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Finding a Research Mentor?
bsomerville writes "As an aspiring social scientist preparing to apply to Ph.D. programs, I'm keen to find a faculty mentor somewhere in North America who shares my research interests. This is more difficult than I thought it would be. While links to program websites are readily available, I'm surprised to find no comprehensive collection of faculty research interests in my field (clinical psychology). Instead this information is buried several levels down in each university website. Is this a common problem across all fields? Is there some inherent reason why no wiki-type Web resource exists to meet this need? It seems like a text-searchable database could be built fairly quickly and maintained by users, saving countless aspiring grad students thousands of clicks through university websites."
Use ISI Web of Knowledge. Search for the terms you are interested in. Find papers. Sort by date. Who's publishing in your field these days? This is who you want to talk to.
My research interests aren't immutable, and I don't entirely know what they are. If I run across a good idea, it can become a research interest. So, (a) who has the time to write such a web page, and (b) it would be wrong anyway.
Also, research interests are (at least partially) an administrative fake. Administrators and research councils like departments to have "research programs" (God only knows why...). Department heads respond to this and ask professors for their "research interests". Professors look at their recent publications and write a one-paragraph plausible story about what their research interests must have been. But it's all after-the-fact and (as the financial people say) past performance has no relationship to future research.
I speak as someone who makes their living doing research.
Great idea. Why don't you start it?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If you are trying to find a mentor in any scientific field, you don't go looking for "lists" of interests. I don't even know what that refers to. You find recently published primary literature in areas you have interest in, and speak to those authors. This helps you find people who are actively working in the field you seek to be a part of. Even if the authors themselves aren't right for you, they are more likely to know other people in the field than anyone else.
Frankly, I'm kind of shocked. You are applying to PhD programs, but don't currently know any scientists in the field? What about at your undergraduate institution? How did you get interested in social science without reading any papers?
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Sometimes it's necessary to stop looking for answers on the internet and start doing plain, old-fashioned manual research. Have you asked the lecturers / staff at your existing college - they must have some contacts, to have taught you in the first place. How about looking up the authors of papers that interest you and actually talking to them.
get out there and network.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
One way to determine what professors might share interests of yours would be to review books and articles you have read on the subject and pay close attention to the cited works. Who writes recent and interesting articles on a topic which excites you? Who has unpublished works in progress which are cited in current literature? If you have a clear conception of your research interests this should not be hard at all. Google scholar can help you here, as you can search by citation and by author (though the author search fails gracelessly when faced w/ abbreviations and authors with the same name). Alternately you can search Web of Science if you have an institutional account or look around for a recent lit review article. When you find a potential match, look for a few things. First make sure they are actually teaching at that school and not on some long term sabbatical or recently moved to some fancier university. Second check their current PhD students to see if they are already supervising a bunch. They don't need to be on your committee in order to mentor you, but it helps. Third (and this relates to the "don't bother"), make sure they are at a good school. Pedigree matters a LOT in academia, don't believe anyone who tells you different. A good dissertation is critical, but an average dissertation from a Harvard PhD gets you a lot further than an above average dissertation from State U. (assuming State U. isn't a public ivy)--that doesn't even begin to touch the non-signaling benefits of going to a good school. Of course "good school" is field dependent. But in most cases the top 10 and even the top 20 are usually the same.
This is all assuming you want to get that PhD in order to teach someplace or do fieldwork. If you just want to learn, disregard all that stuff above about good schools. A lot of those top schools are pretty miserable for grad students if your goal is to learn.
However, if you want to get placed somewhere good, then you can avoid this tedious search and simply apply to the best schools out there and hope you get in a top 10-20 institution. It's really mercenary, but that's how it works.
I'll second this. In economics, where there is a (nominally) unified classification code for both jobs and research, most filled positions don't match the stated classification code. A professor may be hired to do time-series work but end up teaching only one time series course and supervising quantile regression work. Plenty of long-term faculty are hired under classification codes which described their early-career research interests but no more describe their current work than would your 4th grade movie tastes describe your current library. And the faculty don't bother changing that crap on the website because nobody really cares. No one who matters is going to search for faculty by the classification on the website. Press will go through a press office, colleagues will know the research and students will twist in the wind. :)
At Ph.D. prep level you should be reading research papers/journal articles to work out who's doing interesting work. You should also have networked in your undergrad and formed connections to people who can provide you with interesting opportunities in exchange for your hard work.
You certainly should not be dreaming of searchable dataases, trawling university web sites or posting to ask slashdot. That you are doing this does not bode well for your ability to complete a Ph.D.
By the way, I have no idea about psychology but preprint articles in Physics and Astronomy can be found on the net at arxiv.org. Since the journals tend to try to restrict publication for their own profits these days (espeically in medical sciences), you may need to find a library or University that you can access that has research papers for your own field. Either way if you're not interested enough to read current research articles to determine who's doing interesting work, perhaps you should be thinking about something other than a doctorate.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Oh, and don't mind all those comments chiding you for not knowing anything about the area you're planning to specialize in. It's not exactly a point in your favor, but I've seen many aspiring Ph.D. students don't know who is who in the research area that's caught their interest, and they usually don't know much about the state of play in that area either (which is what they will find out in the first 6 months of their Ph.D. training). It will definitely add to their workload but that's why doing a Ph.D means specializing in a specific area.
Disclaimer: I am a current PhD grad in EE. Your field might be different, YMMV, etc.
Many people on this site will say research the latest papers or even insult you for asking a question regarding the best way to find a research mentor. Sorry about that, grad students can be ... curt at times. I'll try to answer your questions and provide some insight.
"Is this a common problem across all fields? Is there some ... this need?"
Sadly, this seems to be a problem in EE too (though I can't say much about other fields). The main reason for this problem is human laziness. Once a student goes through all the trouble to find a decent grad program to enroll to, there seems little reason to document this one-time affair. When I was in a similar situation as yours, I too thought of making a wiki type site where all my experience could be indexed and searchable by other students. However, I quickly became aware that this is pointless. First, PhD research tends to be VERY VERY specific so information useful for me has little value to others. Second, field specific information changes very rapidly so any program catalog would need constant updates or become useless in a matter of months. Third, people are lazy. Once you do through the process of choosing a program you have very little incentive to stream-line it. You will almost likely never encounter the problem again ... so why optimize.
But all is not lost, here are a few tips:
1. Don't listen to people telling you to read the all the latest research in your field. You will likely not understand it. That's not meant as an insult at all. While you might know the field you are interested (clinical psychology) you likely don't know any of the specific terms to do a thorough analysis. It would be like me telling a 3rd year EE undergrad interested in signals that they should read an IEEE transaction journal on motion compensated temporal filter DWT lifting algorithm, and somehow be able to understand it and contact the author regarding their research. It's unrealistic and probably does more harm than good (you might get depressed at how little you actually know).
If you are to read anything, read a light survey paper about clinical psychology to get acquianted with the terms. Then search for schools that do that. I.e. if pre-natal clinical psychology interests you (I have no idea if that's an actual field) then maybe UCLA does good work in it.
2. Talk. Perhaps your best source of information is a professor in your current school. Ask him/her what schools they would recommend for PhD work. You might be surprised at the answer, often they will recommend other schools and be able to tell you the good/bad. Also, be sure to ask what school they went to (it's usually on the department website anyways). Just make sure to ask more than a single professor's opinion, you don't want to be prejudiced by one guy's pet research project or arch-nemesis grant competitor (yeah, sadly some profs are like that).
3. Once you find a good school, check the department website and find a professor who does interesting work. Just call him and ask him about his research (professors ALWAYS like to talk about their research ... unlike some grads). Chances are you won't understand 90% of what the guy says, but you will get somewhat of a feel whether you can work with him for the next 2-3 years. Go ahead and call all profs in that research area ... you will learn just by talking over the phone who is reasonable and intelligent and who might be just a tad crazy.
Which brings me to the most important part ... make sure you find a mentor you can work with for at least 2-3 years. There is no point in trying to work with a genius if he's a jerk ... you won't get anywhere and your research (if any) will suffer. And if you don't find that one star research mentor, that's okay too (maybe he is still doing his postdoc). Just find a school where t
As a current UK PhD student nearing the end of my three years, in my opinion you're looking for the wrong thing. Everyone will tell you that you need to be very passionate about your research and that it is the key to success. However, I don't feel that its true. The relationship between the student and supervisor is the most important aspect. If you don't have a good relationship, you will fail. So you should look for a supervisor that you can trust, who has the important qualities and skills (e.g. good communicator) and is willing to make time for you. You want a supervisor who is not happy with the way your current institution teaches its students, but instead is constantly evaluating him or herself to better the way they provide such an education. You don't want someone who will get lost in their own research, or is too busy as a Professor to see you often enough. I think the only way you will know who would work well with you is by comparing the lecturers who taught you for your undergraduate degree. Which ones were happy to provide assistance (e.g. timely, polite responses to your emails?) Which ones made the effort in lectures to aid your understanding by providing voice recordings of their lectures if you missed them, or mind-maps for each lecture, or turned up 15 minutes early if you had any problems? I chose this individual over a particular research topic. Obviously, the down side is that for three years I've been stuck researching artificial neural networks - which may or may not be my first choice. But I don't think I would be 3 months away from finishing if I was being supervised by any other member of staff in my department. Once you have the PhD, you are free to research what ever you like.