Welcome to your Ph.D.! Now choose a lab

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It’s been a long time, but if I remember correctly, my grad school acceptance letters mostly looked the same: “Congratulations! You’ve been accepted into [school]! Let us know by [date]!” And I’m pretty sure the rejection letters followed a similar pattern: “Sorry! We had many qualified applicants, but you weren’t among them. We’re wrong about this, and you don’t want to study at our stupid school anyway. Honestly, we found you too handsome.”

But one letter was different. It didn’t congratulate me on being accepted into a department—it congratulated me on being accepted into a particular lab. At any other institution, the order was school and department first, followed by a period of figuring out which lab to join. At this school, the interest I had expressed in one particular lab in my application had already been translated into a choice.

This, at first, was thrilling. I could imagine myself joining the school in the fall and beginning my doctoral research immediately. I had visited the lab during prospective grad student weekend, so I knew exactly where I’d be working, what I’d be working on, and who I’d be working with. Heck, I even remember encountering a peristaltic pump in the lab and recognizing it as the same model I used in my undergraduate lab.

Yet, as intriguing as it felt, that sense of predetermination was also unsettling. I’d chosen that lab based on a colorful website and a few publications. I met the professor and his grad students for an hour. What the heck did I know? What if I was wrong?

Because I knew enough to know I didn’t know enough, the acceptance into that lab pushed the school to the bottom of my list. I was off to my first postcollege adventure, and I wanted the great unknown, not the same beige peristaltic pump.

So, what did I exchange certainty for? A system of rotations: Every 2 months for my first year of grad school, I’d switch to a different lab, four labs total. I’d work on a relatively dinky research project in each—the kind that can reach some kind of conclusion in 2 months—and then choose the next one. And for that whole first year, I’d seek an answer to the question that would have been preanswered for me at a different school: which lab to join.

Other graduate programs, I’ve heard, offer a chance to experience labs in a kind of “open house” format for a few weeks before choosing. The principle is similar. You already chose this particular program for various reasons: geography, prestige, stipend, logistics, proximity to your parents, lack of proximity to your parents, the prospective grad student you hooked up with at Recruitment Weekend—and enough research into the professors to have some confidence, or at least naïve optimism, that one will be a good fit. But figuring out who that person is takes more than a brief chat in which you’re both probably trying to impress each other. And even if your school asks you to commit to a specific principal investigator (PI) before joining a program, there are steps you can take to increase your chances of picking a lab that’s a good fit.

Here are some of the strategies I found helpful when selecting my thesis lab.

I asked older grad students which professors were nice.

That may sound irrelevant, or at least like a quality that real scientists should find irrelevant—but, trust me, it matters. You do your best work when you feel like you’re respected.

I asked professors for recommendations.

Everyone seemed to say that one particular professor emeritus had strong opinions about all the other labs in the department and wasn’t afraid to share them. (Apparently this is a superpower that some professors emeriti have.) So I scheduled some time with him, sat down, and asked him every question I could think of, taboo or not—which labs seemed like fun, which were desperate for funding, which hadn’t published in a high-impact journal in years, which had a recent scandal that wasn’t widely known. His advice made me consider labs I hadn’t thought about—and dissuaded me from pursuing some labs that looked good on paper but now sounded less appealing.

I listened to department seminars.

We had regular events where professors would present a bit about the research in their lab to the department (with beer). Despite the liquid bribery, it could have been tempting to skip these to study, work, or nap. But I’m glad I made a point of going—those seminars not only showed us how interesting everyone’s research could be, they also showed us a lot about the personality of the presenting professor. In fact, the series was so popular that, after I left, the department turned it into a semesterlong, first-year course: one professor per week, boasting about their research to recruit grad students. It sounds like it was a helpful, though beerless, way to get to know the labs—and the PIs.

I asked new grad students about their current rotations.

Other first-year students had recommendations for, or against, rotating in their labs, for any number of reasons. Although my first rotation lab had been lined up without my input, I relied heavily on all of this advice for rotations two, three, and four. At first, this information was hard to come by, because students generally erred on the side of politeness, but once the floodgates were opened, my classmates became a great source of candid information.

The matchmaking period also gave me a chance to learn something I hadn’t known when I applied to grad schools: what the heck I even wanted. Other than a summer internship, I didn’t really understand what it was like to work in a lab on my own research project as a full-time job. I didn’t know what to prioritize, what I needed to succeed, and what I could let go. It was only by working briefly in labs I didn’t love that I learned more about what I did.

It’s been years since I thought about the school that offered me a position in a particular lab along with my acceptance letter into the program. With some memory searching and creative Googling, I figured out the name of the PI I would have worked for if I had joined that lab. It turns out Wikipedia has some choice words to say about him, including a citation from a student newspaper that extensively described the “toxic” and “hostile” environment in his lab. Had I joined his lab, the peristaltic pump would have been the least of my worries.

That makes me feel a bit vindicated; my fear of commitment helped me dodge a bullet. Or, maybe I should give my younger self a little more credit. I knew that I wanted—and needed—to dig deeper than an intriguing publication record and a 1-hour interview before committing many years of my life to a lab.

There’s no single system for selecting your graduate lab that guarantees a positive experience. The best you can do is to seek as much information as possible, be honest with yourself, and then cross your fingers. And if it turns out you made the wrong decision, it’s not impossible to switch labs. Honestly, you were too handsome for your current lab anyway.

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