| It depends on the specific professor. There are stressful and relaxed ones. It trickles down from the professors to their assistants to their PhD students. Here's my ad-hoc list of bad signs. Avoid those. Professors * don't have time for feedback * have no interest in their PhD students' work * are known to steal results (and put their names on it) * are ideologically/religiously driven and judge you and everybody else accordingly * don't open their network to their PhD students * jump from one hot/trendy topic to the next and burn their PhD students on it * blame others/circumstances for anything bad Faculty * members pride themselves for devoting their lives to the cause * members do long work days, have little sleep * has little budget it spends on its PhD students * feels toxic (Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.") PhD students * do overtime * rarely/never publish * publish in irrelevant magazines * publish with their names on the nth position (after doing all the work) * don't or rarely attend conferences * don't or rarely work on what they signed up for * take long to finish (or don't finish at all) * blame others/circumstances for their bad situation Talk to PhD students, ask on the net, listen to speeches and lectures the professors gave. A lot of advice given at HN about whether to join a startup applies to academia as well. Unnecessary work, little pay, vague promises, inconsistent management, insider circles. I wonder what academia's equivalent of stock options is. Aiming for tenureship perhaps? |