Beyond Fame and Funding – Part 1: 7 Critical Questions to Ask Yourself When Choosing Your Ph.D. Advisor

“The person you choose as your Ph.D. advisor will be more important than the person you choose to marry.”
This advice came from a well-established professor at a highly ranked chemistry program in the US while I was visiting graduate schools and “shopping” for a Ph.D. advisor.

Eighteen years later, this advice still irks me. No, my Ph.D. advisor is not more important than the person I choose to be and work with in daily life for decades.

What is true though is that your choice of Ph.D. advisor will be the most influential decision of your Ph.D.

This person:

• Leads a group and shapes the group’s culture, possibly down to the work hours, and you will feel it every day.
• Supports your growth into a professional
• Controls the funding and access to resources for your Ph.D.
• Sponsors your visa, if you need one
• Advocates for you during your Ph.D. and afterwards (or not)
• Makes decisions about whether you finish your Ph.D. or not
• Influences where you publish your work and the pace at which you publish

Whether you're applying for graduate programs or you've been accepted to a program where you will shop around or even do rotations, you are facing a relationship decision that will influence the next 3-8 years of your life.

This blog series will cover:
1) 7 critical questions to ask yourself so you can make an awesome decision about choosing your Ph.D. advisor

2) How you can meet Ph.D. advisors to connect and find answers to these questions before deciding (and possibly before applying)

3) Red flags to look out for when choosing a Ph.D. advisor

This series rings truest for Ph.D. students in STEM, but there may be truth for other fields as well. Let’s dive in!

Yes, the title of this series says we should look beyond funding. We should, but we cannot ignore the influence of finances on how we live and work.

Your financial situation will depend on many factors, including the institution, fellowship opportunities for you, your Ph.D. advisor, and your own resources and support.

There is a vast variety in Ph.D. funding situations. Unless you earn a fellowship from an external source, the majority of your Ph.D. stipend will come from your Ph.D. advisor’s funding, which includes a baseline amount of support from the university and mostly external grants.

On the comfortable end of the spectrum, some institutions promise a full stipend from year 1 through year 8. They expect your professor to fund you after the first year, but there is sufficient institutional support for you if needed. This security will come with specific requirements for teaching, coursework, and other stipulations.

A contrasting and common situation, especially at large state schools in the US, is that you are promised a sum of funding for the first year. After that, your stipend varies year to year depending on fellowships and the number of classes you teach.

A side note about teaching - teaching is not equal across schools or departments. You could be overseeing a lab of ~20 students and/or regularly grading hundreds of exams.

Find out as much as you can about where your financial support will come from, the time you will invest for it, and what support you will need to live through those years.

Onto the questions beyond fame and funding:

1) Is the research so exciting for you that you are willing to learn anything you need to get it done?

Choose someone whose work you find interesting enough that you are willing to persist through the unknown, repetitive, mundane, challenging, and unglamorous work that will no doubt accompany the cool stuff.

In research, the problems we solve on a practical level often sound very different from the thesis of the research, and you will develop ‘bread-and-butter’ skills to support these needs.

What we work on day-to-day may seem different or indirect from the question we want to solve.

Working in genetics?

In the ‘wet lab’ you’ll need to figure out how to purify and amplify your DNA. Then you will probably spend even more time in the ‘dry lab’ mastering the programming languages you need to perform the bioinformatics, statistical analysis, and data visualization to make sense of the data and communicate it.

Studying organic chemistry?

Yes, you need to be great at doing the reactions, but you’ll also need to be excellent at characterization techniques NMR spectroscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, chromatography, and elemental analysis.

Experimental neuroscience?

You might become a mouse surgery genie.

Experimental physics?

You’ll spend hours cooling things down and/or aligning lasers that have to be perfectly stable to achieve the near-ideal conditions you want for your measurements.

Nanoscience applied to just about anything, including biology and semiconductor chips?

You will benefit from understanding and applying core concepts in computer vision signal processing to make sense of your images and to get meaningful information out of tiny spikes on a line.

Just about any thesis you imagine will require you to acquire knowledge on tangential topics and master tools from multiple disciplines. You’ll need to not only be adept at reading the data, but also master the decisions and conditions under which those data are obtained.

2. What are their leadership and management styles?

Do you thrive with someone who is hands-off, who will send you off to work on something for a month or more without checking in?

Or would you rather have regular check-ins? Some supervisors hold a weekly group meeting. Some professors walk into their lab daily if they're in town. Or someone who randomly calls you to their office, or even stops by the lab daily.

A Ph.D. advisor with a reputation as a “micromanager” could be an excellent source of accountability for other students while others will find their style suffocating.

An advisor with a reputation for being “absentee” could be providing the freedom that some students need to explore, focus, and thrive while others flounder with insufficient direction and feel lost.

There are many leadership styles and the one that matters most is the one you will live with.

3. Would the group size work for you?

Choose someone whose group seems to have a size and culture that works for you.
Group size does affect group culture, but there is no “one trend fits all” pattern.

Professors just starting out usually have very small groups – perhaps 1-2 people their first year, then adding 1-2 people each year. There’s a lot at stake for a professor in this phase of their career, so they are likely to be very involved in conceptualizing, designing, and even executing projects.

This can be awesome for some people and way too much attention for others, and what this looks like exactly depends on the person. I have worked with multiple pre-tenure professors. One came to the lab every day as long as he was in town and “how’s it going” cued students to tell them what they were doing.

Another rarely came to the lab. We met her once a week as a group and then once more individually. “How’s it going” cued students to express their overall sentiment in the moment.

Later career professors can have a huge range of group sizes from purposefully tiny (1-4 students + postdocs) to an enterprise of 80+ research associates, postdocs, Ph.D. students, undergraduate students, visiting scientists, and interns.

Two professors I know keep their groups around 12 people. They believe that this is the number of people with whom they can connect well and very importantly, for whom they can maintain funding. Any more than that could be a squeeze on their financial and mental resources. These groups can provide 1-1 interactions with the professor as well as collegiality within the group.

Large groups under famous professors or principal investigators (PIs) tend to form subgroups under a few senior researchers or postdocs. These subgroup leaders and other members of the faction could be your main sources of feedback, not your professor. You might see the professor once every few months or a year, especially if they’re famous and traveling around the world in high demand for guest lectures and collaborations. Your interactions with such an advisor could be a matter of showing them what you do rather than gaining pointed feedback to solve your problems. This is especially true if they are the editor-in-chief of a journal, the chair of a department or research center, or the president of your university.

This kind of arrangement, common in groups with more than 20 people, works for many people. Often, the sheer size of the group could lead to separation into multiple offices and labs. If you're considering a group like this, get to know with whom you might be interacting most frequently. These are the people most influential to your day-to-day experience.

4. Who will you spend the most time with and what are the group dynamics like?

Regardless of group size, research groups can have complex interpersonal dynamics.

Do you like working as part of a team? Or do you thrive in a slightly cutthroat environment?

Do new students typically work with another student or postdoc assigned by the supervisor?
Or do they have to figure things out on their own? Or do they work in small subgroups?

There may be unwritten or unspoken rules about "the chain of command", when to ask someone something, who to ask first, and how.

One overzealous student I knew annoyed their Ph.D. advisor by directly contacting another senior professor instead of waiting for the advisor to make the connections. The student thought they were being proactive, saving the busy professor one step, but this action also stepped outside their sense of authority. Right or wrong, it’s likely that the advisor was in a better position to advocate for the student to the senior professor.

There might also be unspoken best practices.

My postdoc advisor had a strong preference for slide formats, the absence of animations (simulations and videos OK), and the format of citations. Such rules weren't written anywhere, but you found out as soon as you attended a group meeting and saw the consistency in the slide themes, or if you didn't figure it out then, you heard about it as soon as you showed your slides to the group.

5. Will they advocate for your career?

Do you believe this person will advocate for you when it's time to apply for fellowships, awards, your next role, postdoc, internships, jobs, etc? Are they likely to support your exploration of different post-degree career paths?

This is hard to know before you start, but you can still get a few signs. Many research group websites show where their alumni went, and talking with people who know the professor can clue you in to their track record.

When you do get to interact with the professor or someone who knows them, remember that advocating for your career is not only about the letter of reference. It is also about whether they might listen for what you want to do afterwards. Ideally, they will support you in networking and seeking resources for your prospective paths from the beginning of your Ph.D.

One Ph.D. classmate found himself greatly interested in an industry role and felt unsupported by his advisor. This student found himself leveraging his own connections to land interviews, an internship, and eventually a full-time role. In contrast, the same advisor advocated strongly for their star student seeking postdoc roles through persuasive letters of recommendations and introductions.

If your advisor does not interact with your specific career goals, you still might have a rewarding experience completing your Ph.D. with them. You'll just need to leverage support from elsewhere.

On the other hand, if an advisor puts up barriers to your career goals, then you might want to reflect more deeply on your options for your career growth and whether you want to stay with this advisor.

6. Are they honest and fair about providing support via funding, visa sponsorship, and other administrative and practical needs for you to stay?

This one is not a matter of preference (OR, these questions cannot be avoided).

Your legal status in the country of your Ph.D. study and financial support will determine the way you live during your Ph.D. years.

If you face uncertainty about these things year after year, the mental and emotional resources you pour into these questions will affect your productivity and the quality of your research.

7. Are they fair in making decisions around ownership of a project, distributing resources, resolving disputes, authorship, and taking time off?

The answers to these questions will shape your day-to-day, the pace of your work, and the recognition you receive for your work.

Your choice of Ph.D. advisor shapes your entire graduate school experience and possibly your career trajectory. While it may not be “more important than marriage” as one professor suggested, your decision deserves due diligence.

These seven questions serve as a framework to help you evaluate potential advisors holistically, from research alignment and management style to funding, visa, and other practical support.

There’s no “perfect” advisor and you may not find someone who “ticks all the boxes”, especially in this age where graduate applications are more competitive than ever. What matters is that you’re aware of what your choice might entail and seek a combination of resources to support you through the Ph.D.

Take time to gather information, speak with students and group members if you can, and honestly assess what you need to thrive. In Part II of this series, we’ll cover how to go about finding out all this juicy information.

The Ph.D. is hard, even if it’s fun. Choosing the right advisor and people to work with can be the difference between a productive, deep learning experience and years of unnecessary struggle.