Hindsight -or- Choosing a Research Mentor

The single most important choice of graduate school is choosing your adviser/research mentor. Your adviser affects nearly all aspects of your career:

• Science - Not only will your choice in mentor shape what projects you work on, but part of the job of the mentor is to train you in both scientific thought and methods. A good mentor will be able to train you to recognize the difference between good research and bad, when to stick with something or give it up, when to publish, and how to produce quality data.
  
• Continuity of Research - Your mentor will provide partial or total funding for your project through her grants, depending on institutional policies. It is critical you have the funds available to complete your thesis project; without them, there is no project!
  
• Writing - Your mentor will also guide you to learn scientific writing for meeting abstracts, thesis preparation and publication. It is crucial to learn good written communication skills; they are the bread and butter of science. Without quality publications, your hope for getting a J-O-B is practically nil. A good mentor will produce easy to understand, quality publications and help you to refine your own writing skills.
  
• Visibility - Related to the above, your mentor can determine how seriously your communications are taken, and whether they are even in existence. A good mentor will encourage your participation in national meetings and timely publication. Your mentor can provide you with contacts to people who work in your field of interest and can advise you on which academic societies are worth your time (and money!)
• Leadership - Your mentor also serves as a model for how you might run a lab in the future. She may also provide you with leadership opportunities within the lab so you can start to develop your own style. Leadership styles differ greatly; try to pick a mentor who is similar to the style you would like to emulate, but not exactly the same. You might learn something from the differences!
  
• Graduation - Your adviser should always have your graduation in mind. A good mentor will make sure you stayed in school long enough to get the skills necessary to do a postdoc, but not so long that they're taking advantage of cheap labor. They will press you to make progress, without demanding too much or allowing you to fizzle out and get a terminal Master's.
  

Given how very important your Ph.D. adviser is to your future career, choosing one can be very daunting. You might ask yourself, how do I rank potential advisers? Funding? Science? Personality? Success graduating students and placing postdocs? These are all important; only you can decide which is the most important for you, given your situation. For me, all the mentors I rotated with had interesting science with established projects, so I could eliminate that from my final decision making process. I made my initial decision based on appearance of funding (more on that) and leadership style.

But as you may be aware, I encountered some bumps.  Lots of bumps.  I chose my first mentor poorly and had to switch labs. My purpose, chickadees, is to prevent future baby Ph.D. students from choosing poorly.  Given my methodical mentor-choosing process, where did I go wrong?