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Waiting at the doctor’s office so I have time for a micro-thread. I would like to remind my senior colleagues (senior to me, I’m relatively senior myself) that not everyone is socialized the way you were, or the way your students were or are trained. Not everyone thinking of...
... graduate school has ever met Masters or PhDs before. My chemical engineering programme didn’t have ONE PhD teaching until a young graduate from our university went to the now defunct UMIST in Manchester (also by fluke) to do his PhD - he returned to teach after I finished.
The state of Guanajuato has a really prestigious graduate programme in Chemical Engineering (Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya) where faculty are Mexicans who did their PhDs abroad (much like my own institution, CIDE) - I learned about ITC from my Separation Processes Professor
Margarita Villalón Guzmán was (still is!) a brilliant chemical engineer who did her Masters at ITC in chemical engineering, won an award for best student. Most winners of that award go on to do their PhDs abroad: CMU, UIUC, etc. Margarita didn’t (not my place to explain why).
I was good at all chemical engineering sub-fields, but process control attracted me because of the Laplace Transform and the mathematical modeling involved. Arturo Jimenez was the one professor who taught that at ITC. So I made my plan: Masters with AJ at ITC then PhD...
... at Wisconsin-Madison because that’s where Margarita would have gone had she done a PhD and that’s where Arturo got his PhD. That was my logic: I’ll follow my interest (Process Control) and the advice of the people who taught me (MVG) and the people who taught HER (AJ)
I didn’t follow what I see senior professors argue is a better logic (choose department/university) because I WAS NOT SOCIALIZED to think that way. I would always have chosen Elinor Ostrom first before choosing PoliSci or SPEA @ Indiana. I DO think choosing advisors is normal.
If you want to be helpful, which I assume you do, obviously, when a prospective graduate student asks you for advice, explain clearly why choosing a department/university could be a better investment. Also, clearly spell out for them the process and the potential outcomes
I basically discourage prospective doctoral students from doing a PhD if they want a TT position, lay out the dismal job prospects and then, if they’re still convinced, I explain various PhD processes I’m familiar with (Mexico, Canada, the UK, France) </fin>
Addendum: since you’ve socialized your students to present themselves as R1 people, please teach them how to summarize their research without resorting to the phrase “my job market paper is on...” which becomes a very mechanistic approach to doctoral mentoring. Their PhD is on...
... topic A, the key research question that drives their work is B, and their methodological approach to tackle it is C, so they’ve developed a series of paper to showcase different ways of answering B research question. They’re more than a job market paper. </ end rant>
