decidedlyodd

Lately, I’ve been corresponding with this guy who recently got a fellowship to study at the MPI. The whole process has got me reflecting back on my experience there. They say hindsight is 20/20, but the whole MPI experience is in my mind still only about 95% clear today. Here’s an excerpt from an email I’m writing to this guy today:

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>2. What made you decide to not do your Ph.D. at MPI? I think I know the
>answers, but I would rather hear from you as well.

The biggest one is that I’m an American and intend to stay in North America in the long term. While MPI is a good place, it just doesn’t have the name recognition or connections in North America that an equivalent US institution would have. In particular, I wasn’t (and still am not) sure I want to work in research universities for the rest of my life. The thought of chasing funding for a living seems less and less desirable as I continue my graduate education. It seems more likely that I’ll work at a smaller teaching-focused college or university or work in industry. MPI has extremely limited teaching opportunities and doesn’t really have that many industrial connections (especially outside of Europe).

Many quality of life issues weighed heavily in my decision to leave. I always felt on the outside of the social circles at the institute. Partially, it was because I didn’t virtually live at the MPI like a lot of other students (a lot of people slept there more nights than in their own beds at home). Partially, it was because I just didn’t have a lot of interests in common with the other people (like playing sports) there. I lived in Im Sauerbrod 84, where there really were not other MPI people (unlike Gaussstrasse, where they occupy practically half the building), so I never ran into people I knew in my building and people didn’t usually drop by my place when a group was gonig out.

Although there are a lot of things I liked about Germany, every day life is harder there because of educational, linguistic and cultural differences. Students outside developed countries study abroad all the time, because they’re willing to put up with the cultural difficulties for a better quality education. The number of Europeans and Japanese studying in the US and in particular the number of Americans studying basically anywhere else are comparatively much lower, simply because the academic gap is not as large.

Academically I felt unprepared to begin a PhD after I had finished my MSc. Courses at UdS do not in any way prepare students for research. After taking courses and doing your MSc thesis, you’re expected to come up with a dissertation topic. I was fortunate in that I had a great deal of freedom in determining my MSc thesis topic, but a lot of students basically have a topic assigned to them by a professor.

In the US, there are many graduate courses offered, where students are expected to do a conference paper level project in a semester. These courses typically have no exams, but usually involve reading key papers in a specific subfield. They really help students find interesting and contemporary research topics to work on. Usually, graduate students also work as a research assistant for a professor on some sort of project. After some time, the student carves out their own dissertation topic based on what they have learned by *doing* research. At UNC for example, many students start *doing* research their first semester as a grad student. Virtually everybody is quite active by the beginning of their second year.

In Europe, I felt like the process of finding a topic involved reading lots of papers for up to perhaps a year. The idea seemed to be to find a topic through reading, then actually start working on it. I didn’t feel like that was the best way to do research, at least not for me personally. There are students who spend a year taking courses, a semester writing a cookie-cutter thesis and then as much as another year just reading papers before they even start doing their dissertation research. I’m not sure how anybody could spend that 2.5 years without actually even trying out research in the area of their dissertation.

Really in the end, it seemed (and still does seem) clear to me, that I would NOT get a better education at MPI than at a good North American university. The best I could hope for was equal and that seemed far from guaranteed. However, when I talk about “educational quality” here, I don’t mean a number in a US News ranking or something like that. Earning a PhD is really all about how you the individual do it. Being here or at the MPI doesn’t make me any smarter. The resources (human, academic, financial) available are in my opinion what makes a difference. If a given environment can motivate you or help you find a great dissertation topic or provide you with the financial resources to complete a doctoral program of study or provide you with the right advice, then that’s what matters. For me, I felt like those needs were not being met at the MPI. I think virtually all of it has to do with me as a person and what I need from an institution of higher education. I imagine some of it has to do with my educational background in the American higher education system and what I’m accustomed to. For a lot of people, it’s the perfect place, but for me it just wasn’t.

I’m reminded of something an Indian friend of mine named Vinay once said. In essence, he couldn’t understand why somebody would leave their home country that has a good (many would say the best) system of graduate education to study somewhere else. Somehow, that has to lay at the core of my situation.