Going to graduate school in STEM? Choosing a PhD advisor / PI / lab / - Darren Lipomi - UC San Diego

[@JennyZhang42]

Thanks Prof. Lipomi for sharing this useful information. Here is my note for choosing a PhD advisor. 1. should you go to a graduate school for PhD? 2. research topics, don't restrict yourself to your undergraduate topics 3. super lab or smaller lab 4. group culture, talk to as many as graduate students as possible in the lab, ask if they are excited about what they are doing, if they are happy about their progress 5. PI himself/herself, long time relationship with PI, support from PI, drop rate in the group 6. school, department, program, location and rank

[@dionysid8751]

fyi, PI is Principal Investigator. Appears to be the lab head and person running the show. Something I had to look up:) Cheers everyone!

[@pushkalsharma6606]

Thank you Prof. Lipomi! Can you also speak something about changing fields during grad school?

[@pourya1398]

Thanks professor Lipomi for your insightful comments. You seem to be a fantastic advisor yourself.

[@mackevinbraza5639]

Thank you Prof. Lipomi! This is a really great resource for a starting PhD student like me. Will be starting my PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry in UC San Diego this Fall 2020.

[@varundolia2192]

Stumbled upon this at the right time! Thank you so much!!

[@rubayettanveer3479]

Thank you, professor. Very true what you have said, I can feel them as being a grad student.

[@williamehrhardt918]

I see big red on your book shelf! I might just crack it open for a refresher. I miss P-Chem.

[@kritikachugh3776]

Thanks a lot, dear. This is really helpful and the best video covering every aspect of choosing the supervisor.

[@gidugupatikavithakavitha7479]

Thanks I understand some concept of my PhD topic

[@raminpouria664]

Thank u very much Darren, I am studying my second master now at United States, before this I did not give priority to the things that you said and spent some valueable years of my life in misery. I was very close to leave the academia and start a cloth shop :D . But I decided to give it another shot as my last chance and made better choices, now although I have started my research in a completely new and different area of study, I am learning everyday and I realize how important is it to choose the best advisor and field of study and not only the best university.

[@kimgineer8056]

This video was so helpful! Thank you so much. I will be starting my PhD in chemical engineering in about one month. I recently realized I want to try going into a different research area than what I had originally planned, so this definitely made me feel a bit better.

[@dhop1653]

Great video, Dr. Lipomi. Thank you for taking the time and providing the world with some needed insight.

[@djlipomi]

Sure thing, thanks!

[@artsyone1]

Really helpful video for our graduating Nano daughter. Thanks Professor!

[@ahmedmustahid4936]

Thank you Dr Lipomi for your informative videos. It would be a nice addition to your already extremely helpful advices if you would make a video on how to write a research statement for a PhD application. Thank you.

[@li-wenwang1425]

Very very helpful! Thank you so much!!

[@drsanjaygulati]

Thank you professor Lipomi! That was really enlightening. Grateful 🙏

[@djlipomi]

You are very welcome

[@rupeshmahore]

Thankyou so much Prof , this was really helpful and I hope you get well soon .

[@djlipomi]

Thank you! 😃

[@fordaiffa6022]

Thanks Darren Very Very encouraging

[@JackieLiu0406]

I was just thinking… if the prestige of phd institution matters when it comes to tenure-track position application.

[@md.evonshahriarsohan1488]

Thanks for the informations! Really helpful. 😀

[@missy7863]

Thanks alot !🙏🏻

[@mehdib2792]

Very insightful even for PostDocs

[@bobmag5058]

Great stuff!

[@sanskarthakur8718]

Hi Dr. Lipomi, watching this video again as I am reaching out to professors for PhD applications (please dont be surprised if I use your suggestions to email you :P). Thank you so much for making this content available to all the aspiring graduate students. I have a few questions about how to gauge the lab culture and the application process 1) Is it a good idea to reach out to current graduate students from a lab to understand the lab culture and other qualities of the lab that are not reflected in the website? 2) How advantageous it is to have or not have relevant experience, specially if your interests are interdisciplinary and you only have some of the required background? 3) Some departments discourage you from contacting professors and some professors discourage you to contact them before applying to the program, what are the reasons? Thank you once again. - Sanskar

[@Gabby-du4mc]

Very very helpful!!!

[@KhaNguyen-wz4ld]

Thank you so much for the great video. For consideration 2, I’m not sure how to talk to graduate students about the lab culture. Let’s say that I like your lab and I reach out to arrange a meeting with you. Should I talk to your grad students then when I visit your lab? Should I just google their emails and ask? I’m just thinking that maybe some grad students won’t be very open about their experiences in lab, especially negative ones, as they fear their PI’s or for other reasons.

[@mertgulcurgs]

Hi Darren, can we say that our PhD topic also sort of determines what are we going to do in our postdoc phase - and later on? Should be only look into postdoc positions or funds which are directly related to our PhD specialisation? Thanks.

[@ayoubsbai6339]

Thank you~

[@djlipomi]

You're welcome 😊

[@negeenkargar7391]

Dear Sir, What is the minimum contribution in a research work in order to be recognized once the work is published?

[@takiyaazrin7562]

Word

[@sovietmaths5651]

So am I literally supposed to call every graduate institution that has interesting work and quiz them on their attrition rates, student positions after leaving the lab, etc? Then do I plot those points out and run an algorithm to find the maximum amount of PhD goodness? Haha. I love the advice, but I don't know how to put that into practice. If someone developed a crawler through all of the college websites and aggregated the data and put it online and indexed it for each field, then visiting that site would be practically actionable. As it stands though, how hard is it to find out attrition rates or the feeling of a lab online? Much too hard to be actionable in polynomial time if the set includes much more than 3 labs. How do we narrow it down to those 3 labs? I think it's pretty silly for someone, who knows so little, to know exactly what field they want to go into. Most people end up studying what their did in their PhD program or as a post-doc because they are already good at those things. And if you ask them what specific thing they wanted to study originally, I guarantee that over 90% of them are not studying that. They're of course, likely in the same field (math, physics, etc), but that's my point. If people only end up broadly in whatever field instead of studying something specifically, then it seems silly to use what specific thing I want to study now as a metric to narrow down the PI/labs to the degree for your advice to be actionable. For all practical purposes, it really is a crap-shoot. And I know we want to have control over our lives, but honestly, it seems like an impossible problem to actually gadge.

[@VladyslavKL]

🐳