Questions To Ask and Avoid on Grad School Visits

It's that time of year again, when prospective graduate students visit the programs they've applied to/ been accepted by. My experiences have always been with visits where you're accepted first and there are no rotations, so some of what I'm about to say may not apply to interview visits or departments with rotation programs. With one of the visit weekends at GiantU done, I've started putting together a list of questions in several categories.

Questions to ask grad students:
What do you think of the city?
You may have to read between the lines a bit, but it should be fairly clear whether or not we like living there.   This also covers things like public transit, apartment locations, etc. Just let them talk for a bit and look interested. You'll find out a lot.

How often do you meet with your advisor?
This helps you gauge the management style fairly well, and graduate students are going to give you the real number, whereas the professor will give you the frequency they intend to meet.

How often do people in your group publish?
Again, this is a question to ask students instead of the professor for much the same reason as the meeting frequency.

How long did it take the most recent students in your group to graduate?
This is an important question to ask both students and professors. The students will give you a better view of the recent trend, where the professor is going to include every students they've ever had in their math.

What are the food options near campus like?
You may be in a town famous for amazing food, but if it's nowhere near campus, your lunch options may be limited.

What was your coursework like?
Different schools take drastically different approaches to their curriculum, and students will give you a better description than the course catalog.

Questions to ask professors:
Do students typically pick their own topic in your group, or are there specific projects to chose from? If the later, do you have specific projects available?
This can still be a hazy question, because at any given time, there are several proposals out for review, so the answer may change before you would matriculate. However, you will get a much more specific idea of what you could be doing, should you decide to join a group.

How long does it take a typical student to graduate in your lab?
Yes, this seems like a very reasonable question. However, in my experience, the answer you get is how long the professor thinks it should take. I suggest asking to compare to the answer to the grad student version, though. If there is a large discrepancy, be wary.

How many students are in your group?
Whether you know that you like a lot of attention and feedback, or you like being part of a larger group, it's worth knowing. Departmental websites are often woefully out of date in this category, so it's worth asking the professor.

When do you expect students to start working on research?
Self-explanatory. It's up to you if you think sooner is better or if you want to really focus on the course work.

What kind of jobs have recent graduates gone on to?
 This can give an idea of the professor's track record in getting students into the kinds of positions you are ultimately interested in.


Questions NOT to ask grad students(and expect a useful answer):
What do you think of working for your professor/ the department?
We're trying to get you to come to our school. We're under orders to be enthusiastic and positive from the person who can actually make our lives hard, our graduate coordinator.

Do you like your research?
Just because I'm madly in love with studying amorphous states of matter doesn't mean you'll find it remotely interesting. If I'm tired of fatigue, you may still be interested in it. Of course, if the grad student in question is tired, drunk, or otherwise failing at impulse control, you can get very revealing answers, like "I only put up with my advisor because I love my research" (I swear this hasn't happened... yet).

Questions NOT to ask professors (and expect a useful answer):

What kind of research does your group do?
In groups that do many different things, this tells you nothing about what positions might be open, especially if they're starting new research areas. In more established and focused groups, this tells the professor you haven't done your homework before talking to them.

What kind of support programs are available for students?
The professors are usually not very well up to speed on these unless a student has talked to them about it. This is a question for the graduate coordinator/administrators.

What do you think of the city?
The way professors interface with a city is not the same as you will in graduate school. They will have better parking, live in different areas and probably not go to the same bars.

How many hours a week do you expect students to work?
 They will either give a wishy-washy "it's about the amount of work" answer, or adjust their number depending on whether they want to impress you or avoid scaring you off.

What questions would you add to these categories?

Final Push

The final assignment of the semester is due today, which means I will be spending tonight and tomorrow grading so that grades can be turned in on time. At some point, I also need to pack, do several more loads of laundry, get keys to the cat sitter, and see if I can manage to breathe through my nose again...

I'm starting to look forward to next semester. For the first time, I won't have classes, as a student or TA. I have a fantastic undergrad working with me who is very motivated. I've realized that there's nothing I can do to get my advisor to read my manuscripts any faster, so I really have to figure out how to keep myself motivated in spite of him. Even though I have fewer distractions, I think next semester is going to be hard, partly because I won't be as busy. The less time I have available, the less I tend to procrastinate. With no other impositions on my time, I worry I won't get anything done...

Email Avalanche

With the beginning of the semester comes an avalanche of new emails. Every student org has ten events they want to advertise, we have daily construction bulletins, and seminars across the college of engineering. This all comes across a moderated list, so it tends to come in spurts as it gets approved, usually around 10AM, well after I've moved into the actual work portion of my morning.

 This semester, I also get the joy of student emails, since I'm a TA. These have been... interesting. I get more than my fellow TAs for this course because my name is first on the syllabus. My favorite has been the request to go over a student's report draft before they submit it *as a draft*. Am I supposed to mark it twice?

I'm super excited about next week, tough. My lab class is taking a field trip! To a (small) foundry! Molten metal!!! (I'm not crazy.... just excited). As much as I love my theoretical work, I miss poking around in the machine shop and foundry., so TAing the lab class is pretty fantastic for me.

Do you have any student email stories to share?

The Transition to Candidacy

Passing my prelims was fantastic, in that I felt like I was actually *done* with something. Except for the part where I really am not done with anything: I'm just starting.

For me, the first two years of graduate schools have been like a series of mad dashes from one deadline to the next. The coursework race, the (insert conference here) scrambles, the speculative abstract panics. There was always another major deadline looming. This week, for the first time, my advisor and I had a discussion about what I should be working on (!) to generate papers (that maybe he'll read?) and make progress, without any specific deadlines!

I hadn't realized to what an extent my life has been ruled by specific deadlines until suddenly, it's not. Yes, I have two conferences this fall, but I already have most of the data, because I was actually involved in writing and submitting the abstracts.

Throughout my scholastic career, I've rarely had a deadline more than six months away. If I hadn't been a warped teenager already looking at graduate schools, you rarely plan more 2-3 years ahead. Now, I have to somehow shift from the last 16+ years of sprinting to running a marathon...

Finding Where You Fit

As a compulsive long-term planner, I've been considering lately where I'd like to ultimately end up (though graduation is still a way off...). One thing I've determined is that I don't want to end up at another R1 university a la GiantU. The resources are fantastic, but there's no sense of "department". We're a bunch of separate groups, and after your course work is done, you retreat to your research cave, until you emerge with a thesis. While a decent fraction of the grad students are in two main offices, some groups are hidden in their own little corners, such as mine. It can be stretch to interact with other students simply because I never run into them (especially since I'm something of a morning person).

SnowTech was a rather smaller school, and I honestly wouldn't mind ending up there permanently, given a good snow blower. I liked knowing all of my professors, even the ones I never took a class with. I don't want to be a research rock star. I'd rather be a good teacher and a decent researcher than develop the next carbon nanotube. My undergraduate professors also generally seemed a bit calmer and frankly, happier, than most of the MSE faculty at GiantU. Maybe it's that their teaching time was more valued. Maybe being in the middle of nowhere attracts a mellower kind of person in the first place.

At this point, there are three paths I can see myself taking: the national lab system, small engineering school professor, or industry. This of course assumes openings at any of these, but such is the way of job searching. I'm lucky that my two-body problem involves a non-academic, which in some ways makes him easier to move around. I've been lucky enough to have a summer internships both in the national lab system and industry, so I'm not simply hoping I'd like them better. There's something oddly reassuring about knowing you have to leave work by 6 pm, or the gaurd

For most of my life, I've known at least roughly where I was going to be in 4 years. I started looking at graduate schools in high school. For the first time, I'm honestly unsure. It's a strange sensation.

How Advisors Are Not Like Bosses

In a number of very critical ways, being a grad student is not the same as having a job. One of these is the difference between your advisor and your boss.

Academia is a weird place sometimes, and part of that is due to the organizational structure. Superficially, it's not a terribly odd organizational chart, but many times, the actual nature of the relationships in academia is fundamentally different than the analogous relationship in industry.

Difference #1: Deadlines
Graduate school is sometimes a strange limbo of hazy requirements with no firm timeline. Other times, there are firm deadlines, but these are somewhat sporadic. Your advisor is not going to stop by your desk and say "I need the report for the widget on Tuesday for the division meeting." (most of the time).

Difference #2: Performance Reviews
In graduate school, it is unlikely that you will ever sit down for a formal performance review with your advisor until it's approaching time for your defense or unless your professor spent time in industry. More importantly (from the grad student side), you will also never review your advisor's performance. Some larger corporations have a system from underlings to review their managers. Grad students don't have this sort of mechanism, so we resort to whining on the internet.

Difference #3: Advice 
Advisors, at least in theory, are there to help give you advice about how to advance your career and achieve your goals. While there are managers who do this, it's not strictly speaking part of their job. Of course, there are also advisors who aren't very good at this, but it's in the title...

Difference #4: Dependancy
If your manager quits, gets fired, or moves to a new position, this means you get a new manager, but may very well still be working on similar projects, and things are relatively stable (assuming everything goes smoothly). Having an advisor quit, move, or get fired can be much more difficult. You're typically required to have someone advising your research, and if you're very far into your project, switching advisors could very well entail losing years of work. If your advisor is moving, you might be able to follow them, but that's not an easy proposition in most cases.

You also very likely depend directly on your advisor for funding and access to resources. There's not someone above them you can go to (i.e., your boss's boss) when you need order forms signed and they're out of town. The independence of your position is much murkier: you don't work for Corporation or University, you work for Advisor at University. Different schools may also deal with this differently, adding to the confusion.
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I'm sure there are plenty more differences, and that there are special cases that disagree with every point I've made above, but in my humble experience and observation, these generally have been true.