More on Advisor Decision

My friend Mitch wrote the following comment to my earlier post.

Wow, your advisor decision in some way influences what kind of research you have to do (that is not only your own research interests within a given field)?

The answer to that question is, pretty much, yes. Not knowing at all how this process works in other departments or even the same Chemical Engineering department at other Universities, I’ll try and explain how it works here.

After I had been accepted by UT at Austin, I was invited to come down to Austin for the weekend (at thier expense) to see the University, the facilities, etc. On Saturday morning, we all went into a large classroom and spent about three hours doing nothing but listening to presentations from all the professors on what kind of research they were doing. This was just to give us an idea of what possibilities we might have for our future research. Then when those of us that chose UT at Austin came down here, we listened to more detailed presentations by the professors. Then we had one month to speak to the professors we were interested in, talk to their graduate students, see their labs, etc. Then we all turn in a piece of paper with our 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices for our advisor. Then the professors all meet together and parcel out which student goes to which professor while trying to give everyone their highest choice possible. The next day they announce whom everyone’s advisors are.

For example, my choices were between Dr. A, Dr. B, and Dr. Bonnecaze. (probably no chance that those other two people will ever read this blog, but just to be safe I’ll keep them anonymous) The research being done in Dr. A’s group looked the most interesting to me, and I liked the atmosphere and the ‘feel’ of the group. I guess the only real disadavantage for his group is that his research facility is WAY off campus, I would have to ride a half-hour shuttle between there and campus. That would give me a daily commute of 1 hour one-way, which is a big minus for me.

Dr. B’s research was also really interesting to me, (in fact very similar, since Dr. A and Dr. B do a lot of collaborations) but I kind of got the feeling that I wouldn’t fit in with his other graduate students so well. It was nothing I could quantify, but I kind of got the idea that the next few years might be full of a lot of awkward silences.

Dr. Bonnecaze’s group, on the other hand, I felt very comfortable with. I hesitated with him though, because he had two possible projects for incoming graduate students, and I was only interested in one of them. The other project is nothing but theoretical work, trying to find a model to fit data that someone else had already taken. The other project on immersion lithography seemed to be a good balance between experimentation and theory and seemed much more interesting.

So I pretty much condensed all that information on the form with my three choices, and ended up with Dr. Bonnecaze. Since no other students seemed to be interested in his projects, I got the project of my choice, and everything is fine.

So to more fully answer Mitch’s original question, as far as I can tell the research works like this:

A professor gets an idea for some kind of research that might be interesting/useful. For example in the case of my research, the idea is this: “Current production methods of making microchips are reaching a physical limit in smallness, due to limitations in lens size, wavelength of light, etc. What if we put a water bubble between the lens and the silicon wafer, so we could use the higher index of refraction of water to make smaller features on a silicon chip?” The professor then writes up a grant proposal, stating the idea, the kind of research needed to answer the question, the amount of money and time needed, etc. Then he sends it to an appropriate deep-pocket, such as the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, or a large company that could benefit from the results, etc. If it’s approved, he gets the money, and that is one project that he can have one or more graduate students working on.

So your advisor choice determines largely what kind of research you will be working on. The professor essentially has a contract to produce the research promised in the grant proposal, and the graduate students are kind of like indentured servants that do all of the work. (This analogy fits MUCH better with some professors over others, but to some extent I think it applies to all of them.) There can be some leeway such as NSF projects, which tend to be more open-ended and you can take the research in a different direction than what you originally intended. But a project being funded by a specific company (such as mine) is much more controlled, since the company is looking for usable results that (hopefully) can eventually be used to make a profit.

Some of you may ask, “Why in the world would anyone want to go to graduate school like this?” The answer is simple though: none of us have to pay our way through graduate school. There are about 40 new grad students in the Chemical Engineering department here this fall, and all of us have our way here paid. I’m getting paid around $25000/yr, which is enough for me to support myself and my family while here, albeit frugally. Most everyone else who is single (or double-income) can live quite nicely on that amount of money.