While a previous post explains why I do not enjoying advising (graduate) students, that should not be interpreted as not wanting to have any graduate students.  In fact, I would like to have a graduate student or two.  While I will not like the managerial aspects of having the students, the energy required to manage two graduate students will not overwhelm the joy of teaching them.

I will now try to explain why then I do not have any graduate students.  The reason is essentially all about funding.  I have written many proposals over the past few years (mostly in collaboration with other people).  The vast majority of the funding I have requested in these proposals is to support graduate students.  Unfortunately, none of them have been funded.

The last grant I received (about four years ago from NSF) requested funds to hire two graduate students, one in physics and one in ME.  Unfortunately, while the grant was funded, the funds provided were about half of what was requested.  With such a limited budget for the work proposed the co-PI and I decided to hire a post-doctoral researcher.  (Note that with the exceedingly high tuition at PSU and the fact that the full amount must be paid for supported students, it actually costs about the same to hire a post-doctoral researcher as it does a graduate student.)  Even if the grant had been fully funded, the funding period was only three years (typical for NSF).  With it taking (on average) five years for a student to finish a Ph.D., there would more than likely be at least two years during which the student would not have funding unless another grant was awarded.  With funding rates so low and my success rate not that encouraging it was hard for me to be comfortable telling a student they would be supported as a research assistant for the entire time.

In many regards it is much easier to manage post-doctoral researchers because they can be let go (and are expected to be let go) once the funding runs out.  Making sure students have funding whether it is from a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship generates a great deal of stress.  I realize that it should not be overly stressful on me but it is.  I feel obligated to make sure a student has support for their entire stay at PSU.

Another benefit to hiring a post-doc for me in particular is that I can readily find someone with a strong background in theoretical mechanics (needed to do the research I propose).  The reason this is so important, especially at PSU, is that our graduate curriculum in theoretical mechanics (at least in engineering) is in shambles.  I will discuss this further in future posts.  Thus, for me to get someone up to speed in all the fundamentals means that I either need to find a student willing to learn a whole lot on his/her own, or I have to spend a tremendous amount of energy teaching them.  While I would expect students to have to teach any graduate student (or post-doc) quite a lot, having to teach them everything is a huge added burden.

All that said, I will continue to request funding to hire graduate students, and will do so when that funding is awarded.  I will also continue to look for the rare student that has his/her own funding and is interested in doing research that requires a deep understanding of physics and mathematics.  Unfortunately, the intersection of these two sets is very small.  Almost all the students that might have their own funding are domestic ones.  Almost all the students interested in the necessary physics and mathematics are foreign.

Maybe as China and India become wealthier nations I will start to see well-prepared foreign students coming to the US for graduate school with their own funding or fellowships from their government.