matters is what you can do. So I would say I basically agree with Sean’s advice.
A Serious Question,
As Rob Knop pointed out, your plan to obtain leisure enough to do physics by becoming a high school teacher will fail. Teaching’s a far more demanding job than it might appear. Leisure would more likely be had by becoming motel night clerk, a self-storage warehouse custodian, or a night security guard. Of course, if you don’t want to spend your entire life in poverty, you might consider and initial period of entrepreneurial activity or investing with the aim of financial independence.
With all due respect to Anonymous Beaver, the self-made physicist route won’t necessarily turn you into a crackpot. If you train yourself sufficiently well to understand physics papers and to write some of your own, you won’t be too far gone. While I’m not certain how physics journals handle submissions from an unaffiliated author (nor do I know arXiv’s policy), I’m fairly sure than they don’t discard submissions that aren’t obviously absurd. So it’s likely that you could have your work criticized and disseminated. [But if your work is perennially unpublishable, then, yes, you have become a crackpot.]
I wouldn’t worry about not getting to interact with experimentalists. That really doesn’t happen much in most departments anyway. The way you usually obtain info from experimentalists is by reading their papers.
And while you won’t have to anyone to bounce ideas off of or free slave labor, you also won’t have pressure to publish, grant applications to write, symposia to organize, conferences to fly to, colloquia to attend, students to support, papers to referee, departmental politics to contend with, classes to teach, and faculty to hire.
With regards to the self-made physicist route, let’s not forget that Albert Einstein was a patent clerk while doing physics “on the side”.
And, we can’t forget that Michael Faraday was a bookbinder and had no formal education, yet he still did MANY great things for physics. In fact, it was by almost pure chance that a satisfied customer of De La Roche, which was the bookbinding company for which Faraday worked, gave him tickets to see the last four lectures given by Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution. At each lecture, he took A LOT of detailed notes, which he later wrote up, bound and gave them to Davy while he was applying for a job at, I believe, the Royal Institution (I apologise if this is incorrect). And, we have all come to know and love Faraday’s Law, among other things.
So, if one decides to pursue another occupation (ie: one that doesn’t require a Ph.D.) this doesn’t mean that one cannot remain up-to-date on current research and do research on one’s own, though I will admit that gaining access to research facilities at a larger university may be more difficult if one is a high school physics teacher, rather than a Ph.D. recipient.
sorry, didn’t read chad’s post carefully enough.
Maybe it was slightly off-topic, but the analysis of some top schools shows (to me at least) that prestige IS indeed important in hiring – contradicting what some here claimed. Of course one could argue as Sean has in the past, that top university PhDs just happen to be good through self-selection, and while there’s some truth to that, I think there must be more than a couple of good scientists from second tier PhD schools – yet they will struggle to make it into a top school.
It’s also a good point that second and third tier research universities (however you define them), liberal arts community colleges, are probably less elitist, but they also often cannot afford to be very picky and have to place more emphasis on teaching, which is let’s be frank – is often overlooked in favor of research at top schools.
To David – I agree that there may be PhD’s from Kansas State who know their physics better than MIT PhDs. But in my opinion, such person from KSU will still be at disadvantage against MIT person simply because proving that you are smart takes more time than is usually allotted for job interview. And because it may be difficult to even get an interview with KSU degree, while MIT graduate is much more likely to get it.
The advice for incoming graduate students NOT to pick their school based on prestige is a recipee for post-PhD career suicide, in my opinion. Like it or not, but a lot of people will make their first opinion of you (or your CV) based on the prestige of the school you went to. Going to a lesser known school means picking yet another uphill battle for yourself, when odds are against you to begin with – due to overproduction of PhDs described earlier.
Paul Orwin — the competition for jobs at almost any tenure track position is huge, not just the tier-1 universities. I’ve looked for jobs at small liberal arts colleges, and there too there is a tremendous amount of competition, and many more really good, qualified people than there are jobs.
-Rob
Scherer at Caltech is the exception that proves the rule. New Mexico Tech (aka the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) is an excellent school for physics and electrical engineering. Astronomers might know about it because the control center for the VLA radio telescope is on the campus. Its undergrad physics program ranks high in the Peterson Guide. But the school is essentially unknown to most working physicists, so the relatively demanding program there is overlooked.
I’m sure there are other places like this, but who knows about them? I’d never recommend New Mexico Tech to someone who wanted to go on to grad school or postdoc in physics because it would make it that much more difficult, despite a good physics education.
“post-PhD career suicide” — my @$$.
Surely a census of the broad field of physics/astronomy would reveal neither that all today’s physicists have degrees from “Top Tier” schools, nor that those who do not are dissatisfied with their careers and feel themselves unfulfilled and unsuccessful.
I’ll say it again: THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN PHYSICS WITHOUT BEING A PROFESSOR AT HARVARD OR CALTECH. Or without being a professor, period. And it doesn’t require a degree from Harvard of Caltech to get there. Given this, I would never advise a student to pick a school based on “prestige” to the exclusion of all else. Grad schools differ widely in their environments, areas of focus, diversity of faculty and student populations, requirements for the degree, attitude toward graduate labor, mental health of the students, emphasis on teaching, etc. — and not every school (even every “Top Tier” school) is right for every student (even every “Top Student” — and I use these terms in quotation marks because I think they are heavily subjective, even though we use them in a way that suggests we all agree on what they mean). A student should pick the school where he or she will be most successful, as far as it’s possible to determine that. What’s the point of going to Harvard or Caltech if you’re going to flunk out, have a nervous breakdown, or emerge so disillusioned that you leave the field entirely? Better to find an environment where you will learn, be challenged, thrive, and produce your own best work.
I think we are hampered in this discussion by very narrow definitions of “career success” and the assumption that anyone who wants to go to grad school MUST have his/her eye on a professorial position at Harvard or Caltech. If that were all there were to life in physics, why would anyone stay? Frankly, I think such restrictive viewpoints are closely tied to the issues of women’s and minorities’ underrepresentation in physics. They suggest that there is only one RIGHT way to be a physicist — the TRADITIONAL way — and anyone who doesn’t fit that mold just isn’t a True Physicist.
Yes: we should inform students of the realities of the academic job market. And yes: we should also tell them that the perceived prestige of their PhD institution may be important to some potential employers, especially those at “Top Tier” schools. But we should also impress upon them that neither of these statements is the last word on the subject, and that there are many other factors that may (and rightfully should) influence their grad school decision. And then we should stand the hell back and let them make their own (informed) choices.