Even though applications aren’t due until December, an avalanche of emails have already hit Naomi Saphra, a soon-to-be assistant professor of computer science at Boston University who’s currently finishing up research across town at Harvard University.

The messages are from people eager to join Saphra as BU doctoral students and contribute to her work on natural language processing, part of the bedrock of the AI revolution. Her decision is more complicated than it would’ve been a couple years ago: She’ll weigh both their qualifications and their likelihood of sticking with the program rather than bolting quickly for a corporate AI job.