- Yaman K Singla, Scientist at Adobe MDSR, Google PhD Fellow at SUNY-Buffalo and IIITD
Although this post is written from a PhD's viewpoint, the same is applicable if you want to search an advisor for your bachelor or master's thesis.
Congratulations! You have made up your mind about doing a PhD and getting that doctor in front of your name.
The next question is who to choose as your advisor. This is a list of questions I ask while looking for a potential advisor. The basic purpose of the list is to just reduce the uncertainty involved with the process as much as possible.
Remember, there are no perfect answers to the questions listed. The purpose of this set of questions is just to make you aware of the different things to look out for while choosing an advisor and a laboratory in which you are going to do your PhD for the next 5 or so years. The perfect set of answers will depend on your preferences, what you like and dislike.
This post is highly tainted with my and my collaborators' viewpoints, so please take every point with a pinch of salt.
This one is probably the most important question and should potentially shorten your list of potential advisors by more than 80%.
Which topics does the advisor work on? Are you interested in them? Do you see yourself working in that domain five years down the line? (Although many people change their topics afterwards, it is good to think it through though)
What are the technical skills required for doing that kind of work? How easy is it going to be to acquire them? Do you want to acquire them?
What types of papers are published by the advisor? Small and focussed or long and encompassing? Conference or journal? Application or theory?
How many papers are published per year? (This also decides how much time and attention that advisor can give you since he will have other projects too)
How many authors do they have? How many senior authors do these papers have? (Senior authors probably did not do the work themselves but were involved with advising the junior authors)
What is the author order? Does the advisor come somewhere in between or at the end? (The answer to this will also vary from field to field. However, for most of the sciences, the author order is the same as the contribution order)
What is the advisor's advising style? Email? Weekly/Bi-weekly meetings? Walk-ins in the office? Anything else?
Is the advisor more 'hands-on' or 'hands-off'?
Who decides on the topic of research? The advisor or the student? Does the advisor encourage the students to come up with their own ideas?
How many years has the advisor been advising? If the advisor is new, how is your research direction aligned with the advisor's PhD thesis?
How many papers does the advisor expect you to publish per year? In the whole PhD?
Do the junior students collaborate directly with the professor or with the senior students?
Where have the graduated students gone to? How many of them have joined industry and academia?
Are internships during the semester encouraged? What about during semester breaks?
Are research internships in other universities encouraged?
Although you may not like to think this as a possible event happening during your PhD, but it is more common than you can imagine. How many professors similar to the one you are selecting are available in that university? There can be many reasons why you may have to change your advisor in the middle of your PhD (advisor moving to some other university or even industry, advisor passing on, you discovering later that you are not comfortable with your advisor, etc) and in that unfortunate case, you might want to keep your options open with those other professors.
Does the advisor have funding to support you?
Where will the funding come from? What are the obligations associated with that funding? Does it require any deliverables from you? Does the funding source stop you from doing some specific kind of research?
Industry project-based funds generally have deliverables. Similarly, funding from the university typically have mandatory TAship requirements.
If it is project-based funding, how many projects are there in the lab? What is the average length of each project?
This will directly influence when your advisor (or you) has to start looking for the next funding source.
Does the advisor have funds to support conference visits? How many conferences can generally be supported?
Does the advisor collaborate with other people in the industry or academia?
This information can also be derived by looking at his past publications.
Remember, these connections are also helpful while looking for internships, jobs, and other opportunities.
Is the advisor comfortable with co-advising? Does the advisor currently have any co-advised students? Are the co-advisors from the same university or a different university?
How much of overlap is there within the research of co-advisors?
Do people in the lab collaborate amongst themselves? Or Is everyone working on some unrelated problem?
How well do the different projects in the lab make a bigger story for the lab?
What is the lab size? What is the distribution (Professors/PostDocs/PhDs/Masters/Bachelors/others)?
How often do people in the lab talk to each other? Are there some general meetings in the lab?
How do people in the lab communicate with each other? Email or Slack or face to face?
What are the resources in the lab? Computers, GPUs, trackers, any other devices? How easy is it to order a new device if you think you require one for your research?
Looking forward to collaborate or update the information? Shoot a comment below.