Junior faculty mentor vs senior faculty mentor

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hummm

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If you were to choose from junior faculty (i.e., you would be his/her first graduate student) then more senior faculty mentor (i.e., associate professor or full professor; obviously more well-established), which one would you choose? I see pros and cons to both sides, and wonder what you guys think.

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I was someone's first graduate student and there are pros and cons. Pro is that newer faculty can sometimes devote more time to mentoring you. Cons are that they don't tend to have as good of connections and don't tend to have as much archival data to start publishing from right away. After graduate school I started a postdoc with a very established faculty member. He spends way less one on one time with students than my advisor did and mentoring is done by postdocs or more junior associated faculty. However, the publishing opportunities are great, he is very knowledgeable about the field, and his connections have really helped former graduate students. What you're looking for may vary, but if I had to do it over again I would have selected someone more established, preferably mid-career.
 
Depends on fit really. I was my advisors first grad student.Good research fit, good mentorship style, opportunities to publish if I put the work in, etc. Fit matters more than seniority IMO. Also, I am more of a clinician, so I also made sure to do externships with the big names in my field where I was. I could imagine that if you are going sole research career, the seniority of the mentor may matter to some extent.
 
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Just depends. Look at where the new faculty member completed internship and postdoc (if he/she completed one) and recent publications. You may be able to get a sense of how well connected that person is from this information. I think being someone's first graduate student can work really well if that person has a lot of data they can share and are reasonably well connected to internships and postdocs. Some sites (e.g., MUSC, Brown) have large internship and postdoc programs so if your new mentor attended a site like this, he/she likely has connections with the programs and their graduates. On the flip side a new mentor who has fewer connections and limited data could mean that publications may be harder to come by.
 
Like you said, I think there are pros and cons. My advisor is more well-established and I can see a lot of benefits from that. However, he definitely does not spend as much time with each of us as like someone with only one grad student would. Personally that doesn't bother me though because I still get what I need. I would agree that fit matters more, but also think about what you prefer - someone who might have more time to dedicate to you but less knowledge/resources, or someone who has more experience/connections, but will most likely spend less time on you. And of course that is just the average, I'm sure there are some new profs who still don't spend a lot of time, and some more established ones who do, but I think that's the norm. I would also consider being someone's first grad student kind of sucks because you don't have the advantage of older students to also mentor you, and increase your productivity by writing pubs w/ other students.
 
I had a pretty negative experience with a junior faculty member and ended up switching to another mentor. Granted it may have been her personality to some degree, but I think she was responding to real pressures that are likely to exist everywhere (at least at R1's) for junior faculty. It felt like she was always in competition with me rather than actually mentoring me. This created tension. She was too busy trying to claw her way to tenure to support me and my career. She also was still setting up her lab somewhat. While it can be great to be in on the ground floor, it does delay some opportunities for publication.

I ended up doing a dissertation on something that was really under the junior faculty member's area of expertise, but I had a senior (near retirement) faculty member be my chair and the junior faculty just sit on the committee. Not ideal, but at that point I just wanted to escape with my degree and my sanity! She was a much better committee member than chair. When she wasn't my mentor the tension decreased and life was much better for both of us.

So my vote is senior faculty, but I think early post-tenure might be ideal.

Good luck!
 
I was the only grad student for two years in a lab and it was great actually. We had some projects up and going already, but we set up some pretty big ones (psychophys, and imaging) in those two years. She was also up for tenure while I was there, and I didn't feel like that affected anything in relation to me personally. I learned a ton from that experience. After that, I enjoyed a role as a senior grad mentor to other lab students.

Lots of individual differences here. My experience was great, and a big part of why everything came so easy after that in terms of internship, postdoc, job. I think personality and fit are much more important than many other factors here.
 
I also had some experiences similar to Doctor Eliza for the same reason. Not explicit competition, but tenure track pressure led my advisor to be less likely to forward things like review requests for papers (I did one in my years there) or chapter/paper requests as he was still working to establish himself and may not have gotten too many anyway.
 
I'm going to play the "both-and" card here. Given the right circumstances, the two faculty need not be mutually exclusive. Being mentored by a few profs at varying developmental levels has advantages, imo, over seeking "the one" mentor. So, I would choose them both. Full disclosure -- my chairperson and second were full profs and former department chairs; they were at the tail end of their research productivity. They've provided national connections and great LORs. However, my "go-to" people were more junior faculty, associate and assistant profs. I ended up publishing with them and remain in more regular conversation with them.
 
I agree with wisneuro in that I think this is going to vary widely from person-to-person (on behalf of both the student and the mentor).

I worked with very hands-off senior folks. It was agonizing my first few years because I had limited support. It was awesome my last few years because I was basically given free reign to do whatever I wanted, had pretty much endless data to play with and was confident enough to do things on my own. Steep learning curve since I was basically self-teaching most things, but I think it made me much stronger in the end and the payoff in terms of my CV was well worth it. I've said before (half-jokingly...but not entirely) that I'm reasonably confident I could make tenure at many places just publishing off the scraps my advisors "haven't gotten around to yet."
 
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