[aspaceman]

This article really rubs me the wrong way. I don't think I would find a Yelp very valuable, and the most important metric for a PhD program isn't job placement numbers. The idea that job placement correlates to PhD quality is just plain wrong. Incredibly intelligent students leave PhD programs through no fault of their own, and people who get nothing out of a PhD program can get a cushy job easily. It's a horrible metric.

I found that the difference between faculty members at the same institution can be immense. This is because faculty have great control over your life due to how doctoral funding works in the United States. If you wish to continue a Biology degree, you must be willing to work with this faculty member, in this area, on this specific problem. Some faculty are rigid about a specific problem, some are not.

Even more complicated is that some students need more guidance than others. Or some students want much less. And the student doesn't necessarily know what they need before entering the program.

This is why I think it's smarter to give doctoral students more freedom and flexibility in switching faculty. The school should be supportive of a student in this process rather than focusing on their job placement numbers.

[foobarian]

I agree with you, and further think it would be awesome if each doctoral program offered "user manuals" for each potential advisor in the department. Things like, "Professor X is very hands off, so you'll be able to do a lot on your own, but make sure you get on his calendar to get advice." Or, "Professor Y is a slave-driving task master but very capable; so make sure to stand up for yourself or you'll get crushed." Of course this is tongue in cheek and would probably never get formalized.

I got this kind of advice from people who already finished their PhDs while I spent a year in industry before grad school. Not everyone can do this but maybe there is some other way to cold-contact finished PhDs and see what they know about the faculty you're considering.

[mmhsieh]

there are ways to do this but the market for the manuals would be pretty small.

[kayaeb]

I disagree a bit about freedom and flexibility in switching faculty, and I disagree strongly about the phrasing of "willing" to work with x faculty on y problem.

I don't care how smart a student is, they are in no way prepared to select a project that will lead to interesting findings, which is a must if you plan to continue in any capacity. A good mentor will have a project with proprietary data that has a 95% chance of successful publication. In this way the student won't get scooped (not through any fault of their own, it's just that a PhD student, even a good one, just can't compete speedwise with someone like me who already has a code library built up to do complex analyses, this is why proprietary data is essential, or an extremely good prof who has an idea that they are confident no one else is on). My projects were a mix, I had one with proprietary data, and one which was a legit eureka finding. But as you say, most profs just aren't good enough to do these Eurekas (not an insult, 90% of science is gruntwork), so they need the cloistered data playground that the child student can crash around in until they manage to build their horrible little sandcastle. That data depends on funding, which depends on a proposal, which depends on a promise to do project X on data Y, and the prof is going to get reamed next time they apply for funding if student Z decided it wasn't "fun" and went to some other prof.

Caveat: We had one turkish guy who was straight up getting academically abused by his advisor (like literally timing his lunch breaks, sending spies to make sure he attended class, super weird shit), and thank the heavens there was a judicial oversight in place for him to get a new placement.

Caveat the second: I thrive in a low-input environment, so my prof just put me in the sandbox and I built the most magnificent and beautiful sandcastle the world has ever seen and roared my way to a whopping like seven citations (lol). My prof was also the director though and the low-input environment wasn't like optional, and not everyone did well in this low-input environment.

[kyboren]

> I found that the difference between faculty members at the same institution can be immense.

Absolutely!

> This is why I think it's smarter to give doctoral students more freedom and flexibility in switching faculty. The school should be supportive of a student in this process.

This is important, but it's not enough. The nature of a PhD means that switching faculty is often not an option. Students 3 years into their thesis work with a budding publication record on a topic often can't realistically just switch to another professor, even if everybody is on board with it. In most cases that means starting over from scratch with a new topic.

So instead students will grind out a final couple (or more) miserable years in order to finally get their degree.