| Another Ph.D. physicist here (Ivy, not Stanford/Berkeley) As others have pointed out, your prospective advisor(s) are the most important thing to consider. You can't go wrong with either school. That said, when choosing an advisor: * Pay attention to where the advisor's former students ended up. The former students are a natural "network" for you when you graduate. If you can, ask relatively recent grads about their experience. * Meet the prospective advisor's current students and post-docs - are they happy? Will you fit in with them? Do they graduate in a reasonable amount of time? Ask other grad students about the professor as well. Trust me, each professor is going to have a reputation. * If you want to stay in academia, mid-career advisors are the "safest" - an assistant prof may be working on something exciting, but the research will probably be more risky, and the professor might even have to leave mid-way through your thesis work if they don't get tenure. A late-career advisor may presently sit on a lot of committees and be more well-known, but by the time you need their recommendation for jobs/tenure they may have considerably less influence (that happened to me, although it was fine in the end.) Read Feibelman's "A PhD is not enough" - still lots of good advice even though written 30+ years ago. |
The opposite, postdocs that never publish and get stuck or leave academia one after the other tends to signal dysfunctionality and is a big red flag. If you dig deeper, those groups are usually broken in a number of different ways and it's critical to stay away. A bad supervisor can ruin the prospects of a great student.