Is it normal for a PhD supervisor having no PhD students staying in academia after their graduation? I am looking for potential PhD opportunites in engineering and I found a potential PhD supervisor. Personally, I plan on entering academia after my graduation. However, it seems that during the past 12 years, the professor had no students staying in academia after their graduation. I also found that some of the PhDs have very good publications in top journals and excellent experience in being a research associate but they all eventually entered the industry or even finance companies.
One reason for this might be that nearly all of these students were sponsored by industry. For me, I wonder if it is normal for a PhD supervisor to have no academic &quot;descendants&quot; in universities or other research institutes and if the professor is suitable for me if I plan to enter academia after finishing my PhD. I would appreciate it very much if you could give me some suggestions on this.
The first thing to bear in mind is that only 3.5% of those that graduate PhDs will end up in faculty positions. If one takes on a student year year of a 30 year career, that means that on average each supervisor will have one student that eventually becomes permanent faculty. This makes sense, as each supervisor needs to replace themselves with one person to keep the academic population stable. If on average, 1/30 students will go on to be faculty, 0/12 is not particularly worrying. Also bear in mind that 12 years is a very short time to make it from starting a PhD to making faculty in many fields. In biology for example, I believe the average time is more like 15 years.
However, it's not quite as simple as this, as some supervisors do have many students who go on to be faculty, so it stands to reason that there are some supervisors who will have none over their whole career. Some of this will be random chance, but my feeling is that the variance is too high to just be accounted for by pure chance.
Things will also vary from discipline to discipline. In some disciplines, the industry options are very attractive, in others there is not much to do directly related to your PhD other than academia. If you are in a computing or engineering field, it is likely that there are so many options that are more appealing than academia, that an even larger number of students than average will leave academia for industry.
In conclusion: it is not necessarily a red flag that 0/12 students went into academia, when that is what you want, but it is obviously more comforting if they do have students that have taken that path.