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A comment on So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanities)?. Parent comment

Re:So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanit... by fastaguy88 on Saturday October 02, 2021 @02:03PM (#28730599)
The "Top-20 school" is bad advice for disciplines (like life sciences) where the expectation is that you will do a post-doc. There are post-docs at high profile institutions that came from lesser known schools, but had a great graduate career, pubs, and recommendations. In those fields, your post-doc is at least as important as your graduate school.

And most good life sciences departments do not offer a Masters program -- you get a masters if you decide at some point to stop pursuing the PhD. Most Master's programs cost money, and, at least in the life-sciences, you are better off working in the field (CS may be very different).

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Re:So you want to go to grad school (in the academic humanit... by ramraj07 on Saturday October 02, 2021 @09:41PM (#28733827)
A Postdoc in a higher school than where you graduated is definitely par for course, but honestly it’s one more gambling step with at best 30% chance of netting you a good academic career. Your postdoc can still be underwhelming and also unless your PhD was stellar, you’re not betting a postdoc in a top lab anyway. The point is, given that you can’t explicitly choose the lab you want to do a PhD in, it’s just better to try and increase your chances by going to a top institution. If that’s already a hard proposition then the competition only keeps getting worse over time.
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