Pre-interview stuffs to do

For people who have interviews approaching, here's a short, preparatory (and probably mostly self-evident) checklist for the campus visits:

• If you haven't done this yet, check to see if it is traditional in the department for prospective students to contact potential advisers in advance of the interviews. In some departments (including the three I've been part of), it's really your future adviser who grants you admission, and the department just rubber-stamps their decision. In other places, it's common for students to join without knowing exactly who their adviser will be. Write your potential adviser, if it's appropriate.
• Read the departmental website thoroughly. Try to determine the requirements for achieving candidacy, what kinds of coursework students take, whether there are lab rotations or teaching requirements, and whether there are department-wide policies on how graduate students are funded.
• Read thoroughly the lab websites and personal websites of faculty with whom you are interviewing. Read their CVs. What are their academic backgrounds, and who were their advisers? What fields have the potential advisers published in, and which fields have they published in recently? Do they have tenure, and if not, when will they be up for it? (For outdated websites, you might want to supplement their publication list with searches on Google Scholar, PubMed, arXiv, Web of Knowledge/Science, Scopus, etc.).
• Scan the specialties of the faculty members in the department. Get a sense of the breadth of the department.
• For each faculty member with whom you have a decent chance of working, read the abstracts of all of their papers that you find vaguely interesting. Read thoroughly at least a few papers that relate to work you might do with them. If you don't have access to these papers through a university, it's perfectly fine to email the professor to ask for a "reprint" (which will really just be a pdf). It's better not to do this at the last minute.
• Scan the pages and publications of the grad students, techs, and postdocs in the labs you might join. 
• Figure out who the department chair is.
• Write a cribsheet with this information somewhere and take it with you to interviews. This is really helpful if you're interviewing at a bunch of places back to back.
• Review your personal statement, and use it to develop a list of questions in your field that you find interesting and another list of potential projects. These ideas don't have to be genuinely viable at this point, but they show you're curious and thinking about research, and you can use them as a springboard in conversation to talk about more realistic directions.
• Write down the questions you have about the department, research, etc. (See the posts on meetings with potential lab members and potential advisers for more ideas.)
• Take a notepad and pen with you to your interviews.

Bonus points:

• If your potential advisers are funded by the NSF, look up their current and past grants on the NSF's Fast Lane Award Search. If they're funded by the NIH, check out the NIH RePORTER database. Most private foundations have their own databases too. Sources of funding are usually listed on CVs.
• Look up your potential advisers' most cited publications in one of the citation databases mentioned above to get a semi-objective sense of what they're known for. Also look at who's citing some of their more recent publications--which hypotheses are being debated? Who are their collaborators? Pay attention to any Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, and Phys Rev Letters publications.

 Are there other preparations that people have found helpful?

Following up after interviews

Thank everyone with whom you met for >15 min! This means graduate students, postdocs, faculty, and administrators.

A simple email should suffice. Following classic thank-you form, it's good to highlight what you particularly enjoyed about the conversation.

If you're thanking a potential adviser, the email should be a bit longer and touch on the research projects that interest you and (if true) the positive interactions you've had with other lab members. If the lab is your first choice, it's okay to say so. You can also gently remind the potential adviser about any outstanding questions he said he'd get back to you on.

If you want to write your letters by hand on your prettiest stationery, that's okay*--as long as they go out immediately. Assuming you have already written a decent note of some kind, the most important thing is that you send it quickly, ideally within 2-3 days of your visit. Snail mail has an obvious disadvantage here. Where I did my PhD, we gave feedback on the candidates several days after the campus visit. It's best if you can beat this deadline.

The whole thanking-people-for-meeting-with-you thing is a generally good habit for life.

*Keep in mind that a lot of researchers travel frequently and don't check their mailboxes that often. I'm one of those people who prefers having all my correspondence in one, easily searchable place (e.g., my gmail inbox, supplemented by tags and threads). Email might make a lot more sense.

What to wear

Disclaimer: I haven't seen any randomized, controlled studies that test the hypotheses (read: opinions) below.* That said, I've experienced both urban and rural academic environments in different parts of the country and in Europe, and I'm a fairly socially astute person. I've also worked in very formal professional environments. What I write below applies to science programs in the United States.

Looking too nice makes you look clueless. Looking too sloppy makes you look clueless too. The goal should be to dress slightly more cleanly, neatly, and smartly than the people with whom you'd be working.

Women are probably best off wearing slacks and a blouse +/- a sweater. Men should wear slacks and a shirt. No tie, unless one really makes you happy. Flat shoes are good for both sexes. Try to avoid conspicuous brands.

This stuff shouldn't matter, but it kind of does: I remember a grad student making light fun of an applicant's precociously blingy handbag. (This might not have happened if the applicant hadn't already displayed an attitude to match.)

Remember, you can dress almost** however you want when you're a grad student.

If you've never dressed for a professional job before, get someone else to judge your outfit. Ask them if you're "dressy casual."

If you're visiting a lab that works with a lot of doctors or industry types, people might dress more nicely, but probably not enough to affect the recommendations above. I've wondered about the labs at Mayo Clinic, which requires its medical residents to wear suits every day.

Lastly, if it's cold out, take a coat. If it might rain, take an umbrella. Wear shoes that allow you to walk several blocks to a restaurant. When you're famous and have tenure, it's okay to show up to give a talk in January in the Midwest without so much as a sweatshirt (true story). For interviews, you want people to focus on your words and fantastic attitude, not your social awareness or thermoregulatory abilities.

*The disclaimer applies to the entire blog, come to think of it.
**This is an interesting topic for another post.

The campus visit - part three

Perhaps the most exciting part of the visit is chatting with potential labmates.

You'll probably spend more time every day interacting with other grad students and postdocs in your lab than with your advisor. Your labmates are the people you'll first go to when you have an idea that might be the awesomest thing ever or really stupid and you need to check. They're probably following the literature more closely than your adviser, and they'll be the ones who forward you cool articles related to your work. They'll almost certainly be more familiar with the methods you're trying to use.

It's really important that you at least slightly like your labmates, on average.

Speaking from personal experience, a single curmudgeonly or even pathological labmate is endurable if you're surrounded by an otherwise happy, creative, and amiable group of people.

Talk to as many potential labmates as possible. Talk to them about their research, and see if the conversation takes off. You can also ask about the same topics you discuss with your potential adviser. How did they arrive at their current projects? How would they describe their adviser's mentoring style? What conferences have they been to? How's the funding situation? With whom do they collaborate in the lab, in the department, and at other schools?

The point isn't to search for dirt about the potential adviser or anyone else. That said, if a potential labmate makes any suggestive comments, follow up as tactfully as you can. Face-to-face conversations are practically the only option in this case. I was once in the awkward position of meeting with a potential advisee of a professor (not my adviser) who was severely negligent as a scientist and a mentor. The advisee didn't ask about the professor's advising habits or working style. I compromised by suggesting a few pseudo-reasons why another program might be a better fit.

My scientific development might owe more to a superfantastic labmate than to my adviser. This labmate was an extremely clever older grad student who decided early on to involve me in her brainstorming. She was generous and encouraging, and we wrote some kickass papers together.

Science is intensely collaborative, and the more you like your collaborators, the more fun it all is.

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.