The campus visit - part two

In the last post, I suggested that you treat every encounter in your campus visit as an interview of sorts. There's a decent chance that even if you won't ultimately do your PhD near the person you're talking to, you'll run into each other again. But this doesn't need to give you performance anxiety.

The campus visit is a mutual opportunity: it's an opportunity for you to determine if you can see yourself happy in a particular lab or program, and it's an opportunity for others to assess if you'd be good to work with. If you show evidence of caring about just one side of the equation, that's a red flag.

Put differently, all of the conversations you have with grad students, postdocs, applicants, potential advisers (PAs), and other faculty members should acknowledge (for the most part implicitly) the concerns of each party. If the other person would make a good colleague, you should see a similar balance of issues reflected back.

In the next few posts, I'll describe how this concept plays out in the interviews. The focus of this post is the meeting(s) with your potential adviser. Remember that the meeting is a mutual assessment of character and a chance to compare goals and expectations. Be prepared, but don't try to impress or look good at all costs; focus instead on understanding your PA and being understood. (Also, remember that most scientists--at least the ones you'd want to work with--have pretty good b.s. detectors.)

Interviews with potential advisers
The fundamental question on your PA's mind is almost invariably, "Is this applicant going to help me accomplish my research?" All of the other questions below follow from this concern.

• Is she reliable? Will she meet her deadlines?
• Will he come running to me, asking for help the second something goes wrong, or will he persist and try to find the answer himself or from other lab members? 
• Is she tenacious? Can she handle failure and imperfection?
• Can he admit it when he doesn't know something? Can he acknowledge making mistakes? Does he demonstrate an ability to learn from mistakes?
• Is the applicant really interested in working here? Does she actually understand what we do? Does she understand the main questions in the field?
• Is the applicant really interested in becoming a researcher? Does he have realistic expectations for  graduate school?
• Is she creative and independent? Can I imagine her developing her own projects and eventually teaching me a few things?
• Is he going to contribute to the lab and program as a whole? Can other people discuss research with him, and is he generous with his time and ideas?

(I don't include questions of cognitive competence--if you've been invited to interview, you've almost certainly passed that bar.) Your questions about your PA will likely include:

• Does the PA show any indication of being a good potential mentor, or does he seem interested only in acquiring a lab hand? Does he show any interest in my interests and goals?
• How much does the PA actively promote her students and postdocs? Does she encourage them to attend conferences, give talks, network, and apply for grants? Does she compete with them for authorship or speaking slots? 
• Does my PA have the financial resources to be a good mentor? Specifically, does my PA (potentially in conjunction with the program) have the money to support me for five years? To support travel? How much of the support would be in the form of research assistantships, and how much in teaching assistantships? It's generally better to do less teaching and more research.
• Does the PA have the professional standing to be a good mentor? Does he have tenure? Does he have a history of funding and quality publications? (Note: I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't work with an untenured professor or someone who has received only one major grant, but it's important to realize that the risks are different. Untenured PAs might not receive tenure, especially at highly competitive institutions, and they might move. Sometimes students follow, but it's obviously complicated. Professors who lose their grants and fail to obtain new ones might have to downsize their labs.)
• How is my PA's research portfolio expected to change in the next few years? Am I interested in the upcoming projects, and would I have the opportunity to work on them?
• Does my PA have time for me, or is she too busy with other lab members, teaching, travel, etc.?
• Is the PA's mentoring style good for me? Is he a micromanager? Does he expect all of his students to work weekends? Does he expect students to develop all of their own projects from day 1? How much time could I spend on my own projects at different stages--will I be restricted to the work outlined in existing grants?

(I'm similarly assuming that by the campus interview, you've already made sure that your PA does good science that interests you.)

Many of these questions are best answered by talking to potential lab members. I'll get to those conversations in another post. Useful questions to ask your PA include:

• "What future projects do you have planned? Do you have any grants in review right now?" If they do, you can ask if they'd mind sharing the proposals. Note that you can probably obtain summaries of their currently funded grants online at institutional websites (e.g., NIH, NSF, the McDonnell Foundation, etc.) or on their CV.
• "Generally, what do you expect of your students in each year of their PhD program?" This is where you find out if the PA expects all students to have a paper submitted by the end of their first year (potentially a warning sign), not to have any papers submitted until their fifth year (also a warning sign), or to be teaching every year (which doesn't speak well of the funding environment).
• "What are your former PhD students and former postdocs doing now?" This is probably one of the most important questions to ask, assuming the information is not on the lab website. If the PA doesn't know, run. Otherwise, make sure that at least a few of the recent graduates are doing what you'd like to do after graduation, whether it be industry, government research, or academia. You can usually sense from the answer the PA's attitude toward non-academic jobs. If your PA is one of those go-ivory-or-go-home types, and you're ambivalent about being an academic, think very hard about whether you would be happy in that lab. There's a good chance that your priorities and interests will be increasingly misaligned with your adviser's, and your adviser's support is critical to your getting a job--not to mention staying happy and funded. 
• "How would you describe your mentoring style?" Cheesy but probably illuminating. I wish I had asked this one.
• "What kinds of conferences do your students go to?" Obviously, you can and should ask your PA's students, but here you can learn whether your adviser encourages students to attend conferences even when the student isn't presenting. These kinds of opportunities can be especially valuable when you're just entering a field and trying to figure out who's who and what the hot questions are. That a PA would support students in this way shows that the PA cares about the student's professional development and has sufficient resources.

Finally, be sure you enjoy talking with the PA on some level. When I was interviewing, one PA told me to choose a PhD adviser exceptionally carefully, because when I was done with my PhD, I'd be more like my adviser than my parents. This was only a slight overstatement.

The campus visit - part one

The most important thing to keep in mind when visiting potential PhD programs is that everyone you run into--including other applicants--might be a future colleague, and anyone in the department can probably have a say in your admission. There are plenty of other useful insights related to campus visits, but this is paramount. Be kind, respectful, and professional to everyone.

At my PhD program, the admissions committee asked faculty members, administrators, and graduate students to email our impressions of the applicants. This is where we would write that Jingfei seemed very familiar with the methodological challenges of researching metabolic pathways in green jujubes, and that we were able to talk effortlessly for an hour with Carlos about recently published studies on catalytic nanostuffs. Even in programs that might not formally solicit feedback, you can bet that people confer. Below are some of the less positive comments I've heard:

• (By far the most common:) The student seemed full of himself. He was more interested in describing his accomplishments and abilities than learning about research in our lab.
• She had no clue about the basics of our work. It's not clear why she's applying to our lab/program.
• When talking with him, it was not obvious what excites him about research or why he is pursuing science as a career.
• She was a little lame for not going to the evening social.

The last comment was actually made by a faculty member in my department. The committee fortunately dismissed the criticism as irrelevant. The comment does, however, highlight that people will be evaluating you not only for your scientific potential but also for what kind of colleague they think you would make. Your character matters. I'll discuss this in more detail in another post.

What other applicants think of you obviously won't have a huge effect on your chances of admission, but it's still useful to think of the other prospective students as future colleagues and potential collaborators. I know two people who met as applicants at one school, earned their PhDs at two other schools, and now occasionally review each other's grants and manuscripts as faculty at different universities. It's a smaller world than you might think.