Most PhD students do not realize that their career fates in US or other industrialized countries are often determined on the day they have chosen their PhD advisors. Typically, an average PhD candidate in a US university is intelligent enough to become a CEO of a company, a wall-street trader, or a professor in a US major research university. However, most PhD graduates will not end up at their desirable jobs, even if they work very hard and have strong motivations. In fact, many top university PhD graduates cannot find decent jobs in US, while many people who earn their PhD degrees from median universities become professors, industrial leaders, CEOs, etc. Unfortunately, many PhD students are misled by the rankings of universities and particularly the rankings of undergraduate colleges. An essential fact is that in this top level of professional trainings, it is one’s PhD advisor, rather than one’s university, that determines one’s career future.

For a hard-working PhD candidate, one can foresee his/her career fate by the job statistics of one’s PhD advisor’s former PhD graduates. For a senior professor who has produced more than 10 PhD graduates, the job statistics is quite accurate. If 75% of the former PhD graduates are currently professors in major research universities, then an average current student in the group will most likely end up as a professor in a major research university in the future too. Similarly, if 75% of the former PhD graduates cannot find jobs, then an average current PhD student in the group will most likely become unemployed on the day of his/her graduation. Note that for chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, etc, one can find a list of one’s former group members at genealogy webpages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_genealogy.

Additionally, if one’s PhD advisor is a very senior professor who is near the end of his/her career, one has to pay a close attention to the job statistics of recent PhD graduates in the past 5 years. Very often, such a senior professor is in a rapidly decaying (old) field and does not have the energy and knowledge to move to a new field (why bother if one is going to retire in 5 years?). Then, his/her current students will be most likely to face more difficulties in finding desirable jobs than group’s statistics would suggest. There are exceptions, though --- some true researchers always enjoy new ideas and new fields. However, such senior professors are few and far between.        

On the other hand, if one’s PhD advisor is a junior professor who has not yet produced enough PhD graduates to offer a good statistics, then there is more uncertainty. Sometimes, an excellent student can help shaping the advisor’s career profile in this situation. A good thing is that the junior professor usually works hard and tries to get his/her tenure. However, in general, a junior advisor offers less help in your career development. In this case, the ranking of one’s university may play a more important role in one’s job hunting.

If you are a foreign PhD student, you actually should use the aforementioned job statistics with caution because it is not applicable to you directly. It is typically more difficulty for a foreign PhD student to find a desirable job in US, such as a faculty position, than one’s American lab-mates. Typically, to offset one’s culture and language disadvantages, foreign PhD students need to put about threefold more effort to achieve the same career goals. For example, if it takes about 4 papers for an average America PhD student to find a faculty job, an average foreign PhD student may have to produce more than 10 papers of the same quality to find a similar faculty position. Therefore, one should pay more attention to the statistics of former foreign PhD graduates in the lab, which is more suitable for one’s case. If one cannot find all data for the statistics of one’s advisor’ former PhD graduates, one can check a couple of other crucial indicators, namely, advisor’s publication record and grant record. Publication record can be easily found at ``Web of Science’’. One should pay a close attention to the publication in the last five years, which are roughly equivalent to the publication period of a student with his/her advisor.  If a PhD advisor publishes only about 2 papers with each of his/her typical PhD student and the number of papers for a successful job seeker on the job market is 8, the PhD candidate will have a great difficulty to fulfill his/her job goal with such an advisor. 

Note that one’s career development depends crucially on one’s advisor’s academic status, reputation and connection. A minimal requirement for an advisor to be a qualified one is that he/she should regularly have external research grants in his/her career, except for people in some disciplines such as social sciences and liberal arts where federal research grants might be rare.  This is not an issue for a PhD candidate who is supported by a research assistantship (RA) from his/her advisor. On the other hand, if one is, or is going to be, supported by a teaching assistantship (TA) from one’s department, one has to watch out pitfalls. Many advisors might never have any external grant, which means their academic statuses are very low in their fields. Typically, by playing local politics, these advisors are able to have PhD students either as their cannon fodders or as their career savers (Be aware that people who are inactive in research usually have much more time to play local politics). Unfortunately, these advisors might deliberately conceal partial or full information from their (potential) students. However, it is quite easy to do an ``Award Search’’ in public domains to find out an advisor’s grant situation. The National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Health Institute (NIH) are among the most respected funding agencies. There are some other useful indications of academic status: committees of professional organizations and conferences, editorships of international journals, and panels of federal funding agencies. In fact, NIH study section members are in public domain. Typically, a PhD candidate’s career is on a dead-end track if his/her advisor’s academic status is very low.  To avert this fate, one should either switch to a qualified advisor or change a school as soon as possible.

Finally, a good advisor is typically willing to spend time on his/her students, cares about his/her students’ career development, responses to students’ needs and first of all, has a superb job record for his/her former PhD graduates. However, what contributes to a good advisor is a complicated and subjective issue. A good PhD advisor for one student might not be a good one for another person.  The last word is that it makes no sense to spend about four or five years to pursue a PhD degree if it does not lead you to a decent career.