by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

Now that you roughly figured out where you’d like to do your Ph.D., the important question of choosing an advisor remains. We’ll share our two cents on how to find the best advisor for you. But we’d be happy for others to comment on how they found their advisors, too.

The necessary condition for an advisor to be a great fit for you is that they have experience in the field that you want to do your research in. Of course, it is not impossible to do a Ph.D. in a different field than your advisor. But it requires a lot more proactivity and effort from your side:

1) You have to find good research topics on your own which is non-trivial given that fields like ours (machine learning) move very fast and there are hundreds of papers published every month. Without directions, it is easy to get lost. 2) You will have to identify important work, important conferences, and important people on your own. This might take you a significant amount of time. 3) You’ll have to be very proactive to find collaborators to do your research with, given that your advisor might not be able to introduce you to people from the field if they are not active in it. 4) You’ll have to learn from a lot of trial and error, submit papers, get reviews, then improve. This takes a long time in comparison to someone giving you feedback and direction directly. Or alternatively, you need to find external help on that.

But other than being active in your field, we think that the sufficient conditions for an advisor to be a great fit for you are diverse. We think that it might make sense to consider the following thoughts: Do you think you’ll be able to trust your advisor? In research things fail, experiments go wrong, code has bugs that you notice too late–making all your current results invalid. In this case, you want to have an advisor whom you can trust and talk openly to to find a solution together. Is your advisor interested in you? Would they care about the success of your Ph.D., will they support you, will they be there for you? Are they open to meet to discuss your questions? And finally, most subjectively, do you feel comfortable with your advisor and their lab? We won’t lie, you’ll be spending a fair bit of your time in the lab during your Ph.D. and this can become very challenging if you feel uncomfortable in the environment. So listen to your gut feeling and choose an advisor who feels like a good fit.