I’m looking into graduate school now (my first attempt is I’m going to probably try to get the MEXT scholarship and do it in Japan, but that’s immaterial to the question), but I have a bit of a question about the beast that’s intellectual inbreeding. I understand perfectly why it’s a stigma, and it’s part of the reason I want to study my field under a different culture. I understand that it’s absolutely taboo to do post-doc and doc at the same place, but I’m confused about exactly what/when it’s considered so.
I’m mostly just unclear about what combinations are taboo, undergrad/masters? Masters/PhD? (assuming you don’t go straight on the PhD track, of course) Doing your post-doc where you got your undergrad if your PhD was elsewhere?
It probably won’t affect me (since I’m planning on going elsewhere anyway), I’m just curious as to exactly what counts as intellectual inbreeding, because I see a lot of people, say, getting their masters at the same place as undergrad and going somewhere else for their PhD, but I’m not sure how much it hurts them (if at all) because I really don’t know what “counts” for it.
In IMHO because I’m sure this is fairly subjective. I’m in computer science (focus in Machine Learning) if it matters, but perhaps just saying I’m in a STEM field, not humanities is sufficient.
I should probably also mention that I want to keep my options open, my top two potentially pipe-dream goals include working on a research team at Google and a tenure track position at a university (yes, I realize there are tons of variables involved here). So I’m interested both in industry and academia consequences, if they differ.
Two things stand out for me as major downsides for the undergraduate/graduate transition:
(1) The actual “inbreeding” part. It really is good, at least in my field, to see different departments, get to know different professors, see a broader base of research being conducted, etc.
(2) And, a “rebooting” part. To be successful at top graduate schools, one needs to completely reboot one’s life. What I mean by this: as an undergraduate, the metronome of life ticks via class schedules, homework sets, and assignment due dates. Professors are often inaccessible myths, shielding by TAs or assistants. Social life is sparked by peers in the same year (typically), and the university and its environs are explored at a cadence and a thoroughness appropriate for undergraduates. ALL of this changes in graduate school. The metronome of life ticks via research progress. Professors are peers (or, at least, “peer-like”) and get called by first names. Social activities follow a cadence that is appropriate for others going through the first-year-of-grad-school motions. Most dramatically, though, is that one is a researcher and no longer a student, and many intuitive rules-of-thumb about academia get broken.
Students that stay in the same place often have (IMO) a hard time adequately adjusting their life view 180 degrees in all these different aspects. One has to dive into grad school fully to be successful, and staying at the same school can lead to keeping the same patterns and routines of life that worked well for undergraduate goals, but not for graduate goals.
As an undergraduate advisor, I try to explain both of the above issues to undergraduates considering graduate school so that they can make the most informed decisions about where to apply and/or accept at. Aside from trying to do best by the student, when considering admitting a new student at-large or for my own research, I fold the above issues into my assessment of the quality of research I think the student can do. (Obviously this is rather difficult to assess and requires considerable thought.) I’ve never seen anyone have a strict “no same school” rule, but plenty of people have real negative biases for it.
If I see a Ph.D. applicant who stayed at Univ A for a masters after a bachelors there, I try to understand why. There are reasonable circumstances for it. For instance, the student might have started an excellent bit of research as an undergraduate and was coaxed into sticking around to finish it up.
Staying put after grad school for a post-doc is definitely uncommon. This transition is the best opportunity to go into a new place and soak up the new academic culture and research environment and to try something wholly new. (It’s better than the undergrad/grad transition simply because you are better at it all after grad school.) Reference letters are, by this stage, becoming so important that it would be crazy to throw away a whole new departments’ worth of contacts. Having said all that, it’s not completely off-putting, if there is a good reason for it. Again, this could have to do with a project that isn’t quite finished and with an advisor that really wanted that new doc to stay around and so made a sweet offer (or was a fast talker). If that postdoc later comes looking for a second postdoc position with me, I would try to understand the circumstances. Fortunately by this stage, there are a lot of ways of telling whether someone will be successful or not.