  Joining a research group is one of the most important events on a graduate
student's path to earning a PhD, but the ways students go about searching for a
group remain largely unstudied. It is therefore crucial to investigate whether
departments are equitably supporting students as they look for an advisor,
especially as students today enter graduate school with more diverse
backgrounds than ever before. To better understand the phenomenon of finding a
research group, we use a comparative case study approach to contrast important
aspects of two physics PhD students' experiences. Semi-structured interviews
with the students chronicled their interactions with departments, faculty, and
the graduate student community, and described the resources they found most and
least helpful. Our results reveal significant disparities in students'
perceptions of how to find an advisor, as well as inequities in resources that
negatively influenced one student's search. We also uncover substantial
variation regarding when in their academic careers the students began searching
for a graduate advisor, indicating the importance of providing students with
consistent advising throughout their undergraduate and graduate experiences.
