You seem so clueless that you shouldn’t really be in a position to advise a student! If the ghost student was signing up for credit, just fail him/her. Or at the very least you should just drop the student email asking what’s up and what your plans should be before taking any nasty action (like above).

Damn!

As a prospective student, you should not be afraid to ask for exactly how the graduates from the specific program/lab/advisor have been performing on the job market. For some advisors you can do this by looking at his/her CV and a bit of googling on the web, stalking those whom you have never even seen before. I think getting that info really is the only way to predict how you might typically end up after getting a degree with the advisor. If his/her past students have been performing well, the advisor is often very happy to let you know that. If not, well, you will be taking a chance with that advisor.

And if you find out that you are not a good match with your advisor for your goal, you should not be afraid at all to switch advisors or transfer to another school at an “early” phase. I’ve seen so many students doing that to end up with a better situation for themselves. Good luck!!

HOWEVER …

Deciding that someone would make a great advisor for you based on one good meeting makes about as much sense as deciding to marry someone after a good first date. I think that the most one can hope for from these campus visits is to identify places that are obvious “no’s” (i.e. students seem uniformly unhappy, your dream advisor acts like a jerk, etc.). Beyond that, my advice is to go somewhere where there are at least two or three professors that you could see yourself working with. Then take their classes, go to their office hours, and after a semester of meaningful contact, make your choice.

Do students take 10 years to finish in that lab and still not get good jobs afterward?

Also, one more thing - it is vastly easier to get an academic job as an experimentalist in physics. There is no comparison - your life will be easier and smoother on average (fewer postdocs, far more likely to get a tenure track position, more positions to apply for, etc.).

This is essentially what I did. It most certainly doesn’t work against you. The biggest problem is that you might not get enough credit for it, in terms of waiving required classes, as you might like. Many schools will allow you to try to take their qualifying exam immediately (rather than after a year), and if you get some samples from them and practice over the previous summer, you’d probably be well prepared to do that. This would get you into research earlier.

Your higher preparation will be valued by potential advisors in general.

The difference between the right grad school choice and the wrong one can mean the difference between being stressed out, overworked, but still excited about your future as a scientist and being utterly and completely miserable. You can’t tell too much about a department by visiting, but you can tell one very crucial thing (as Scott H. alludes to): You can tell whether the grad students hate their lives. Of the three schools I visited as a prospective Physics/Astronomy grad student, only one appeared to have grad students whose eyes still held a spark of “wow, isn’t what we do cool,” and so that’s where I went. 10+ years on, knowing what I know about the departments I was considering, it was absolutely the right choice, and I never would have been armed with the knowledge to make it without visiting.

So, short answer: Try as hard as you can to make some time to visit your prospective departments — even if you haven’t been accepted (or even applied) yet — and talk to the people who are the potential versions of you in a couple of years.

Here’s a question though that I’ve been wondering about- what is your opinion about accepting to a school you haven’t visited, or even emailing a professor from a department before you’re accepted saying you’ll be in town and would like to talk to him/her? The reason I ask is I will be graduating in December, and after throwing my applications in the mail I plan to do a backpacking trip around the world until graduate school starts. I’m really looking forward to it, but the downside of things is I will (hopefully) be accepted while on the road and won’t be able to visit anywhere before accepting an offer. Thoughts?

They are at Bob’s Country Bunker in Kokomo, IN

One thing confuses me - is there a big difference between Harvard Astronomy and Physics re graduate coursework? Presumably the cosmology courses you took would have been common to both. Or do you mean that you might have taken a different direction atogether? If so, Harvard did you a big favour - as a humble solid-state physicist, it seems to me that we are living through a golden age of cosmology!

Regards, Cormac O’ Raifeartaigh

P.S. Fabulous interview with John Horgan - do you mind if I use snippets in class?