your advisor is the key to getting through grad school intact.
you're going to end up working in your advisor's research group, doing work that your advisor finds interesting... it is therefore best if you find your advisor's interests, well, interesting. this may seems obvious, now, but it wasn't to me when i was looking.
if you select a school, get in, and _then_ start looking around for an advisor (like i did... whooops) the chances are much higher that you are going to end up either:
a) doing work that you are not really all that interested in. b) not being able to find an advisor that has any interest in what you find interesting.
neither is good. so......
narrow your list of schools down to 10 or fewer. check the faculty bios in the catalogues from those schools (which should include their research interests). identify a batch of likely suspects. then search online for papers that they have published (preferably with one of their students as a second author).
your first few papers will probably have you as the second author, no matter what fraction of the work you actually do yourself, so papers like this are a good indication of what kind of work the Research Assistants under the prof's wings are actually doing.
rank the schools by which have the most and most desirable of such profs. order your application efforts, and your final decision accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
your advisor is the key to getting through grad school intact.
you're going to end up working in your advisor's research group, doing work that your advisor finds interesting... it is therefore best if you find your advisor's interests, well, interesting. this may seems obvious, now, but it wasn't to me when i was looking.
if you select a school, get in, and _then_ start looking around for an advisor (like i did... whooops) the chances are much higher that you are going to end up either:
a) doing work that you are not really all that interested in.
b) not being able to find an advisor that has any interest in what you find interesting.
neither is good. so......
narrow your list of schools down to 10 or fewer.
check the faculty bios in the catalogues from those schools
(which should include their research interests).
identify a batch of likely suspects.
then search online for papers that they have published
(preferably with one of their students as a second author).
your first few papers will probably have you as the second author, no matter what fraction of the work you actually do yourself, so papers like this are a good indication of what kind of work the Research Assistants under the prof's wings are actually doing.
rank the schools by which have the most and most desirable of such profs. order your application efforts, and your final decision accordingly.
happy hunting!
:jeff
i recall Pitr reading not only "Evil Geniuses for Dummies" (something like that) but also "Hooked on Slavonics", to get his accent configured propely.