>Researchers always say that they are looking to recruit new

>>8336547
grant money

>>8336547
> needing your hand held in grad school.
I mean you're suppose to start being more self-sufficient, knowing how to learn the stuff you need to learn.
Other grad students have been the best resource in my experience.

>>8336555
There's a difference between hand holding and being completely unwilling to meet with your students.

>>8336547
>have 10 grad students
>put them on crazy ass projects that are hard
>only one needs to succeed
>don't care about the other 9
>get more grant money for awesome hard project

>>8336609
So essentially, they are casting a wide net?

>>8336547
There is literally no downside to having more grad students as a prof if you have the money. For them it just means more papers, more recognition, more grants, etc. A prof is basically judged on their productivity of their students. If you look at groups at say Stanford and such, they usually have upward of 20 people if you include the post-docs.

>>8336633
Adding to my answer, this is only not true with heavy theoretical field where a useless student can actually waste everyone's time since they will need constant hand-holding while producing barely anything or nothing at all. In experimental fields, you can usually make them do the tedious experiments while waiting for them to inevitably fail their quals.

>>8336643
> a useless student can actually waste everyone's time since they will need constant hand-holding while producing barely anything or nothing at all

You just described the postdoct in my research group

>first year at grad school
>also adviser's first year as professor at grad school
>only grad student
>unlimited attention

She's actually on like a billion committees and shit like that that she's constantly in phone conferences for, but she tells me to interrupt them. Basically she's bae

>>8336888
Assistant professor usually have no reputation and connections though. It can be very hard to follow through with an academic career by doing a PhD under a no-name professor. I'd be wary of getting a reference letter from them, let alone do a whole PhD.

>>8336888
>>8336952
My adviser is a new professor to MY university. However he is well known in the community. Coauthored with a Field's medalist and numerous people in the field.

I am his only student and I get a lot of attention.

Best of both worlds.

>>8336952
My situation is more akin to this anon's
>>8336994

Worked with CERN on ALICE and BNL on RHIC's PHENIX detector, which is where I am now.

So i am very seriously considering a PhD. The professor i would be working with is well known. He is working on getting a project approved that i would be very interested in working on.

However he wants to retire in a few years. So he said he would be co-advisor with another professor. This other professor is new to the university and was his previous PhD student. This new professor i believe is a full fledged professor and not an assistant prof or anything like that. So it is just kind of a weird situation.

I really do think he wants me to get my PhD. He sent me very high praise this past weekend. He gave my class a bonus problem on our assignment. It was a data analysis type problem that he wanted done and didn't have time to do it himself and he didnt know if it was really possible to solve, hence it being bonus. I worked through the night and sent him my solution (that i am 99% sure is correct) in the morning.

In his reply he said I had all the attributes of a PhD student. The first attribute being one of self abuse and the second being the blood hound like tenacity to solve a problem. This is the type of guy where his grad students keep a tally of how many times he actually tells them "good job".

I graduate with my undergrad degree this may. I would be able to go directly into my PhD in the summer if the project gets the go ahead.

>>8336888
how would you rate her titties?

>>8337108
Why are you hesitating then? It doesn't matter that the older prof is retiring, he won't vanish.

>>8336994
>>8337071
All newly hired professors in this competitive academic environment come from famous lab under famous people. They themselves didn't study under assistant professors who were merely previous students of those. Do you see a pattern here? You want more in your advisor than simply coming from a big lab™, you want their lab to already be established as a big lab™. By definition this is an impossibility when the professor is new. Sorry to break it to you guys.

File: benoit.jpg (4KB, 142x168px) Image search: [Google]

4KB, 142x168px

>>8337131
This
>start gradual school with new PI
>PI won award for best pHD thesis in Deutschland
>post docs at hot lab at MIT
>publishes first author Cell papers
>starts their own lab at great research uni
>has a nervous breakdown in 4th year
>quits science to become a therapist
>mfw 4 years of grad school doesn't count to my thesis committee

>>8337108
Think about what happens after you get the PhD. What do you want to do? Where do you want to be?

>>8337753

Just to give more info this would be a PhD in metallurgy.

I want to have a career that I enjoy. I also just find metallurgy fascinating. I want to do research or high level failure analysis. I would probably just go straight into industry afterwards. I am not too interested in becoming a professor at this time. I am really interested in physical metallurgy and heat treating.

From my experience through internships and co-ops, with a bachelors degree I would only have a career I could tolerate. From talking with my classmates and getting their view from their internships and co-ops it seems my experiences were very common. Most of the people I worked with who called themselves metallurgists did very little if any metallurgy related work. One company i worked for had 12 metallurgists and only 2 of them did relevant work and both of them had graduate degrees ( one of them from my university). The other ten were basically maintenance people.


So basically I want to have a career where I actually get to do metallurgy on a daily basis. It seems that only having a bachelors in this field there would be very little chance that would be the case.

college is a scam

go learn to weld