Hello everyone!
I am currently first yer graduate student doing my first rotation. I wanted to get opinion of some more experienced people about the PI of the lab I am rotating in so that I know roughly what to think about it and where I stand.
I will try to describe the situation without my subjective view of it so that I do not color the story.
To describe my experience - I ended up in a lab which seems to be doing amazing science.
The PI is relatively young so there is not much publication record but from what I have seen the people from the lab are going to submit publications to some "high impact factor" journals sometime soon.
The lab environment is okay - the lab is relatively small and, as I've talked with the PI, it will most likely stay this way.
The lab has joint meeting with another group which members are sometimes really mean. These lab meetings seem to bring a lot of stress and anxiety in the people from the group. There is a lot of harsh criticism - mostly of the science not personal but it sometimes feels like a personal "attack".
The money seems to be completely not a problem - from what I've heard they have a lot of grants and the PI is on track to get tenure.
The PI is always available (I feel that might change once they publish all the papers that they have in the pipeline).
The PI gets really excited about thousands of ideas a minute. Even though I am just a rotation student, I quite often have little idea of what I am doing as, even though we meet every week, there is no concrete plan - rather, big ideas and huge excitement about everything.
An finally, two very advanced graduate students - the first PhD students of this PI, left the lab after couple of year. They were close to graduating but both of them left. Which has not happened in the history of the program (that such advanced PhD left the lab). After talking to both the PI and one of the students about it, I am still unsure what happened. Both sides have different stories - the PI says it was misalignment of expectations (the students were considering doing "alternative careers") and some other issues; the student mentions the other lab (the one from joint lab meetings), friendship with the mentor which turned out to not work in the face of criticism and the power dynamic, and some other unresolved/unclear issues. The student was very critical and told me explicitly to not do it (very clearly) because it will be ugly. I have also heard from people around that I should think twice - generally people do not want to talk badly about others but I can sense what is opinion of a lot of people.
I know I won't find a perfect graduate advisor. But I was wondering what do other people think about this. The science is great and I have somewhat limited choices - is it worth to compromise, is it worth to take the risk? What to think about it?
Thank you all for your opinion.
Promilla