The type of principal investigator (PI) you choose determines how well the next few years of your career as a PhD student goes (see article for more information). While you can’t fully understand how a PI functions just by speaking to students of the lab, completing a rotation in the lab of interest proves favorable in more ways than one. You might find out, for instance, that despite how much the research appeals to you, the environment in which it’s conducted isn’t conducive. Below are a few PI characteristics I gathered from real student experiences that that people rarely consider.
The Good PI: The good PI provides their students a perfect balance between independence and management; students may explore their ideas while staying within the scope of the overall lab goal. A good PI helps you stay focused when you might seem derailed from the research question to be answered. This PI does not determine when you “clock” in and out of the lab so long as you produce data in reasonable time. A good PI provides opportunities for their students to attend conferences and facilitates networking with colleagues in the scientific community. Finally, a good PI is a mentor- someone who not only shows interest in your research, but also in other factors surrounding how well you perform, in and out of the lab environment. Luckily, there are a number of such caring PIs.
The Bad PI While some students prefer to be micromanaged, there are some extreme PIs that tend to be suffocating. I once rotated in a lab whose PI couldn’t stand seeing his students (of which he had only two, myself included) sitting even for a few minutes. His idea was that there is always something to do, so if you’re caught not doing anything that means you have no time management skills. You always had to be busy, even if it meant “filling pipette tips” see article. These kinds of PIs regulate your lab schedule from the wee hours of the morning to bedtime, Monday through Sunday. Another bad characteristic of the PI was that in this particular lab, you couldn’t dispose of lab gloves anyhow because you worked with nothing harmful; your initials were written on them (yes!) and reused time and over again. As a rotating student, you were given a list of things to do (which was mainly to run DNA gels) every God-given day by the post-doc and must check off the chores you completed at the end of each day, leaving no room for independence. Needless to say, I didn’t get a chance to start a project or join any part of a project. I rotated in the lab because of the PI’s record of publishing in Nature; however, I felt the sole of my feet at the back of my head as I hit the ground running away when the rotation was over Click here to revisit a previous article on how to deal with grad school pitfalls.
These PIs are certainly not rare and limited to my own experience. In the experience of another student, the PI of that lab made sure to call the lab phone number early in the morning, from home, and requested to talk to each member of the lab in pretense of having a question to ask. This was to make sure everyone “clocked” in to lab when the PI expected them to. Once, a student made an excuse for a fellow student about being in the bathroom and the PI insisted that student called back when they were out of the bathroom. This PI, strolling in later in the morning would stay late and also expected everyone to stay at least as late if not later.
The Ugly PI: The ugly PI syndrome sometimes is not intended; it is mostly out of PI immaturity or lack of patience. Unfortunately, some cases are well-thought through by the PI and occur out of retaliation. A student shared an experience of their PI sabotaging their grant application; in the comment section of the PI about the student, the PI called the student a procrastinator. From the student’s argument, the procrastination came about because the PI always had a new idea to try and many things just weren’t seen through to the end. Nevertheless, sabotaging a grant application that would benefit not only the student, but also the lab as a whole simply to prove a point seems silly and is just downright ugly. Although that might not have been the reason the grant wasn’t awarded, but the reviewers definitely didn’t overlook that particular comment.
Overall, the probability of ending up with a bad or ugly PI is slim, but they do exist. It is up to the student to make good use of their time rotating in any lab to find out as much information as possible. If, however, you do end up in one such lab- remember that you’re not alone. Many students have survived it (see this article for helpful tips).