Selecting Your Program, Supervisor and Grad School (Faculty Route)

Last time, I wrote a post on how to select your program, supervisor and grad school if your aim is to get into the industry. This post I will try to give my opinion on how to select the three things if you are aiming to be a faculty member. Please do not take my words as a sure-success formula. I would appreciate all other advices from you guys.

In my opinion, I would select the program, supervisor and grad school in the following order:

1. Select the program that coincides with your research interest. In order to get a faculty position, you will need to publish a lot and that means you need to have a lot of solid results. The only way you are going to get many results is that you have a lot of passion for the research that you are working on.
   
2. Choose a professor that has the same research interest as you do to be your supervisor. If your supervisor has the same research interest as you do, then you will able to work on what you like. Also, you will get more great ideas and guidance from he/she. This would certainly help you with your publication and networking in the long run.
   
   It also helps if the professor is well known in the field. Check their paper citation number to see how well known they are. This would probably help you to network with people in the same field.
   
3. If you happened to find a few potential professors that have the same interest as you, then you have more selections for graduate schools. At this point, try to aim for the well-known ones. The reason is just the same as my previous post - connections and opportunities. Also, I want to emphasize that choose the grad schools that provides you with funding. If there is no funding, it is going to be hard for you to focus on your research and, frankly, it is not worth it.

To end this post, I want reemphasize that you need many publications to get a faculty position. Try to work on good quality research (something that the particular research communities care about) and make sure you get to publish in good journals! If anyone else has more suggestions, leave me a comment. I would very much appreciate it.