Questions to Ask Professors
Questions for a professor you are considering as a research supervisor or mentor, covering supervision load, feedback turnaround, funding, authorship, and what happened to their former students.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How many students are you supervising at the moment?
Why ask it
The number, plus whether it is rising, predicts how much attention you will get better than anything they say about their intentions. Someone with a dozen students, a lab to run, and a committee chair is not going to read your drafts quickly, however willing they sound.
How often do you and your students meet, and who books the meeting?
Why ask it
Standing weekly slots and student-initiated meetings produce very different experiences. If the students do all the chasing, ask one of them how often meetings actually happen, because the intended rhythm and the real one often diverge.
When a student sends you a draft, what is your usual turnaround?
Why ask it
Three weeks is workable if you plan for it and ruinous if you do not know in advance. An answer of "pretty quickly" without a number is worth pressing on, since draft delay is the most common way a thesis timeline slips.
Do you prefer to hand students a project, or to have them arrive with their own?
Why ask it
Neither is better, but a mismatch is painful for years. Handed projects start faster and can feel like someone else's work. Self-directed ones suit people who already have a question and stall those who do not.
Can you walk me through a recent project of yours that did not work out?
Why ask it
You are listening for whether they can describe a dead end without blaming the student who ran it. How they narrate failure is roughly how yours will be narrated.
Which of your current or former students should I talk to for an honest account?
Why ask it
Anyone confident about their supervision will name two or three without hesitation, including someone who has finished and left. Hesitation, or a list of only current students who still depend on them, is information.
Where have your last few students gone after finishing?
Why ask it
A supervisor who tracks this can tell you which routes they can actively help with. If they do not know, their network is unlikely to be doing much for you, whatever their publication record looks like.
How is authorship decided on work I contribute to?
Why ask it
Ask for the rule, not the sentiment. "We are all fair here" is not a rule. Who is first author on a paper built mainly from your data, and who decides, is the thing that causes the most lasting bad feeling in research groups.
Is there funding attached to this position, and how long is it secured for?
Why ask it
Funding that runs out a year before a thesis normally finishes is a common and quiet problem. Ask what happens in that final year, and whether it has happened to a previous student.
What teaching, marking, or lab upkeep comes with the role?
Why ask it
Hours here come straight out of your research time, and the total is often larger than the formal appointment letter says. Ask for a figure per week during term and outside it.
What does a productive first year look like to you?
Why ask it
Their answer tells you what will be measured, and whether the milestones are concrete: a pilot study, a qualifying exam, a draft chapter. If it is all attitude and no output, expectations will be set later and retroactively.
What happens when a student's work slips behind?
Why ask it
Every group has slippage. What differs is whether there is a mechanism, an earlier check-in, a reduced scope, a co-supervisor brought in, or whether it becomes a matter of private disappointment. Ask for an example.
What are your expectations about hours, and about being physically present?
Why ask it
Some groups run on a strict daytime presence in the lab, some on total flexibility, and some on an unspoken norm of weekends. Better to hear it plainly than to infer it from other people's guilt three months in.
Do you have a sabbatical, a move, or retirement in view over the next few years?
Why ask it
A supervisor who leaves mid-project is one of the more disruptive things that can happen to a degree. Most will tell you honestly if asked directly, and the department's contingency plan is worth hearing too.
Who else in the department would give me feedback on my work?
Why ask it
A single reader means a single taste, and blind spots go uncorrected for years. Look for a committee, a co-supervisor, or a group meeting where work is genuinely critiqued rather than presented.
Which conferences do your students attend, and who pays for it?
Why ask it
Travel is how you become known to the people who will later review your work and hire you. If funding for it is unclear or comes out of the student's pocket, that shapes your visibility more than your output does.
What kind of person struggles in your group?
Why ask it
This is the most useful version of the fit question, because it invites a specific answer rather than a flattering one. Someone who says nobody struggles either has not noticed or is managing your impression.
What would you want me to have read or learned before I started?
Why ask it
You get a concrete preparation list and a sense of the technical floor. It also tests whether they think in terms of building people up or of hiring skills already finished.
If something between us was not working, how would you want me to raise it?
Why ask it
Naming the channel in advance makes it usable later, when raising it will feel much harder. An answer that treats the question as unlikely is itself worth noting.
Is there anything about working with you that students only figure out later?
Why ask it
The self-aware answers tend to be specific and slightly unflattering: slow on email, blunt in seminars, hard to pin down in spring. Those are the details you would otherwise learn a year in.
Choosing who to work with
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before the meeting
Read two of their recent papers, not their whole list
Recent work tells you what they are actually doing now, which is often not what their profile page describes. Two papers is enough to ask a real question about method or direction.
Look at where their students published
Search a couple of former students by name. Whether they came out with first-author work, and how long they took, says more than any description of supervision style.
Decide what you need most
Close direction, or freedom. Funding security, or a specific topic. Naming your priority in advance stops you being talked into a role that suits their gaps rather than yours.
Checking what you are told
- Ask a current student the same question about meeting frequency and compare the answers.
- Ask a student who has finished and left, since they have least to lose by being frank.
- Ask the department administrator about funding length and teaching load; they deal in facts rather than intentions.
- Notice whether group members speak in the supervisor's presence or wait to be prompted.
- If you visit, look at whether people stay for lunch together. A group that scatters usually tells you something.
Signals worth taking seriously
No former students to point you to
Either the record is short or it is not one they want examined. Ask directly why, and listen for whether people left the group early.
Authorship described in terms of trust rather than rules
Trust is not a policy. Groups without a stated convention resolve disputes by seniority, and you will be the junior party.
Every answer about workload is about passion
Enthusiasm framed as an answer to a question about hours usually means the hours are long and not discussed.
You are being recruited unusually hard
Pressure to commit before you have spoken to their students is worth resisting. Anyone confident in their group is comfortable with you checking.