Choosing a laboratory

Choosing a university, and later a job or a graduate laboratory, is often hard. Whether you get in or not, there is a lot of information and many options. University still has the slightly different scale of entrance-exam difficulty, so some of the decision is passive. Graduate school is not very competitive, so you can choose. That freedom is what creates the worry.

I was lucky and could decide my graduate school in one go. Finding the laboratory after that was harder. I wanted to join a famous laboratory in neurological-disease research, from papers I had read. A more senior scientist told me that it is often better to look for a place that is still going to grow, rather than one where the PI is already a grand figure.

Suppose you meet a laboratory and its people at a meeting, in a paper, in a lecture, or at an open campus. If the talk is genuinely interesting, and you do not seem a bad match with the professor, it is worth jumping in even if the record is not yet enough — depending on age. If you hesitate, you cannot take part in the remarkable research they are doing right now. Of course that work is secret, so it will not be made public. But you should be able to see, in the edges of how they speak, an excitement and a heat they cannot quite hide.