A scientific adviser is the most important person for getting your Master's or PhD degree in time and without too much pain. What is even more important, is that it is a person, who will help you to get your first job, write your recommendation letters, use connections to get you an interview.
This implies that your professors has to be famous enough to have those connections and powerful enough to organize those interviews. Usually such people are well established researchers with their tenure received long time ago. Very often they have big research groups and not so much time to spend doing research. This is also because those famous professors have to attend numerous meetings and conferences and serve as advisers in all kind of committees. Therefore the time left after all those activities is shared among writing papers and grant proposals, teaching and, after all, working with research group members.
If we take all this in consideration, we suddenly realize that this type of scientific advisers can be good for getting your job, but really bad to work with.
On the other hand, young active professors, especially before their tenure, can spend days and nights in the labs working with their students and trying to work on the coolest projects and writing a lot of papers. You PhD will be finished very soon, and with impressive results in your resume. Unfortunately after that connections of your advisor start to play such important role, that you excellent resume may be not enough. This is especially true for academic career, where without calls with support from the advisor it is even impossible to get interview.
So, what to do? Is it better to choose old and established or young and active advisor?
As usually in life, there is no simple answer, but there are several possible solutions. First solution is to get co-advised by two people one of each kind. Second is to approach your famous professor with research questions so actively that you can get higher priority in his or her time share. Third is based on the fact that graduate study takes some time. Therefore if you start with a great young professor, and you together do nice research, at the moment of your graduation she or he will have enough connections to help you find a good job.
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