This post is a little out of date, I started it in May and then summer exploded on me. I'll have a slightly more up-to-date post in the next week or so, I hope I hope I hope.....
Now that I've given you a sense of what kind of research I've decided to go for, I'll give you a taste of my process for tracking down professors with whom I would like to do that research. Over the past month or so I've been brainstorming, bugging colleagues and friends, and scanning listservs and other online resources to amass a list of potential professors I might like to work with. I've been determining additions to the list based on some mindfulness about how I react to the descriptions of a professor's work, what little I can glean about their person, and the feel of the institution.
I'm not working with much data for these impressions, since the large majority of these professors are people I have yet to meet in person. As a scientist who's supposed to be cooly analytical, it also bugs me to have to rely so much on online impressions of a person. However, recent experience has taught me trust my instincts a bit more, and there is some amount of research to back this up. It's not the best evidence, but it's what I have at the moment.
And because I'm a scientist, I of course have to find good ways of analyzing and sorting my (highly subjective) data. I am a self-avowed spreadsheet addict. So, naturally, I have created a spreadsheet and rating system for the PhD search. Part of this spreadsheet serves as simple data collection. I have fields for professor, institution, their research, and what research I might do with them. That last field is important - I of course want to make sure the professor does cool research, but it has be cool research I can see myself working on. Location is also important to me, as it will take a certain amount of activation energy to get me to move from a place as awesome as Colorado*.
*Where it was snowing on May 1st when I started writing this post...
The second part of the spreadsheet is my tool for making sense of all the information by applying my subjective ratings. I rate based on the person of the professor, my impression of the institution, howI feel about the research, and what I think of the location. I used a scale from -2 to +2, with -2 being "really not psyched" and +2 being "oh HECK yes!!". I use only integers to try to keep the subjectivity in control.
The results have been useful for making sense of my giant data collection spreadsheet, although I'm having to stop myself from trying to code up a clustering algorithm. When I plot my ratings as a bar chart sorted from lowest score to highest (below), I can break up my "professors of interest" into about 4 groups: definitely interesting (7+), pretty interesting (5-6), meh (4), and probably not (3 and below).
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| Professor names concealed so I and them can maintain some modicum of privacy. |
Now rather than trying to track down over 20 people, I've only got about 8 professors at three different universities to seriously pursue. If a significant fraction of those 8 professors don't work out for some reason, I can go back to my "meh" and "probably not" categories and re-evaluate. At the end of the process, I hope to have 3 or 4 programs to apply to, with things narrowed down to only one or two professors at each of those programs. I confess that the chart above is actually out of date - I got it down to about 10 professors when I decided to focus on deformation alone. I'm still working with my ratings system, though, as it's still helpful to have a way of prioritizing my options.
What's next? First, lots of discussion with people close to me, both personally and professionally. The goal of these discussions will be to help me narrow down the list further to the professors I actually want to contact. Then, I get to do the very scary job of actually reaching out to some of these professors, which will likely narrow things even further. I'll write a bit about these discussions, and about reaching out to the professors, in a later post. That is, if I can ever get myself to stop fiddling with my spreadsheets...
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