The rites of spring.

Every spring I get depressed. Last month I had the stunning realization that graduate student recruitment is a major cause of my spring depression. Each year, as the days lengthen, graduate programs engage in their ritualistic seduction of prospective students. In the past 15 years, US institutions, including the most elite and respected, have evolved mating displays worthy of birds and fish. The strongest applicants are flown across the country, treated to weekends on the beach, dinner at faculty homes, special lectures and one-on-one meetings with faculty and students. All this effort is intended to convince the students to select one program, or institution, for their graduate study.For several months the top cohort of students (which I suspect is disconcertingly small, because many of these students seem to encounter one another at several interviews and to trade impressions of different graduate programs) undergoes a grueling series of visits. Some students apply to eight or nine programs, and visit each of them. I have seen students in tears about their senior theses being compromised by the endless interviews. I have seen faculty alter their travel plans to conform with their institution's recruitment days. I have found myself comparing notes with colleagues at other institutions about our common applicants.Each April, I am annoyed by the shockingly large number of students holding offers from five or more graduate programs who don't have the grace to decline offers of admission in a timely fashion so that offers can be made to deserving students on the waiting lists. Each year I am astounded by some of the reasons offered by students who decide to go elsewhere, proving that the decision-making processes of young adults are not for people over 35 to try to fathom. Each year I am touched and amused by the notes written by students who attempt to soften their rejection of us with kind words about us and our program.Why have we evolved these complex mating games? The answer is that most of our brightest American college graduates are not choosing to pursue graduate studies in basic science. Although there are many able, even brilliant, foreign students clamoring for entry into American programs, much of the funding for graduate students is restricted to American citizens or permanent residents.At the same time, more institutions aspire to first-rate graduate programs. The difficulty of obtaining faculty positions has created a cadre of exceptional junior faculty at almost all of our research and teaching institutions, even traditionally less research-intensive institutions. These junior faculty members are rightly hungry for excellent PhD students and push hard to build strong graduate programs.So, otherwise dignified senior scientists find themselves catering to the whims of 22 year olds who, like first-round picks in the National Football League draft, have promise, but have not yet done anything worthy of the kind of fawning attention that they receive for this fleeting three-month period.As I watch these students exercising, even flaunting, their power to choose, I know how abruptly the illusion of power will be shattered when the students start graduate school. Some graduate programs fail miserably to deliver the supportive and nurturing environments that they promised. Other students who have never failed at anything before will for the first time confront painfully the fact that doing science means working in the domain of the unknown, where we are all powerless.As I make offers to prospective applicants I am acutely aware of the irony that the most sought after applicants do not always become the best scientists. But then, the flip side of the desperate search for graduate students is that it creates extraordinary opportunities for unusual applicants. The science not studied when 18 or 20 need not preclude a future career, and some of the finest graduate students in our program have come to us with unconventional backgrounds that have enriched us and their science.I assume that this spring, as in all past years, will yield a crop of bright and eager young scientists next fall. For me, greeting the new students in the fall is the true ‘spring’, the time of new beginnings. I like meeting the new students, knowing how much they will change and grow. Some will discover that they don't really want a life in science and will go in other directions. Others will gain in confidence and develop expertise that their mentors don't have. In some years we watch the last person admitted off the waiting list blossom into the winter's brightest flower.These thoughts should ease my spring depression but somehow the overall success of the long-term relationship doesn't make the excesses of the courtship any more palatable.