by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

Should I work with a more or less senior advisor? Of course, every faculty is different and has different ways of running their labs. But over the years we noted some similarities between advisors of different levels of seniority that can affect a Ph.D.’s life. Let’s talk!

Let’s start with what’s great about working with very established and senior faculties: 1) they are well-known in the field. Therefore, they can help you build connections with other researchers easily. They know the conferences, can introduce you to important folks, get you internships, and establish collaborations. They are also usually very valuable reference letter writers. 2) Their labs might be better funded, given that they have a long history of grant writing. This can reflect in better equipment or more people to work with. They might even have postdocs that can support you in your research. In fact, some quite senior faculty might put your advising entirely on the shoulders of their postdocs and you won’t really interact with the prof much. 3) The following is very dependent on the person, but a well-established advisor might put less pressure on you because they are established enough in their careers.

In contrast, young faculties’ careers kind of depend on you. They need every paper you can write for their tenure case, they potentially even need you to graduate for them to be tenured. This might put some of pressure on both sides. But it will also have lots of advantages for you: 1) Less established faculties might be more hands-on. Since their Ph.D. is not too far in the past, they are probably very well on top of the field, have coded in frameworks that you will now code in, and can, therefore, support you very well. 2) They might help you very much in your every-day research given that they absolutely want you and need you to succeed. So, you might be able to learn a lot from them, simply because they are so close to you and your work. 3) Given that they might have less funding, their groups would be smaller which often means they have more time to meet with you, talk about your research and give you directions. At the same time, a young faculty member might be a part of a bigger research group and you might still be able to interact with other researchers.

Eventually, as we said, every person is different, and you might just wanna find out how your potential future advisor runs their lab and if this aligns with the way you wanna work. In some cases, you can even have the best of both worlds and find a possibility of being co-advised by a senior and a junior faculty member.