What should one consider while signing up for a Physics PhD program, with an focus on experimental Quantum/Molecular optics, program at either university if both of them offer?
I understand there are many factors to take into account when choosing a school for research (advisor, research fit and funding to name a few), but these are on the individual.
Any Physicists on HN?
As others have pointed out, your prospective advisor(s) are the most important thing to consider. You can't go wrong with either school.
That said, when choosing an advisor:
* Pay attention to where the advisor's former students ended up. The former students are a natural "network" for you when you graduate. If you can, ask relatively recent grads about their experience.
* Meet the prospective advisor's current students and post-docs - are they happy? Will you fit in with them? Do they graduate in a reasonable amount of time? Ask other grad students about the professor as well. Trust me, each professor is going to have a reputation.
* If you want to stay in academia, mid-career advisors are the "safest" - an assistant prof may be working on something exciting, but the research will probably be more risky, and the professor might even have to leave mid-way through your thesis work if they don't get tenure. A late-career advisor may presently sit on a lot of committees and be more well-known, but by the time you need their recommendation for jobs/tenure they may have considerably less influence (that happened to me, although it was fine in the end.)
Read Feibelman's "A PhD is not enough" - still lots of good advice even though written 30+ years ago.
The opposite, postdocs that never publish and get stuck or leave academia one after the other tends to signal dysfunctionality and is a big red flag. If you dig deeper, those groups are usually broken in a number of different ways and it's critical to stay away. A bad supervisor can ruin the prospects of a great student.
Actually I gave a talk a couple months ago that was well received where I refused to use slides and only used the chalkboard. Tbh that was way more fun imo.
I think everyone should make an excuse to grab the chalk at least for part of every lecture. Part of being the instructor is doing the presentation.
This is a huge difference IMO. If you want insulation from the world, go to Stanford. If you want to be immersed in it, good bad and ugly, go to Berkeley.
I completely agree with this- your advisor will be the most influential factor of your phd years, for better or worse.
Also, some programs have a reputation of enrolling a lot more students than there is actually room for, with purposeful high attrition during the first couple of years. I am not sure if Stanford or Cal have this reputation or not, but might be something to look into.
Real question: How do you know? Example: Did you partner get a PhD in Physics at Stanford and you at UCB? Or, did you get masters at Stanford, but PhD at UCB?
The question you have to answer first is: why do you want a PhD? Is it to do science for as long as possible? Is it to contribute to the frontier of human knowledge? Is it to participate in an global research community? Is it to land a tenure track job? Or do you not know the questions and their answers (which is fine!)?
I'll offer myself as a case study. I knew I wanted to make something tangible (hence device physics / photonics), I knew I wanted to explore the possibility of continuing in academia, and I knew that I would enjoy working in industry. I structured my PhD to go for a high risk/high reward research topic (with the thinking that if it pans out, academia would be viable without having to go through an extended PhD and multiple postdocs, which was off the table for me). I also set up to consult on industry projects, and started poking around the local startup incubators and B-school entrepreneurial offerings. My school (and PI) choice was motivated really by these factors: how I judged the impact of potential research being done by the team, how plugged-in and amenable was the environment to extracurricular work, and how supported I would be to a transition to start-ups/industry.
Figure out what you want, and treat your PhD itself as an experiment w/ testable hypotheses. If you're not sure about something, how can you build into the experience a way to find out? Is it a class, a side-project, the local community that can help? There are many factors to take into account when choosing a school because we all weigh those factors differently - once you decide what's really important to you you'll get better-tuned advice.
The thing I would say though is that 1) the supervisor or supervisors you end up working with are incredibly important and are really the make or break decision for the whole programme of study; 2) you are in a surprisingly powerful position if you are a good undergrad student (the world is your oyster! You can go anywhere and do almost anything!); and 3) think beyond the PhD: it is little more than an apprenticeship. Where are you going later – do you want to work broadly in the area of $PHD_SUBJECT for the next few years? Will you learn the skills you want to let that happen?
If you don't enjoy your subject of study, you may well come to resent being cheap labour for a rich institution, at a point in your life when you can do almost anything and go almost anywhere – and see your friends earn real money and get on with life (marriage, children, houses, etc).
Full disclaimer: just today I have advertised a PhD place for a bright mathematical scientist, at Aarhus University in Denmark [1]. I am biased, but I would encourage you to go elsewhere. There are many great institutions in europe (switzerland and the UK included) and the other thing is that you do a PhD in 3-4 years on a real salary in most places – e.g. the starting point for total compensation for a student in Aarhus is ~428500 dkk per year (~$60k/year, ~€57k/year, ~£47k/year, from which tax & compulsory pension contributions are deducted, but no health insurance) and it is expected that this is enough to live on. This is a very reasonable salary, comparable to many graduate jobs. If anyone would like to talk to me about it, I'd love to chat (see profile).
[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/dynamic-nuclear-polarization-how-... [2] https://phd.health.au.dk/application/opencalls/multimodal-me...
Something like: Location, Grad funding or financing available, degree type desired, field and project of study, background or education desired.
If you are interested in Academia after graduation, then your primary advisor is going to have a lot of influence on where you end up and the trajectory of your career. Their reputation and their network will have a lot of influence since you will be seen as a protégée of Prof X. The school tends to be a bit less important. If you're interested in industry and startups then Stanford is probably closer to that culture.
Who you work with really matters (obviously) and different PIs and labs can have very different cultures which you may or may not feel comfortable with. That alone can make your decision if you are very sure about what you want to do and who you want to work with.
Outside of that, I would say Stanford is a really great place to do graduate work, especially if you're not entirely sure what you want to do.
All of this is with the obvious caveat that my experience is from quite some time ago.
My knowledge is about a decade out of date now, though, so things could have improved. I'm also not sure if that was also happening in other fields of physics or if it was just limited to astro. But it would be worth looking at the average time to graduation for the departments and schools you're interested in.
Anyway, if you don’t have a specific advisor in mind (well you wouldn’t be asking if you do), my advice is go to the open house in both departments and talk to the actual profs and grad students.
Edit: Oh and another thing, I recall getting admitted into Berkeley too but the offer didn’t even guarantee funding beyond the first year? Which was a big turnoff. Definitely check how you’ll get funding and for how long. That said I’m a theorist, I suppose if an experimentalist can’t find funding they’re in much bigger trouble than not having money.