Comments
This was one of the best written posts on the forum. It's clearly motivated, expresses the issues, the context and your uncertainty and confidence well.
I think you have good answers already.
Here's some other considerations (that are mostly general):
- Fit is important. How well you feel in the lab matters a lot. If you feel like the people are overbearing or if you have to fight, that's bad. This can be hard to figure out and worth thinking about. There is a honeymoon period, and small things can play a big role 1-2 years later. Many people become miserable.
- (For an MA, it might matter less) but the actual placement record of the PI is pretty important. This is not just for the usual reason of academic status, but I think it's gives an important sense of how good the work/lab is.
- Especially for an MA, the PI actually might not be very hands on or determine your experience (especially for high status PIs). Often it's actually the post-docs (lab techs sometimes) that are extremely important for students and can make you successful, or make your life a living hell.
- Note that people leave and a small trap is joining a lab where the talent (post docs) take a new position, which change everything for you.
- Asking around for reputation is important.
- It's unusual and I'm unsure how likely it is, but it's possible you might be able to swing some sort of EA mentorship or grant, which might make your second choice more interesting if you can point it toward pandemics.
- Overall (maybe because of my bias described below), I generally distrust labs where you are fitted in a slot to solve a problem for a PI. I recommend a lab where you can gain general programming skills or have freedom to network and express your abilities.
More background:
I'm against/biased against a lot of "hard science" grad work, because (maybe outside of a small number of labs/PIs) I think you often just serve as cheap labor that doesn't actually involve a lot intellectual activity (this is a distinct from the other problem a lot of research activity is winning games in academia).
This might be different and not apply to bioinformatics or something exposed to a lot of programming.
I made an EA-inspired career change into biomedical engineering and am midway through an MS, so I feel I can speak to some of this.
Speaking for myself, having freedom to develop my own project would have been suboptimal. One of the biggest values of grad school is absorbing the strategic knowledge of an experienced supervisor. The most capable people in our prestigious lab defer heavily to the PI. Not all PIs are worth deferring to. You should seek a lab run by a PI whose judgment in project selection motivates you the most.
It's important to choose a lab where you won't find your growth bottlenecked by something pointless. You want the limiting factor to be your own skills, time, and energy. Here are some things I would make sure you'll have:
It won't cut off many options and pathways, although one thing I can think of is that, as an MS student, you're unlikely to be competitive for the NSF GRFP (PIs steer their PhDs toward that), and you won't be eligible for it after doing the MS.
What it will do is give you a comparative advantage that will exert a strong pull in a certain direction. You'll use your experience to get a PhD position or your first industry job, and that will tend to give you more forms of related experience, funneling you into a niche.
You can fight against that to some extent, but it takes effort and you will not have perfect control. After your MS, you'll be in debt, 2 years older, and feeling pressure to find your next step. You'll have less slack than you do right now, but more doors will be open to you.
No, I think you should aim for a lab that will give you heavy guidance in constructing your project. Good strategic and technical mentorship is invaluable. When the lab constrains your project, it's a sign they have a focused research agenda that your work fits into. That means your work will enhance somebody else's. Everybody is therefore motivated to help each other. This is good for research.
Choosing your own project that doesn't fit with everybody else's means that nobody's directly incentivized to help you. You miss out on a HUGE amount if you wind up in this position. Ideally, there should be a specific person in your lab you can name whose own research will be drastically accelerated by your own project (which is something you'll only figure out after you join the lab).
I think it's very good to choose projects that give you at least 1 marketable skill so you can get your foot in the door somewhere after you graduate. That's something you can discuss with the PI. But don't trade off too much motivation for marketability. If you're choosing between a fascinating project that uses only skills with no market value, vs. a fairly interesting project that will also teach you the skills to get your first postgraduate job, probably go with the second one. It's only 2 years.
Hi there, thank you so much for the fantastic, detailed reply, I appreciate the effort.
It's really good to hear your perspective on being able to choose my own project, as that's something I'm concerned about too. The second supervisor did mention that that is a challenging thing for students to manage, and so I am more drawn to being able to complete a pre-designed and well-constructed research project than trying to pull one together on my own.
I just realized that I completely neglected to mention in my original post that I am from Australia, which is a pretty major detail but only really means that that advice about the NSF GRFP doesn't apply. Given that I (hopefully) won't be in as much debt completing my MS in Australia rather than the US, I hope that that might give me a bit more "slack" as you say. Nevertheless, I understand what you're saying about being "pulled" in a certain direction and that's something I'll take care to be aware of.
The advice about making sure my work is directly helping someone else's is excellent, and I know for sure that that will be the case for the first lab, as the supervisor clearly explained how the research is contributing to the lab's agenda, and there is a postdoc in the lab that has similar research so will be apparently guiding me throughout.
On the last point, I might try to recontact the first supervisor to get a general idea of what techniques they use in their lab and that I would be using, to try to gauge how marketable my time in the lab would make me.
Once again, thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and useful reply!
Absolutely! It sounds like your were intuitively being pulled in this direction anyway, so it sounds like you have good judgment and that will take you far. Best of luck.