How to Foresee Career Fate Peter Chen
(Source: http://bbs.creaders.net/education/bbsviewer.php?trd_id=809865)
Most
PhD students do not realize that their career fates in US or
industrialized countries are often determined on the day they have their
PhD advisors. Typically, an average PhD candidate in a US university is
intelligent enough to become a CEO of a company, a wall-street trader,
or a professor in a US research university. However, most PhD graduates
will not end up at their desirable jobs, even if they work very hard. In
fact, many top university PhD graduates cannot find decent jobs in US,
while many people who earn their PhD degrees from median universities
become professors, industrial leaders, CEOs, etc. Many PhD students are
misled by the rankings of universities and rankings of undergraduate
colleges. An essential fact is that in this top level of professional
trainings, it is one’s PhD advisor, rather than one’s university, that
determines one’s career future. For a health and hard-working PhD candidate, one
can foresee his/her career fate by the job statistics of one’s PhD
advisor’s former PhD graduates. For a senior professor who has produced
more than 10 PhD graduates, the job statistics is quite accurate. If 75%
of the former PhD graduates are currently professors in research
universities, then an average current student in the group will most
likely end up as a professor in a research university in the future too.
Similarly, if 75% of the former PhD graduates cannot find jobs, then an
average current student in the group will most likely become unemployed
on the day of his/her graduation. Note that for chemistry, physics,
mathematics, computer science, etc, one can find a list of one’s former
group members at genealogy webpages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_genealogy. Additionally,
if one’s PhD advisor is a very senior professor who is near the end of
his/her career, one has to pay a close attention to the job statistics
of recent PhD graduates in the past 5 years. Very often, such a senior
professor is in a rapidly decaying (old) field and does not have the
energy and knowledge to move to a new field (why bother if one is going
to retire in 5 years?). Then, his/her current students will be most
likely to face more difficulties in finding desirable jobs than group’s
statistics would suggest. There are exceptions, though --- some true
researchers always enjoy new ideas and new fields. However, such senior
professors are few and far between. On
the other hand, if one’s PhD advisor is a junior professor who has not
yet produced enough PhD graduates to offer a good statistics, then there
is more uncertainty. Sometimes, an excellent student can help shaping
the advisor’s career profile in this situation. A good thing is that the
junior professor usually works hard and tries to get his/her tenure.
However, in general, a junior advisor offers less help in your career
development. In this case, the ranking of one’s university may play a
more important role in one’s job hunting. If
you are a foreign PhD student, you actually should use the
aforementioned job statistics with caution because it is not applicable
to you directly. It is typically more difficulty for a foreign PhD
student to find a desirable job in US, such as a faculty position, than
one’s American lab-mates. Typically, to offset one’s culture and
language disadvantages, foreign PhD students need to put about threefold
more effort to achieve the same career goals. For example, if it takes
about 4 papers for an average America PhD student to find a faculty job,
an average foreign PhD student may have to produce more than 10 papers
of the same quality to find a similar faculty position. Therefore, one
should pay more attention to the statistics of former foreign PhD
graduates in the lab, which is more suitable for one’s case.
If
one cannot find all data for the statistics of one’s advisor’ former
PhD graduates, one can check a couple of other crucial indicators,
namely, advisor’s publication record and grant record. Publication
record can be easily found at ``Web
of Science’’. One should pay a close attention to the publication in
the last five years, which are roughly equivalent to the publication
period of a student with his/her advisor. If
a PhD advisor publishes only about 3 papers with each of his/her
typical PhD student and the number of papers for a successful job seeker
on the job market is 10, the PhD candidate will have a difficulty to
fulfill his/her job goal with such an advisor. Note
that one’s career development depends crucially on one’s advisor’s
academic status, reputation and connection. A minimal requirement for an
advisor to be a qualified one is that he/she should regularly have
external research grants in his/her career, except for people in some
disciplines such as social sciences and liberal arts where federal
research grants might be rare. This is not an issue for a
PhD candidate who is supported by a research assistantship (RA) from
his/her advisor. On the other hand, if one is, or is going to be,
supported by a teaching assistantship (TA) from one’s department, one
has to watch out pitfalls. Many advisors might never have any external
grant, which means their academic statuses are very low in their fields.
Typically, by playing local politics, these advisors are able to have
PhD students either as their cannon fodders or as their career savers
(Be aware that people who are inactive in research usually have more
time to play politics). Unfortunately, these advisors might deliberately
conceal partial or full information from their (potential) students.
However, it is quite easy to do an ``Award Search’’ in public domains to
find out an advisor’s grant situation. The National Science Foundation
(NSF) and National Health Institute (NIH) are among the most respected
funding agencies. There are some other useful indications of academic
status: committees of professional organizations and conferences,
editorial boards of international journals, and panels of federal
funding agencies. In fact, NIH study section members are in public
domain. Typically, a PhD candidate’s career is on a dead-end track if
his/her advisor’s academic status is very low. To avert this fate, one should either switch to a qualified advisor or change a school as soon as possible. Finally,
a good advisor is typically willing to spend time on his/her students,
cares about his/her students’ career development, responses to students’
needs and first of all, has a superb job record for his/her former PhD
graduates. However, what contributes to a good advisor is a complicated
and subjective issue. A good PhD advisor for one student might not be a
good one for another person. The last word is that it
makes no sense to spend about four or five years to pursue a PhD degree
if it does not lead you to a decent career.
The above discussions are personal opinions and might not be useful or suitable to many people.
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