The Art of Choosing a Lab
Picking an advisor is the real unicorn of a PhD program: your PI can make or break your experience. Besides grad students, they're the longest lived members of a lab - and they can be your biggest advantage or disadvantage when you want to graduate.
In a way, choosing a lab is simple: know what mentorship style you need and what type of relationship you want to have with your advisor. (DO NOT CHOOSE A LAB BASED SOLELY ON THE PROJECT!) I’m very lucky to have a largely positive relationship with my PI, which is truly unicorn-esque - most of my friends are either neutral or negative. I knew what kind of mentorship and lab environment I wanted, so I narrowed down my candidate PIs for rotations pretty fast and luckily clicked with my first rotation lab. Here's the factors I looked at, in order from most to least important:
Mentorship: I was not independent coming in, with little experience in typical molecular biology techniques. I wanted someone who was willing to be hands on - weekly check ins and proactive with feedback. Do you want someone to guide you as you learn experimental design and hypothesizing, or are you independent and want to be left alone to do your thing?
Lab Environment: You can tell a lot about the lab based on how happy the workers are. Try to get coffee elsewhere on campus with a senior grad student, tech, or postdoc from the lab so you can get their honest opinion away from prying eyes and ears. What's work/life balance like? Is the PI a micromanager?
Age/Seniority: this plays into 1 because this factor can dictate how much time your mentor has to spend on you. For the style I wanted, I aimed for younger PIs who were around the lab more instead of being stuck in meetings or writing all day. They also tend to mentor their students directly rather than assigning you to a postdoc.
PI Track Record: Is there a fast turnover? Can they graduate their PhD students on time? Do they have recent publications with the experimental rigor you want?
And here's a few red flags: promises of high-profile publications, PhD students mastering out, fast turnover of personnel, lack of camaraderie, staff working around the clock and burning out, and low morale among staff.
It might be surprising that research topic isn't really in this list! That's because when I started my PhD, I didn't have a specific project in mind or a specific disease I set my heart on studying. At the time I felt dumb and inexperienced, but that actually gave me flexibility - I wasn't tempted by PIs with red flags and attractive projects. That said, you truly never know where your project will take you.
Storytime: I never wanted to do developmental work and swore off it as much as possible - it just never interested me and the prospect of "playing God" turned me off. My first project studied lipid metabolism in the context of cardiometabolic disease, and over time I shifted to a secondary, more promising project on adipose tissue. And then the universe decided to come full circle and my research happened to take a hard right turn into adipose development by the end of my PhD (oh the irony). That's right - me, the person who couldn't care less about studying development (will I ever know what the mesoderm is? No) was somehow roped into dissecting mouse neonates and hypothesizing about stem cell subpopulations. PhDs are really unpredictable in that way, because you don't know in which direction the cold unfeeling heart of science will push you. So don't be tied down by project topic! There's always a chance it can become something you're passionate about.
Choosing an advisor can be really daunting, but it doesn't have to be! It's a two-way street - you have more power than you think, and never feel like you owe it to a lab to join them. As a first year, you're basically a free agent while you rotate, so take advantage of that!
My last piece of advice: be empowered to choose what you feel is right. You can't go wrong if you go with your gut, and often you will know if a lab is a good fit within the first few weeks of being there. Good luck!