Chemistry graduate school admissions

I originally started this blog with the desire to write about the process of applying for national-level fellowship funding in the sciences. In the course of preparing for my Hertz Fellowship interview last year, I searched in vain for examples of questions that might come up during the interview. That's what inspired me to start the blog. In a comment on the previous post asking about my credentials when applying for graduate school, Shawn reminded me that I had not yet addressed the topic of admissions. Based on the search engine keywords that lead people to this blog, I'd say he isn't the only prospective graduate student with questions about the application process.

Shawn asked about my grades and GRE scores, but the truth is that these things are not particularly important (for the record, I had good grades and a mediocre chemistry GRE score). In terms of their relative importance for graduate school admissions in chemistry, I (and professors whose advice I've heard about applying) would rank the relevant factors as follows:

1. Research experience
2. Recommendations
3. Rigor of coursework
4. Grades
5. Extracurricular activities
6. GRE scores

In the past, graduate programs in chemistry used to be smaller, and my impression is that the students were more likely to be chemistry nerds; now, plenty of aimless college seniors end up applying to graduate school because it's the next prudential step to take--not necessarily because they really want to be in graduate school. If you think you might want to go to graduate school, you should try doing research as an undergraduate to see if it's something you enjoy. This is the single most important thing you can to do: show the professors who are reading your application that you want to do research, and that you have an appreciation for the difficulties involved. If you're an undergrad at a research university, it should be easy enough to email a few professors or talk to your teaching assistants about working in a lab. No matter where you are, though, you can do research through the NSF's REU program, a summer internship at a chemical, pharmaceutical, or biotech company, or something else such as the Amgen Scholars program (I think industry is trickier for undergraduates interested in physical chemistry, but I've heard that it can be useful to do something that provides you with experience playing with optics and operating lasers).

It's a good idea to try working in a lab early on for several reasons: (1) you will learn things that aren't taught in classes and that are often more relevant to becoming a chemist, (2) working on a project for a long time makes it more likely that you'll be able to publish your work--an addition to graduate school and fellowship applications that really makes you stand out--and (3) you will learn about whether or not you like a particular discipline of chemistry. Classes often don't give you a good picture of this (many students like organic chemistry on paper, but don't want to be working in a hood all day). If you work somewhere for a while and don't like it, you can try working in a different type of chemistry lab, and you've saved yourself the difficulty of finding that out once you've joined a lab in graduate school. Or, if you work in several labs and don't like any of them, you'll know that graduate school in chemistry is probably a bad idea.

A fourth reason to get involved in research early on as an undergraduate ties into number two on my list above--recommendations. Working in an academic lab ought to give you some contact with a professor whose word can carry a lot of weight down the line, whether you're applying for a summer job or graduate school.

I don't think the rest of the list requires much elaboration--the main point here is that doing research as an undergraduate trumps anything else you might do. This isn't college admissions, which is largely a game of amassing credentials loosely related to what you might study. Professors are selecting a pool of people who might be their future advisees, so they want people with the best demonstrated track of research experience they can get. They don't care if you study really hard for the GRE and get 99th percentile, or if you volunteer at a hospital, or if you get an A or a B in your history class.

One professor put it to me this way: If you are a C student but you publish a paper in JACS as an undergraduate, you'll be a shoo-in at any chemistry graduate school. You'll have demonstrated that you're capable of and excited about doing graduate level research, which is really what professors are looking for.

Comment response

I recently received a comment on a post that asked,

I was wondering if i could correspond with you through email, maybe just to find out more about your graduate life in UC Berkeley, and to ask you questions like: how's the workload like? Are you expected to work independently or do the professors provide alot of guidance? etc etc.

In order to retain my anonymity (which is important to me because I might occasionally say blunt, unflattering things about people who have a lot of influence over my time in graduate school and beyond), I won't correspond with people via email, but I'm really excited to receive comments and to respond through blog posts.

The first semester at Berkeley is the most difficult in terms of deadlines. Graduate students certainly work a lot at Berkeley, but for me it's the constant deadlines and evaluations--problem sets, quizzes, exams, grading, teaching preparation, on top of research--that stress me out. I can handle spending a lot of time in lab working towards the goals of a project, but I have difficulty with the awkward regimentation of my time that comes from having things due every couple of days. Most first year students take two classes, teach, and do research starting in October. It sounds okay, but it's a lot to juggle. Teaching is supposed to be roughly twenty hours per week, but I think it usually ends up being a little less. Classes might be ten to fifteen hours per week, and then we need to try to get research done on top of that. So I'm looking forward to a week from now, when the semester will be over and I can focus on my research.

While students take classes during their second semester, I hear that things tend to be more laid back--professors know that students want to be spending their time on research, so the classes aren't as time consuming. Additionally, the first year graduate students do not teach during their second semester, so the only thing to take away from research time is one or two easy classes.

In terms of independence, this really varies by professor. In the lab I ended up joining, my guess is that I will see my professor less than I want to--it would be nice to have a little more guidance early on, but my professor is just too busy to provide it. Professors who don't have tenure are more likely to be working in the lab and to know what's going on day to day, because they're working beside you all day. So there's certainly an opportunity in those types of labs to receive a lot of guidance, but it comes at the cost of a lack of privacy--if you think something is a good idea and your professor doesn't, it's more difficult to do it on the side. Additionally, the workload in those labs just tends to be higher--70 or 80 hour weeks are the norm. Some tenured professors are also good about staying in touch, though; I have a friend in the Chemical Biology program (where students do rotations) who worked in a lab where she had a weekly 30-minute meeting with the (tenured) professor. The older professors can be a little more checked out; you might see less of them because they're spending their time on something other than chemistry.

In general, though, I've been impressed by the independence exhibited by my fellow first year students. I assumed there was going to be more hand-holding required as people got into doing research, but I think for the most part people understand that research, not class, is what graduate school is about, and they are impressively committed to making progress on their research projects.

Joining lab groups

The first year students were allowed to officially join labs about a month ago. Technically we had until the end of October to join a lab, but everyone I talked to a month ago had settled on a lab by the earliest possible date (except for the people in the chemical biology program, who don't choose their labs until May). There are probably a few wrenches thrown into the lab joining process every year, and this year was no exception:

-One tenured professor is considering moving to another school, so people were kind of iffy about joining his group. I think two or three people ended up joining his group; I'm not sure if this is fewer than normal.
-One professor, Richmond Sarpong gave his tenure talk in September. He had an offer for a senior faculty position at another school, so his group would probably have moved there if he hadn't gotten tenure. Several first year students were interested in joining his group. I know one who said he came to Berkeley because he wanted to work in the Sarpong lab and thus was going to join the lab whether that meant staying at Berkeley or not. I think the rumor that he was awarded tenure was leaked right when people had to submit their group choices, and quite a few first year students joined his group.
-I heard about a couple of popular groups that did not have enough room for all of the students who wanted to join. In one case, there were eleven students who, a week or two before the deadline, expressed strong interest in a group that only ended up taking three of them.

My own lab-joining process was slightly stressful, but things worked out in the end. I had two potential groups in mind, but really wanted to join one over the other. I was worried for a while that I would not get into the one I wanted, but a combination of being a little pushy and other people losing interest seemed to push things in my favor. One good piece of advice I received was to be straightforward about what group I wanted to join, irrespective of what the group's situation was. That is, this person told me I should not allow my expressions of interest in a group to be tempered by how full/popular a group seemed to be, because if lots of students do that, then nowhere really ends up where they want to be. I knew this on some level, but I think it was good for me to have someone reiterate this.

Alcohol in graduate school

I've been a little surprised since getting here by the large role that alcohol plays in graduate students' lives. The chemistry department has a weekly social hour with free beer called ChemKeg, which is great--it gives me an excuse to socialize with people and allows me to easily see people who aren't in my classes. Several of our orientation events at the start of the school year had either beer or wine. Group meetings at the start of the year were always stocked with beer, making it easy to have a couple of beers most nights of the week--beer was often the only beverage. At night, grad student socialization seems to pretty much always involve going somewhere for drinks.

When I was in college, I certainly saw heavy drinking, but it wasn't as frequent. Instead of having a couple of drinks several times a week, people would concentrate their drinking into the nights when they had free time. They drank less often, but when they did, they got really drunk.

So it's unclear to me if this is a graduate school thing or a twenty-somethings thing. Grad students seem to gravitate towards alcohol, but is this true of most Americans our age? I don't interact with enough twenty-somethings outside of graduate school to be able to draw a good conclusion about this, but the ones who I do see on a regular basis don't drink very much at all.

Overheard on campus

"Some books are, like, really good!"

Group meetings and advising styles

In Berkeley's chemistry program, the first-year students are strongly encouraged to have settled on a research group to join by six weeks into the semester. With that soft deadline rapidly approaching, attendance at group meetings is high. Several that I've been to have been standing-room-only, or have had to be moved to a bigger room to accommodate the expected crowd--at some meetings, dozens of first-year students have shown up for meetings of groups that are 15-20 people in size. Ultimately, probably about two people will probably join a group of that size in a given year, so I did not expect that there would be such high attendance at the group meetings.

It's interesting to see how my pre-conceived notions affect my perceptions of what's going on at a given meeting. For example, Professor A is known in the department to be pretty inaccessible and is a (personable, friendly) bigshot with a large research group. Professor B has a smaller research group and is not as well-known. I went to both group meetings this week and observed a similar dynamic: both Professors A and B didn't seem to know much about what their students were presenting on. They asked basic questions that seemed to indicate they hadn't spent much time thinking about these projects. When Professor A did this as a post-doc was presenting, I thought, of course he doesn't know what people in his lab are doing--I've heard he's hard to reach and has such a large group that it's hard for him to keep up on what's going on in the lab. When Professor B exhibited similar behavior with a senior graduate student, however, I caught myself thinking, it's great that Professor B gives his students so much space! It looks like they really have the freedom to do what they want. It must be because he trusts his students to work independently, and these students seem to have cultivated that skill well.

Really, they were doing something very similar--asking questions that they probably would have asked before or thought about had they spent time discussing their students' projects with them--but I assigned completely different motives. Really, the reasons for their apparent distance are complex but encompass both of these motives: both professors are busy, and both have observed that their students--at least late in their graduate careers--will work well and produce interesting results without having their hands held.

I've heard that Professor A meets with his students when they first join the lab to make sure things are on track, and then pretty much disappears for a couple years. During this time, the students are pretty dependent on other graduate students and post-docs for advice; meetings with Professor A are only held to discuss big new ideas or a shift in direction because things aren't working out. But once his students have been around for several years, Professor A actually talks to them more than he used to because by then they have enough experience that he trusts their intuition about their science and what ideas would be good to pursue. This model seems to work well for Professor A, but I am a little wary of entering a research group where I don't have access to the "big idea" expertise that a professor has when I want it. Ideally, my research adviser will give me all the room I want, but also be there to talk when I want to discuss the big picture.

Classes and grades

In graduate school, you're no longer supposed to worry about grades. People were kept in this cycle of worrying about their grades as undergraduates because if they applied to graduate schools they needed to impress--it was like college admissions all over again.

(This was especially true of pre-med students--I knew several who spent hundreds of hours volunteering with organizations they didn't care much about, or who decided to major in something sort of bio-related but sort of quirky, based on the hope that their applications would stand out and give them an edge in admissions. I readily admit to doing this sort of thing when I was in high school, but now that I have a little more perspective I can appreciate how silly all of this was.)

To impress upon us new graduate students the worthlessness of grades, pretty much everyone gets an A or a B. Students who do really poorly might get a C, which is considered a failing grade. But it's kind of funny how graduate schools are upfront about the fact that they're going to inflate everyone's grades so that we know they are meaningless. I appreciate it. (I wouldn't mind doing away with grades altogether, but that's a topic for another post.)

Despite our professors explicitly telling us that this is graduate school and we needn't be concerned with our grades, there has still been plenty of chatter about them. For example, after the quizzes for one class were returned there were groups of students who immediately complained to one another--this looked like a scene right out of my undergraduate organic chemistry classes--about how the quiz assessed too narrow a range of the material, the grading was too harsh, the concepts weren't properly explained, etc. These may have all been valid criticisms of the format of the class and the quiz. But it appeared to me that they were grounded in dissatisfaction with a low grade, which really no longer matters. I wonder if this will continue or if we will learn to relax when it comes to grades as the year goes on.

Orientation, day 1

I went to sleep Sunday night anxious about orientation starting. Even though orientation is a pretty laid-back time, I felt like the start of orientation marked a new phase of my life. It was like when I would lie awake in bed before the first days of middle school, high school, and college. Funny that my only experiences with this are school-related; I wonder if the same would happen to me before other long-term commitments (marriage, a new job, childbirth, etc).

When I got in on Monday morning, the chair of the department briefly greeted us. He noted the similarities between now and when he entered graduate school in the early 1970s, making note of wars, budget shortfalls in science, and a lagging economy, saying that although things seem(ed) dark it was a good time to be entering graduate school. I wasn't sure if any of it was meant to come off as subtly political. He also mentioned a new study that showed that the women who had graduated from Berkeley's chemistry department in the late 1990s and early 2000s were far more successful at landing academic jobs in top universities than their counterparts from other top schools' chemistry departments. The disparity is interesting, but there seems to be no analysis of why it might exist beyond pure conjecture from interested parties (for starters, what is the size of Berkeley's female grad student population compared to those at the smaller private schools being compared to it?).

Afterward, we had about an hour and a half of downtime and then met in groups with "peer advisors," older graduate students who shared their wisdom on the school and the city. The rest of the day was time off until a reception late in the afternoon. I always have trouble with these social events during orientations--I hadn't met too many people earlier in the day, and I'm not sure how many of the first-years stuck around all afternoon or came back to campus for this reception, so the vast majority of the people there were complete strangers to me. I showed up and wandered around a bit until I bumped into someone I barely knew and we started talking. Perhaps if I'd had more of the wine I would've loosened up in no time.

In talking to a few first-years, it was interesting to see the differences in how much people knew about the department. One first-year I talked to had a stated research interest in a subfield of chemistry, but couldn't name anyone in the department whose group she was interested in. Another had started working here over the summer and knew all about the research interests and publications of the professors she might work for. It always surprises me a bit to encounter students of the former type; it leaves me wondering what their criteria were in choosing a graduate school, if not the opportunities to do the type of work they find interesting and the likelihood that they would mesh well with their graduate advisers (I think these were my most important criteria).

Overall, it was a pretty low-key first day with few events. The American Chemical Society's national meeting (the biggest chemistry conference in the country) is going on right now in Washington DC, so many professors weren't around.

Preparing for Berkeley

It's been a quiet couple of summer months, so there hasn't really been much for me to post. There were a few periods where I hadn't heard anything from Berkeley in a while and I started to get paranoid that I wasn't getting some of the emails I should have been, or things must have been getting lost in the mail, but everything has worked out okay.

I realized that people in the graduate program at Berkeley probably try on purpose not to inundate us incoming graduate students with materials and paperwork until we arrive. I just bummed around all summer, deciding to relax and have a slow couple of months. So I certainly had graduate school on my mind and was even a little impatient to get started on the days when I felt bored. But some people were much busier--they might have spent their summers working two jobs or volunteering in a developing country, and they wouldn't have had time to bother filling out pesky forms and emailing back and forth with professors and graduate students.

My summer ended up being more chemistry-free than I would have liked. I didn't have university library access, so I couldn't really read journal articles unless I asked someone who was still in school to email them or to borrow a VPN login to my school's network. I read part of "Designing the Molecular World" by Philip Ball, a book that explains the frontiers of several areas of chemistry research to non-chemists.

Since arriving in the Bay area I've just spent some time getting things in order. I got my Berkeley public library card, bought a bike, and went for a few hikes. Orientation started this week and things are somewhat busier now; more on that soon.

NSF Fellowship, revisited

NSF just announced the remainder of the graduate research fellowship award recipients, bringing the total to 1236 for the year. Unfortunately, my name was not on the list.

I received an honorable mention. This is supposed to signify that NSF thinks I am worth funding, but there were enough people higher than me on the list that I didn't make the cut. But honorable mention feels sort of like a consolation prize that you get just for trying (this is not actually the case since many applicants get rejected without honorable mention), since it just comes with some supercomputer access that I doubt I will use.

Before the results were announced, I was looking forward to seeing my ratings sheets so that if I did not win, I would be able to get some useful feedback on how to improve my application for next year. NSF sent me an email about the ratings sheets just ten minutes after sending the honorable mention notification. There are three ratings sheets, each consisting of two ratings for the award criteria ("intellectual merit" and "broader impacts"), with each rating followed by a one-paragraph explanation. I received three "excellent" ratings and three "very good" ratings, and all of the explanatory text was glowing. There was only one bit of criticism about my research proposal, but it came from someone who gave me an "excellent" on intellectual merit, so I can't imagine it carried much weight. I'm not annoyed that I got an honorable mention--I understand that there were weaknesses in my application and that these evaluations are somewhat arbitrary--but what irks me is that there is no indication of why I received "very good" instead of "excellent" ratings where I did, nor of how I could improve my application in the future. I was really hoping for more detailed comments--ideally, scanned printouts of my essays so that the reviewers could make comments by hand and point out their thoughts on certain parts--but now I am quite disappointed in the feedback system.

Research interests

With my arrival in Berkeley just a few months away, I've been thinking about my research interests. I feel like they are poorly defined. I can't point to specific questions I'm interested in addressing, or to subfields of chemistry that I have a long-standing interest in wanting to explore more deeply.

Last week, I sent a brief statement to Berkeley so they could match me with a first-year academic adviser. They wanted to know what my research interests were. I wrote something kind of vague describing how I want to approach my research, and what areas of chemistry I find interesting generally, but in the end, it ended up looking pretty bland and nonspecific.

The problem is that my research interests are being externally defined. The way I approach thinking about what I want to work on in graduate school is to look at what the faculty are doing, look for something I find interesting, and then sort of latch on to it. Someone's doing femtosecond spectrosopy? Sounds difficult and mathy. Someone's solving protein crystal structures? I think I would get bored. Someone's manipulating quantum dots? Maybe I could do that, too!

Ideally, my research interests would grow out of what I genuinely want to pursue, and then I would find a faculty adviser who seems knowledgeable and capable of helping me do my research. (I have the impression that this is how things tend to work more in the humanities and social sciences: a graduate student is on their own a lot, and relies on an adviser for direction. From what I've seen in the sciences, though, there is a lot more top-down delegation, whether it's in large physics projects like CERN or individual chemistry groups in which ten people are addressing a complicated problem from different angles.) But even if I were given the space to define my own goals and pursue them, I wouldn't know what to do. I think in chemistry, this is a result of the heirarchical nature of the research. There is a lot of background to know before getting to the cutting edge of the field, and for the last four years I've been building that base of knowledge. But I don't know much about where the frontiers of chemistry lie. Organic chemistry made me fall in love with chemistry, but on a fundamental level, there doesn't seem to be very much left to figure out. The physical organic chemistry done, I believe, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s gave us very good models for how organic chemistry works. I couldn't take a few organic chemistry classes and then go to graduate school and study electrophilic aromatic substitution (a basic type of reaction that people often learn about in their first or second semester), because all of that stuff is already worked out. And this is true not only of undergraduate organic chemistry, but most of the chemistry I have learned as an undergraduate--I learned about things that are well-known and uncontroversial, and was not exposed, in a broad sense, to where the frontiers of chemistry currently lie.

The transition from studying well-known phenomena to figuring out where on the boundaries of chemistry I want to be is a little confusing. I loved organic chemistry, but I would not want to spend my graduate school career doing natural products synthesis. I wasn't so excited about what we learned in my biochemistry class, but I still find biology fascinating.

In chemistry, if I do narrow something down slightly, there are still thousands of subfields, only a handful of which I am familiar with. Take my above statement--"I still find biology fasinating." What does that mean I want to study? Protein biochemistry from a mechanistic perspective? Prebiotic chemistry? Cellular imaging? Signal transduction networks? X-ray crystallography of membrane proteins? (And I'm limiting myself to biologial studies that are done in chemistry departments, here.) There are so many subfields of which I have so little knowledge that it's very difficult for me to define a personal research interest.

The only solution I currently see to all of this is to plow through and read about what happens to strike my fancy at the time. By learning more about where chemistry currently lies as a field, I should be able to formulate my own ideas on where it could go. But this is a very slow approach. In some sense, I feel like I've been duped: there is chemistry that people actually do, and then there is chemistry that undergraduates learn. And obviously, you need the latter to understand the former, but it's jarring to realize that I actually know very little about chemistry. I feel unprepared. In trying to navigate the world of modern chemistry research, I feel like I'm trying to learn a whole new discipline from scratch.

NSF Fellowship

A few days ago, NSF posted a list of recipients of the 2009 graduate research fellowships. NSF awarded 950 fellowships, which is on par with previous years (from 2005 to 2008, the numbers were 1024, 909, 920, and 913). This year, however, a notice was posted on the website along with the released names:

"Due to the complexity of the current budget situation, the 2009 GRFP awards will be announced in installments based on fields of study and other factors. The first installment is now available on FastLane. Awardees, as well as Applicants not recommended for funding, have been notified by email. Recipients of Honorable Mention and any additional Fellowship award offers will be forthcoming. Applicant ratings sheets will be available after all award announcements have been made. We thank you for your patience."

As luck would have it, my name is not on the award list, nor did I get a rejection email. So despite the delay in announcing the award recipients (which was originally supposed to be done in late March), I am still no closer to knowing whether or not I received an award. I hear there are about 2000 people in my boat--roughly 20% of the applicant pool.

During the week or two preceding the award announcements, the NSF GRFP forum at The Grad Cafe was very active, with new posts every few minutes as people scrutinized every minor change in the website to try to figure out when the results might be released. This provided for some valuable camaraderie among the people (myself included) who were sick of waiting for the results and getting no answers from NSF. For a brief period, people were able to access their ratings sheets by submitting a request to have their username/password sent to them by email; however, NSF disabled this very quickly after it was discovered, so only a few people saw their sheets. People kept holding out hope that there would be some other glitch leading to leaked results, but no such thing happened this year.

According to people who called NSF, the main reason for the delay was budget complexities--NSF simply did not know how many fellowships it could fund. The number was anticipated to be higher than normal, but it looks like the size of that funding difference was (and apparently still is) in question. NSF has received stimulus package money, but it's unclear how much of that (if any) will go to graduate research fellowships. Presumably because some people needed to make graduate school decisions based on whether or not they received a fellowship, the NSF released a first round of results probably listing most of the award recipients.

So at this point I am thinking I will probably receive an honorable mention, and there is a small chance I will receive an award, depending on how much funding is made available. My guess is that the number of second-round awards won't be trivial (or else why would the NSF have gone to all this trouble?), but I have no idea if it will be closer to 100 or 1000.

Decisions, decisions

I have one week to make a decision about whether to go to Scripps, Stanford, Berkeley, or Caltech. This decision will profoundly impact the next five years of my life. Of course, it doesn't have to be five years--dropping out is always an option if I'm unhappy in graduate school--but if things go according to plan, I am deciding where I will be living, which campus I will take strolls on, and, to an extent, who I want my graduate research adviser to be. The thing that makes this decision difficult is that by choosing to attend one school out of four, I have to decide that I won't be living in the other three cities (my options are La Jolla, Palo Alto, Berkeley, and Pasadena), that I won't get to explore their campuses, and that I won't be working with the various professors I've been excited about for a while. It's easy to say I'm excited about a particular place, but it's really difficult to take the rest out of the running, especially when I know that I would probably find something I'm interested in and do well at any of these schools.

I've been telling people that I'm pretty certain I'll be going to Berkeley in the fall, but I've been meaning to write about each school once more before making that final decision.

So, let's start with Scripps.

While I was there I noticed that it didn't really have a campus--it was just a collection of close-by buildings and parking lots--but I didn't make much of it at the time. After visiting Berkeley, though, I realized that I would really prefer to be on a campus. It might seem like a trivial distinction (many grad students in the physical sciences like to say things like, "I'll be spending all of my time in lab anyways, so who cares about X?") but I think being a student at Scripps would feel too much like working a job: you drive to this building and are inside all day. When you want to get lunch or take a break, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go unless you drive. Since there's no campus, there's not much going on other than biology and chemistry.

Scripps is different than what I'm used to, in terms of how the place operates and the type of research that's done there. Coming from an undergraduate chemistry program that is fairly well-represented across organic, inorganic, biological, and physical chemistry (no analytical / nuclear), it's quite a shift to imagine going to a place that's so bio-focused. I don't know if I'm ready to make that jump; given that I want options, it seems kind of limiting. I have options there in that there are over 100 faculty members that I could potentially work with as a graduate student, but many of those people are working in areas outside the purview of chemistry (a lot of the prospective students I met when I visited were interested in immunology, for example). I would not go to graduate school in a biology program without having a much better understanding of what biology research involves, both in content (what sorts of problems are biologists trying to solve, and what is addressable in the 6-7 years it takes to complete a PhD in biology?) and in day-to-day work (what sorts of techniques are used, and what is life like for a graduate student in biology?). Thus, many of the groups at Scripps are functionally off-limits to me.

Living in San Diego would be very different, and I could really go either way on it. It's hard to say no to the weather and the beaches (I'm not a beach person, but it was beautiful outside), but I imagine it would also be annoying to have to drive everywhere. When I first arrived at my hotel (about a five to ten minute walk from Scripps) the day I was visiting, I was really hungry but couldn't find anything to eat--there was nothing within walking distance.

After the day that I spent meeting the faculty at Scripps, I was pretty sure I did not want to go there. This was largely due to a mismatch of research interests between me and the faculty; while I'm sure there are many things going on there that I would be excited about, I just don't have enough of a background in biology to really appreciate a lot of it at this point. My interactions with graduate students on the second day left me viewing the place more favorably. But looking back on all of my visits, all of the graduate students talked up their schools, so I eventually learned to take graduate student praise with a grain of salt.

So, Scripps is something of an unknown in terms of how well my research interests would mesh with what's going on there, and I'm not excited about the work atmosphere there. Research-wise, I could probably find something there that I'd be happy doing, but at this point I'm just not certain about that. It's probably not a good idea to go to graduate school some place where I don't have a strong idea of what I want to do going in.

Next, Stanford:

I was seriously considering going to Stanford until I visited. I guess I just felt disappointed. Really, it just wasn't for me in terms of there being a match between my own research interests and those of the faculty there. None of the professors there is particularly interested in having me as a student. The whole visit was rushed--I didn't get a good sense of how the grad students felt about the place. And I'm not excited about living in Palo Alto. I think it's pretty easy to nix Stanford.

Caltech:

Caltech seems like a great place to do chemistry. I think I could be very happy there. My impression is that the students there work longer hours than students at other schools, but people there seemed pretty happy.

I liked the feel of a small department. Because of the greater emphasis Caltech seems to have on dividing the department into disciplines of chemistry, it felt more like a department within a department--I got the impression that there are these communities made up of five or six research groups that are pretty close (members of the community know each other, know what others are working on, and so forth).

Pasadena isn't my ideal place to live, but it seems good enough: there are things to do within biking distance, the weather is beautiful, and Caltech's campus, while quite small, seemed like enough of a campus that I'd be happy with that aspect.

If there were a couple more faculty members I wanted to work for at Caltech, there is a good chance I would go there. As it stands, I'm not really sure who I would work for if I went. There's one professor who seemed pretty interested in recruiting me, but I think her research program aligns more closely with what my interests were a year or two ago rather than what they've become. Some other aspects of the department seem a little old and entrenched, just like the adherence to subdivisions of chemistry: there seem to be numerous professors who are continuing to bang away at the same projects that have fueled their entire careers. They're still getting results and pushing forward, but somehow it seems stale to me. I have to admit that I'm more excited about doing new chemistry--showing proof-of-concept with a new technique to address an interesting problem, in a manner that ideally will present tools for others to use or influence how people approach the problems they're working on--rather than doing what I think of as old chemistry--using tried and true techniques to delve deeper into questions of interest. Some people consider some of what I think of as "new chemistry" to be flashy and over-hyped; indeed, I view several large areas of chemistry research this way (for example, to my bewilderment, the practice of attaching everything to carbon nanotubes or other nanoparticles seems to be in vogue). I may look back on how I thought about chemistry at this stage and be ashamed of my shallowness, but for now, it's what excites me. The point of this aside was that in my field of chemistry, some of my potential graduate research advisers at Caltech seem to be delving deeper into their areas of study and optimizing things rather than starting entirely new projects.

There are people I could work for at Caltech. The professor who tried hardest to recruit me would be a reasonable match, although working in that group would probably be pretty intense--lots of 70-80 hour weeks. Another professor I met with does research that I find pretty fascinating, but I didn't get a good vibe from my (brief) interactions with her, and I didn't get a chance to speak to any of the graduate students her group. One professor was out of town, but his research still interests me; and another might be good to work for, but I heard she keeps her students on a pretty short leash. So it's kind of a grab bag. No one seems ideal at Caltech, although the first guy I mentioned seems pretty good.

Finally, let's look at Berkeley:
When I visited Berkeley, I thought by lunchtime that I wanted to go there. I got along well with the grad students I had met; I loved the feeling of being on a large, active campus with a surrounding neighborhood full of restaurants and shops; and I was excited about living in Berkeley (independent of grad school considerations, if I was picking somewhere to move to, it would probably be San Francisco or Berkeley).

As the April 15 deadline to matriculate gets closer, though, I find myself less sure that I want to go there. I'm having a few nagging thoughts:
-I might not actually be as excited about working in various groups there as I once thought I was. It's hard to tell if I am actually less excited, or if this is just me getting cold feet about making a commitment to the program. I think it's just cold feet.
-I don't want to teach for three semesters. That is a long time (though the semesters spent teaching are not consecutive).
-I've heard a troubling story about one of the people I'm most interested in working for there, involving kicking someone out of her group.
-As I noted above, I'd be turning down some other great opportunities to go to Berkeley. I don't feel as sure about the decision as I wish I did.

Berkeley it is.

NDSEG Fellowship

"We regret to inform you that we cannot fund you for an NDSEG Fellowship. The selection process was very thorough; your application was reviewed by many experts in your discipline. NDSEG is very competitive and there were many more qualified applicants than could be funded; of the over 2,000 submitted applications, only 200 will be funded. It is possible that you will be eligible to apply again next year for the NDSEG Fellowship. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide any feedback on your application, but please feel free to contact us if you have any other questions. We encourage you to continue with your educational goals and wish you success in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

The NDSEG Program Team at ASEE"

A couple of days ago when I was trying to find out when the award notifications would be made, I came across this forum at thegradcafe.com. Somehow, it was comforting to see that other people were stressing out about the award way more than I was. They may have had good reason--funding in other fields, even those of interest to the NDSEG fellowship committee, may be harder to come by than it is for chemistry graduate programs. But I have decided to take a no-stress approach to fellowships: it would be nice to receive one, but it really doesn't matter. The fellowship stipend tends to be a few thousand dollars a year more than what the programs I'm looking at pay (~30,000 vs ~27,000). Of course, there is also the flexibility that comes with having your tuition and stipend covered, but after my visits I'm not too concerned about not being able to work for someone because of funding issues (we'll see how naive this turns out to be). Going into the fellowship application process with this mentality that the fellowships aren't so important made it a lot less stressful, and coming out of it with this mentality will prevent me from having this urge to check my email every 30 seconds until I hear from NSF--which, as far as I can tell, will happen some time in the next two weeks.

Scripps and MIT

I forgot to mention this two weeks ago: I did end up getting into Scripps. No surprise there, since it turns out they admit pretty much everyone they interview. On the other hand, I did not get into MIT. Looks like it'll be California for me.

Visit 4: Caltech

I went to Caltech last weekend, on what was my fourth and final graduate school visit.

I flew into LAX and had to make it to Caltech from there. The graduate program suggested two options: taking public transportation (a combination of bus and rail) or getting a shuttle at the airport. After waiting half an hour for a bus with no luck, I opted for the shuttle. I boarded the shuttle at 5:30 and did not make it to my hotel until 7. So driving in LA was pretty irritating.

On Thursday night we had dinner with a professor, grad students, and other prospective students in our division. Caltech was different in this regard: while all of the other schools I visited emphasized the erasure of subdisciplinary boundaries (organic, bio, physical, inorganic) within their chemistry departments, Caltech separated us by subdiscipline for dinner on Thursday. The restaurant was absolutely the most upscale place I had been taken for dinner on any of my visits (but that really says more about the mediocre dinners at other schools than the ambiance at this place). Afterward we went to a bar for a bit and I spent a long time talking to a former Stanford student I'd met on a previous visit and an undergrad from Berkeley.

The next morning, we had breakfast and a brief welcome. The professor pointed out that PhD students from Caltech are more likely to get academic jobs than those from other schools. Most of the rest of the presentation was pretty standard stuff. The one thing that stands out about their program is that it is very proposal-heavy. If I recall correctly, the second year candidacy exam requires a research summary along with two original proposals, and then in the third or fourth year three more need to be written.

Next, we were split up by division again and shown around the chemistry department's facilities a bit, which I appreciated. So we saw the NMR room, a lab with a robot in a glovebox for doing automated experiments, the XPS setup, etc, and met the scientists in charge of running these facilities. After that we headed off to our appointments. Again, like everywhere else, they were in groups which ranged in size from three to five prospectives. Only one of the professors I met with, a pretty new one, knew who I was. This seems to be pretty common--I guess the younger professors tend to be more invested in getting specific people into their groups. It might also be a generational thing--thirty years ago, prospective graduate students were not recruited to the extent that they are now, so there might just be some inertia in this regard on the part of older professors. One of the professors I met with actually instructed her secretary to wait until all of us scheduled for the appointment had arrived to let us into her office. Apparently she couldn't spare two extra minutes to say hello as we arrived, pretend to be curious about our research interests, and make small talk.

The faculty appointments at Caltech were thirty minutes long--shorter than they were anywhere else--and most of the meetings I had ended up going over or being kind of rushed. The advantage to having short meetings, ostensibly, was that there was room in our schedules to meet lots of professors. But I think most people ended up having thirty-minute chunks of downtime scattered throughout the day because their schedules weren't full. During my downtime I explored the campus. I found it to be sunny and sparsely populated, much like Stanford's campus (but not nearly as large).

In the late afternoon, there was a (presumably) regularly-scheduled inorganic chemistry talk that I went to. The talk was fine--not totally my cup of tea--but it was interesting to see how people interacted there. The grad students in different groups clearly knew each other well, and professors knew and talked to graduate students who weren't in their labs as well. In this regard, the inorganic chemists struck me as pretty familial. Perhaps one result of keeping these walls between subdisciplines of chemistry in the department is that people tend to rally around their shared identities as inorganic chemists, biochemists, etc. Of course, it also helps that the department is smaller than the other ones I visited. But during and after the talk, there was a very congenial atmosphere; the discussion of the science afterward was casual and friendly, with people jumping in to explain their thoughts rather than it being a rigid, formal, question-and-answer session. Which is the type of thing you'd hope to see in an informal departmental seminar, but still--in terms of portraying an atmosphere for the prospective students, the talk could not have gone better.

The poster session in the evening was a little strange. Some groups were really overrepresented, having up to five posters, while others were absent. I mentioned in my post about Berkeley that I found the poster session valuable because it allowed me to quickly find graduate students in the groups I was interested in. Here this didn't end up being the case because several of the groups I was interested in did not present posters.

On Friday night we had dinner and went to a Mexican restaurant for drinks. I talked to a couple of prospective students, a professor, and a few grad students. The students at Caltech seemed more into recruiting than the students at the other schools I visited. I wasn't sure what to make of this.

On Saturday we had breakfast, chose between going hiking or going to The Huntington, and then left town.

Generally, the impression I got of the graduate students was that they worked a lot but were pretty happy. I heard separate stories about two professors who circulated sheets where their grad students had to sign up to indicate which day they would be taking off on a given weekend. As I mentioned above, the smaller size of the department really made it seem like more of a community, and I got the sense that this was reflected in some of the students' happiness.

Aside from the relative lack of interest displayed by some of the professors, I can't really come up with a good reason not to go to Caltech. On more trivial issues such as campus atmosphere (i.e., what a stroll through the campus feels like) and surrounding city, Berkeley definitely wins out. I'm also interested in working for more people at Berkeley, and was able to get a better sense of the atmosphere in their groups by talking extensively to their graduate students; at Caltech, unfortunately, this didn't end up being the case. My gut is still telling me to go to Berkeley, but after visiting Caltech it's a little bit harder to make that decision.

Visit 3: Berkeley

My visit to Berkeley was the day after my visit to Stanford; lots of students visit both schools, so the schools coordinate their visit days. They both have the same four visiting "weekends" (really a Thursday at Stanford and a Friday at Berkeley) and offer a Friday-morning shuttle from the Stanford hotel to the Berkeley hotel. The weekend that I visited, there were about 15 people taking the shuttle from Stanford to Berkeley.

We showed up at Berkeley, were escorted to a conference room, and had breakfast. Afterwards, Michael Marletta, a biochemistry professor, gave us a welcome talk. Most of it was standard stuff--information on the chemistry graduate program, nice things about Berkeley and the surrounding area, etc. A few things were noteworthy here: (1) He noted that a lot of us were probably looking at chemistry departments that always get ranked in the top five or so, where there's no actual way to distinguish quality (the implication being that there are more obvious differences between #1 and #15). However, Berkeley is the only public university that's so highly regarded (probably Urbana-Champaign and Madison are the next public universities on the chemistry list, but overall do not tend to be as well-regarded as Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, and Harvard). (2) The percentage of incoming students who finish with a PhD is 82%. This seemed low to me, and Marletta said it was pretty much just people who decided that graduate school at Berkeley was not for them. He did not have statistics on what percentage of students pass their second-year qualifying exam. (3) The Berkeley chemistry program is pretty light on graduation requirements. After the second-year oral exam, there's no other formal requirement--this means that, unlike in other programs, there are no cumulative exams to pass, no third-year exams, and there is no thesis defense.

Afterwards, we went on to our meetings. Each of us had a grad student assigned to us, which was a little awkward because they escorted us between appointments. It's a nice idea to prevent us from getting lost in the chemistry buildings, but I imagine it ends up being pretty irritating to the grad students to have to show up every hour, and it was a little cumbersome for me (one of my meetings got out a little early and I had to wait in the hall for 10 minutes because my escort was going to pick me up there). Both of my morning meetings went pretty well, although they were with more-established professors who probably have lots of people wanting to join their groups, and so neither knew me (or any of the other prospective students, as far as I could tell) personally.

We were supposed to go get catered sandwiches for lunch, but the grad students I was with didn't want to do that, so they took us out instead. Which was great. It was amazing to see how vibrant the campus was midday, with students everywhere, a concert going on, demonstrators, people handing out fliers, etc. I'm not used to that sort of thing. It was also nice to see what types of food options were available right off campus.

After lunch, there was a poster session, which I found extremely useful. Scripps didn't have a poster session, and by the time I made it to Stanford's at the end of the day, I was pretty certain that I would not be going there. At the poster session, I found the posters of the groups that I was interested in working in and talked to the grad students about the professors, group dynamics, etc (for me, there was very little science involved at the poster session). I appreciated that during this time, it was easy to identify what group a given grad student belonged to, in contrast to my other time spent talking to grad students, 90% of whom worked in groups I had no interest in. My only complaint about the poster session was that it was only an hour long.

In the afternoon, I had three more meetings--two with younger faculty members who I'm quite interested in working with, and one with a more well-established professor. The younger professors clearly had read my application and knew who I was, and our discussions were more focused around my interests (to the extent that they could be, considering that at least one other prospective student was present at all of my meetings). I really appreciated this. I think the best advice I received about picking a graduate school came from a grad student at Scripps, who told me that my excitement about working in a group should be reciprocated. Everyone goes to a graduate school excited about a couple of labs there (at least, I think they should); but this excitement often isn't reciprocated--especially as early as graduate student recruiting weekend--by professors who know that no matter what, they will end up with a good selection of talented students they will be able to court in the fall. At Scripps, where there were two faculty members I was really interested in working for going in, one had no interest in me (or anyone else, for that matter--he's a notoriously absent adviser because he has such a large group and is so busy), and the other was probably interested in having me in his group, but didn't really go out of his way to express it (no follow up e-mail after the visit, for example). At Stanford, no one knew who I was--I just showed up in people's offices (or, met with their grad students) and we never discussed my research interests. I could have sent someone to Stanford in my place and nobody would have had a clue. So I appreciated that these two Berkeley professors took the time to read my application and kept my name in mind before they met with me. I think it bodes well for an adviser/advisee relationship when the adviser is actually interested in taking on a particular student.

On Friday night, there was a gathering at a professor's house where they had pizza, beer, and lots of prospective and grad students. Towards the end of the night, I looked around and was surprised to find that I was one of the last prospective students there--a lot of the grad students stuck around longer than us. Perhaps it was because we were just tired, or because we were eager to get back to our nice hotel (I highly recommend staying at the Hotel Durant if you're ever in Berkeley).

On Saturday, we met up with a few grad students in the morning and split off into groups to go on tours of either Berkeley or San Francisco. My tour was not particularly exciting or informative, but it was kind of fun nonetheless. Later that day, I went back to campus on my own and spent some time looking around one of the labs I was interested in working in and talked to some of the grad students there.

At this point, I'm fairly confident that I'd like to go to Berkeley next year. It has the highest number (four) of groups that I feel interested in working in, it of course has excellent facilities (especially with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab right there), I really liked the feel of being on a large campus with an active student body, and I would enjoy living in Berkeley. The nagging downside to going to Berkeley is that all students, even those with their own fellowship funding (I haven't heard back on this front other than the rejection from Hertz), have to teach for three semesters. At Stanford it's two (three quarters, actually) and at Scripps it's zero. Scripps certainly impressed me and is currently second on my list, but I feel like I have more certainty with Berkeley--there are more research options that I know I'm excited about. The focus of the research at Scripps is different than what I'm used to, and it's hard to tell if my interest would hold. At Berkeley, I have similarly unfamiliar options available to me as well as those that I know well.

One other bonus at Berkeley is the chemical biology program, which is not a standalone program, but more of a track available to students in a few departments including chemistry. They take ten students per year so there's some competition to get in. But a big reason to do it as a chemistry student is that the chemical biology students do rotations (rotations tend to be uncommon in chemistry departments, but more common in biochemistry and especially biology departments). Chemistry students have to pick a lab to join after six weeks at Berkeley; chemical biology students work in three labs for ten weeks at a time and then choose in April of the first year. For someone like me who wants to spend time exploring various options, doing rotations sounds like a pretty good idea. Waiting until April to join a lab means not getting started on thesis work as quickly, but it also provides an opportunity to pick up some experience with new techniques and to make a better-informed decision. Of course, I can't bet on getting into the program, so I don't know to what extent the chemical biology program should factor into my decision. But independent of the program, I'm still excited about Berkeley.

I'm leaving for Caltech's visit weekend tomorrow, but my guess is that I will still want to go to Berkeley afterwards.

Visit 2: Stanford

As I noted in my post about Scripps, my impression before visiting Stanford was that the visit would be rushed. This turned out to be true.

I arrived at my hotel in Palo Alto late on Wednesday night and met my roommate, who it turned out had research interests similar to mine. We weren't sure if they paired us up like that on purpose or if it was just a coincidence. We went to bed and the next morning all of the prospectives walked 10 minutes over to breakfast on campus. We were given a slideshow presentation about the program by Steven Boxer, who focused on how cooperative the atmosphere was in the department, in terms of collaboration between researchers in the traditional disciplines of chemistry, and on how beautiful the campus and surrounding areas were.

Next we headed off to meetings with faculty members. One of the faculty I met with was Matt Kanan, who is a brand-new professor starting his lab at Stanford this summer (he seemed to be meeting with a lot of students). I won't describe the specifics of his proposed research, but he was interested in developing new approaches to address ongoing problems in chemistry which others seem to address through a brute force method (for example: he wants to develop a way of enhancing selectivity in catalytic transformations that does not just rely on futzing with bulky ligands, in what could be a very high-impact procedure if it works).

At lunch I talked to a grad student in a computational group and one in a lab I had thought I was interested in working in. Neither of them would say anything at all negative about anything. This was something that frustrated me throughout my grad school visits: it's more difficult to make comparisons when all that comes out of people's mouths is praise for their professors, departments, and schools.

Next, we split up into small groups for tours of the campus led by grad students. My tour guide was a first-year student, relatively blunt and uninhibited, until I asked him if there was anyone in the department he would not suggest working for, a question which he would not answer.

We had a few more afternoon faculty meetings, which two of the professors could not show up to--which I took to some extent to be an indication of a lack of devotion to their students. As the afternoon wore on, I realized that I definitely did not want to go to Stanford. The biggest factor was meeting with faculty (or, in two cases, their student representatives), and realizing that while I was interested in some of the work that came out of their groups, I was not interested in doing the research. This disconnect was largely my own fault for having an incorrect impression of what the grad students did on a daily basis (or not having thought about it as much as I should have). I came into Stanford thinking there were four professors I would've liked to work for; I left with that number at two, one of whom wasn't around to meet me.

In the evening there was a poster session where I talked to a few grad students from the two labs I was still interested in. Perhaps it was the particular students I talked to, but the grad students at Stanford seemed to work less than I would have expected. I received many answers around 50 hours per week. There was supposed to be a bus to take us back to our hotel for dinner, but one of the biosciences programs was also hosting visiting students that day, and had taken all of the buses. So we walked over to our hotel and then to dinner with some graduate students and professors. Afterward, we went to a bar; I spent most of my time there talking to a Berkeley undergrad about her impressions of the professors she'd met with, and ones at Berkeley who I'm interested in working with. I headed back early since I needed to get up early the following day to take the bus to Berkeley.

Finally, a decision from Harvard

For the past month or so, I've been wondering about my applications to Harvard's Chemistry and Chemical Biology program and MIT's chemistry program. I sent in all of my graduate applications in December (I believe the Harvard application went out second, during the first week of December) and had heard back from four of the six schools between the end of December and mid-January. I went on graduate school visits without having heard back from Harvard and MIT, figured the letter stating their decisions might have gotten lost in the mail, and decided that I would soon call the departments to find out.

Well, it turns out Harvard just took a long time to reject me. The letter was waiting for me in the mail when I got back from my visits a couple of days ago. Still no word about MIT.

I'll be posting about my visits to Stanford and Berkeley soon.

Visit 1: TSRI

For the last few days I was in La Jolla (a bit north of San Diego) visiting the Scripps Research Institute. The visit weekend at Scripps is unique in comparison to those at other chemistry departments in that it is an interview weekend, whereas other departments only invite admitted students to visit. I found out while there, though, that over 90% of the interviewees would be granted admission; we were told that the rare students not granted admission were those whose behavior made it clear that they were not interested in doing graduate-level research. The graduate program there is relatively new, having been established about twenty years ago. The focus of the program is on the interface between chemistry and biology (I believe Scripps lays claim to the term and initial practice of "chemical biology"), although there are some chemists who don't do anything immediately relevant to biology (the synthetic organic chemists) and biologists on the other end of the spectrum, whatever that entails.

On Thursday afternoon, a graduate student picked me up at the airport and drove me to the Torrey Pines Hilton, which is a very nice hotel about half a mile from Scripps. My roommate arrived shortly after me. I had been a little apprehensive about meeting my roommate--what if we just didn't click?--but he was actually a really friendly guy and we got along well.

Thursday night we went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in La Jolla where we had a buffet-style dinner with our graduate student liaisons. I met a few other prospective students and a few of the undergrads, but didn't really get much of a sense for Scripps out of my interactions with them. We went to bed early because Friday would be a long day.

On Friday morning, the prospective students all walked over to Scripps together. On the way, I talked to a guy who had worked in an immunology lab at Scripps over the summer and had really enjoyed it. He seemed pretty much set on going there in the fall. Once we got there, they assembled us all together, fed us breakfast, and gave us a short presentation on the program. Scripps is unique among the graduate programs I'm considering in that the focus is entirely on research. There are no undergraduate students, so the graduate students don't have to spend any time as teaching assistants (although, for those who want to, there is the option to do so at UCSD). Scripps has about 200 faculty members, 114 of whom are potentially open to taking students. In line with the focus on research, classes don't seem to matter so much. The requirements seem quite flexible: students must take four classes for a grade and two elective classes pass/fail, an option intended to encourage students to explore areas they don't know much about. Additionally, there is very little bureaucracy--faculty meetings are rare and the graduate program is administered by one or two people. After the presentation, all 40-50 of the students present introduced themselves, gave a one-sentence description of what they had worked on as undergrads (everyone had conducted some sort of research), and said why they were interested in attending Scripps. Most of the answers to the latter prompt were along the lines of, "I'm interested in the chemistry-biology interface" or "I'm interested in the research" which got old rather quickly. I wasn't sure if the genericness of the responses arose from a lack of meaningful knowledge about Scripps or from time constraints; further discussions with the students that I met over the weekend suggested to me that it was both.

Immediately after that, we went to our meetings with the faculty. Before visiting, I had sent in a list of eight faculty members I was interested in meeting with. One was out of town; one, I was told, would not be a good match for my interests; and one did not end up on my schedule even though he met with other students on the same day. I remain puzzled by these last two occurrences; my only explanation is that they did not want to meet with me, which seems a bit odd given that the purpose of the weekend, from the faculty's end, was to recruit students.

One or two other students were present at most of my meetings. At most of these meetings, we listened and asked a few questions while the professors did most of the talking about a couple of current projects in their labs. This was a nice format for interaction with the professors who had been added to my schedule at the last minute and whose research I was unfamiliar with: it provided me with a snapshot of their research which I easily understood. It was very interesting to see these professors discuss the motivations for their research in informal terms--I felt like I had access to a side of these professors that I would not see if I read their papers or listened to their talks.

I met with several professors who were interested not in racing to achieve the next big result, but rather in changing how science was done in their fields. One professor, Reza Ghadiri, particularly struck me in this regard: he approaches experiments with an emphasis on studying information in biology on different scales, from storage in small molecules to signaling in cellular networks. Rather than seeking new approaches to studying or tackling small, isolated problems, he wants to control biological information in a way that opens up new ways to address questions in biology.

Halfway through the meetings, we had a round-table lunch. There were four other students and three faculty members sitting at my table. It was interesting to see the faculty interacting beforehand and after--they seemed to have a bit more camaraderie and awareness of each others' students and research than I am accustomed to seeing; but perhaps it's just that I rarely interact with more than one chemistry professor at a time.

On Saturday, we went out in small groups with chemistry faculty members; the professor I was with drove a few of us around La Jolla and we went out for breakfast. We spent the afternoon with graduate students and then went to a party where there were more prospectives and graduate students.

My biggest regret is that I did not get a chance to walk through the labs or see much of the equipment. I heard from professors, post-docs, and grad students that they had access to everything they wanted and that the labs were very well equipped, but I never really saw that. I briefly walked through a few labs to get to professors' offices for my appointment, but that was it. A little bit of time set aside specifically for lab tours would have been nice.

One notable downside to Scripps is that many professors do not seem to spend much time with their students. I heard that a lot of them spend time consulting and traveling, resulting in less face time. Most of the graduate students tried to put a positive spin on this, telling me that Scripps students tend to be independent, capable of getting what they want, etc. Also troubling was that both professors and students described Scripps students as risk-takers. Working on high-risk, high-impact projects is fine, but I didn't get much of a sense for what happens when it doesn't work out; having absent faculty doesn't seem like it would be much help (unless they're the type to continue pushing their students down a path that clearly isn't going to work).

I was glad that the visit lasted a couple of days. The Stanford and Berkeley visits that I'm headed for later this week seem rushed in comparison (Stanford's is one day; Berkeley's is one plus time with grad students in San Francisco). I appreciated visiting with professors on Friday, but my time spent with graduate students on Saturday gave me a much better handle on the environment at Scripps.

Health insurance

My partner and I (who, for the sake of clarity, I will refer to with feminine pronouns throughout this post and future posts on the blog) are planning on living together while I'm in graduate school, and might get married within the next couple of years, depending on where we live. She currently has health insurance through her parents, but will no longer be eligible for it once she turns 23 later this year. She is self-employed, so she will probably have to buy health insurance at an expensive individual rate (at least a few hundred dollars per month for a reasonable plan). The other option would be to live in a place like Massachusetts or San Francisco, both of which subsidize health insurance for low-income residents; however, none of the places we are considering living (San Diego/La Jolla, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Pasadena) have such programs in place, to our knowledge.

If I were employed at a company, getting health insurance for a spouse would be straightforward--we would be able to sign up for the family plan offered by my employer. But it seems that grad student benefits aren't so nice. Today, my partner called the health centers at Scripps, Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech to find out whether they offer health benefits to spouses or partners of graduate students.

To my surprise, Scripps has hands-down the best spousal coverage: $100 per month for medical insurance, and $18 per month for dental. This is an excellent rate.

Berkeley is apparently working on implementing spousal coverage but for now nothing is in place. She was told that the option might exist a year from now.

Stanford does not offer health plan for spouses/dependents.

Caltech offers a more expensive option for spouses and same-sex domestic partners: $1243 per insurance term (each insurance term lasts four months), plus a $75 charge to access the health center (it's unclear to me if this is a one-time fee or a once-per-term fee).

So it looks like if I do not end up at Scripps it will be somewhat difficult to get reasonably-priced health insurance.

Pre grad school visits

Over the last month and a half I received responses from most of the grad schools I applied to: I was accepted to the chemistry departments at Berkeley, Stanford, and Caltech, and have been invited out to Scripps for an interview. The professor at Scripps who called me to share the news said that "interview weekend" was a formality and that I would almost certainly be admitted. I'm not sure if this is true for all of the interviewees or if some of us will be denied admission after we visit. My instinct is that it's the latter because the Scripps professor tried to sell me on the school, indicating that he will probably put in a good word for me when it comes time to formally extend admission offers. However, not having had much contact with professors at the other schools I was admitted to, I don't know to what extent selling a prospective student on the department is standard practice (my only other data point is MIT's chemistry department, where I heard from a friend that the prospective students were taken out for a very fancy meal in Boston's north end last year).

I still have not received word from Harvard and MIT, which are the other schools I applied to; however, as is probably obvious from the list of schools I applied to, I'm eager to be in California. At this point, it's unlikely that I would want to go to Harvard anyway; I recently heard that the professor who I was most interested in working with there is no longer taking graduate students. And of all the schools I applied to, I hear the worst things about MIT in terms of work hours and grad student morale (although there are a couple people I'd be interested in working for there, who may not have reputations as slavedrivers).

For now, I'm not really sure what to expect from all of the meetings I'll be having with professors at these schools. I'm meeting with around six professors / research groups at each school, and in most cases that number is higher than the number of groups I'm truly interested in working in. So, I'll be meeting with people whose research I don't know much about. I'm sure these interactions won't be tests of my knowledge of their research programs, but it seems like at least a familiarity is in order. I've read recent papers of the groups I'm most interested in working in, but for the lowest professors on my list, it's hard to motivate myself to find out more about their research when I could instead be spending my time reading about something I'm more interested in.

Hertz Fellowship Interview

Shortly after submitting my application for the Hertz Foundation Fellowship, I found out that I'd been selected for a first-round interview (of the approximately 800 applicants, 200 are chosen for a first-round interview, 50 for a second-round interview, and 15 for the award). I had heard the interview would be technical in nature and that it wasn't really possible to prepare for. I was worried that "technical" meant that I would be asked to apply Green's theorem and do problems on special relativity, so I tried to brush up a bit on math, physics, and electronics. The questions turned out to be much more general than I expected.

On the day of my interview, I put on my nicest clothes and biked over to the hotel I'd been told to go to. There were clearly a lot of interviews going on that day--when I showed up, several other students were milling around in the lobby waiting to be interviewed at the same time that I would be. I'd found out when I called the Foundation a few days earlier that one of my interviewers would be a member of the board of directors of the Foundation; my other interviewer would be a recent Hertz fellow (I was given their specific names, and looked them up beforehand; more on this below). I was quite intimidated and nervous. When the time came, I went up to what appeared to be my interviewer's hotel room (I had assumed the interview would be held in a conference room or something).

Both of my interviewers tried to come off as being "on my side" in the sense that they were very friendly and did not make me squirm (for too long) when they asked questions I couldn't answer. The point of the interview is to get at how an applicant thinks, so they don't like silence. At several points when I was trying to reason through something, my interviewers told me that I needed to think out loud and that silence would be counted against me (or something along those lines). I don't remember all of the questions they asked--in fact, I think I disproportionately remember the ones I had trouble with, since I spent more time on those--but here are the ones I remember. (At the end of the interview, I explicitly asked my interviewers if I could write about / share these questions and they said I could and claimed that they do not re-use questions.)

1. I was asked a seemingly simple question that I could not answer: If I weigh myself on three consecutive days, assuming that my weight fluctuates a little bit and does not stay the same, what is the chance that my weight on the 2nd day is between what it is on the 1st and 3rd days? I told them I thought the answer was 1/2 and why I thought this, and they told me I was incorrect. I tried thinking about it more and clearly wasn't getting anywhere, and they said we could come back to it later. Thankfully, we never did (this was how they addressed most of the questions I got stuck on--they said we'd move on to something else temporarily, but we never returned). I'm not sure if the point was to get me to confirm that my weight measurements were normally distributed, or something.

2. If I had an extremely sensitive scale and a mass, what factors would affect the weight registered on the scale? This question was pretty straightforward; I listed off things such as altitude, air pressure, etc. They prodded me towards a major one that I was missing (the relative location of the moon), and we moved on.

3. They moved on to more chemistry related stuff at this point. They asked me a few factual questions about how resonance works, and asked me if I could identify who first proposed the structure of benzene. They then asked me whether the resonance stabilization in benzene vs. static 1,3,5-cyclohexatriene can be predicted from ab initio calculations; I replied that it was easy to do with a pencil, paper, and MO theory.

4. Next, I got pretty stuck on a question that should have been much easier: If I have a cup of ice water, when the ice melts, will the level of the water go up, down, or stay the same? My initial response was that it would go down, assuming that the volume of ice sticking out above the surface was negligible. It was quickly pointed out to me that that was a faulty assumption. After at least five minutes of making an idiot of myself and after they reminded me about Archimedes's principle, I arrived at the answer. A friend of mine later pointed out to me that sea levels rising due to global warming was a good analogy for this. That would have been a perfect response, demonstrating the type of thinking that (I believe) they are looking for in these interviews.

5. I was asked a few questions about electrochemistry, which is an area where I have a real dearth of knowledge. I was asked to explain what happens to a battery when it is cooled, which went well. Then I was asked how a lead acid battery works; I had no clue. They talked me through that one.

6. Continuing in the battery vein, they asked me why lead acid batteries had been used in cars for such a long time. I thought they were looking for a definite answer to this and I wasn't sure what it was. I realized (a little too late, perhaps) that they were using this question to gauge my ability to talk about technical issues, and they were happy to hear my speculation if I presented it confidently and could back it up with solid reasoning. I mentioned hydrogen storage offhand and then they asked me about the state of the field, current barriers to adoption of hydrogen as a fuel, etc. So here our interaction was more of a conversation--they really just went off what I was saying, and if I had started talking about something I didn't know about, they would have found out very quickly.

7. Next, they asked me how a specific spectroscopic method employed in chemistry works. They would not have brought this up with most people, but it was directly related to something in my application. I stumbled a bit at first, since it had been a while since I thought about it, but this went okay.

8. Finally, I was asked some conversational questions about my intended field of study in graduate school. They didn't seem to have much knowledge of the field of chemistry that I want to work in, and asked me some basic technical questions about it (their questions were along the lines of asking a natural products chemist what was left to do aside from make increasingly-complex molecules, or asking a medicinal chemist about the drug design process), asked me to discuss its importance, why I was interested in it, etc.

9. They asked me if I had any questions and I told them I was planning on writing about my experience and asked if it was okay to share the questions they asked. They said they couldn't see why not. I would have asked another question or two, but our hour was up and it was time to part ways.

One thing that I realized during the interview was that while my interviewers had read my application, they did not remember it very well, since they had undoubtedly read dozens of applications. They had taken a few notes on it, jotting down a few key phrases to ask me about during the interview. I had Googled my interviewers beforehand and neither seemed to have formal training in chemistry, but I was surprised by the depth of the chemistry knowledge of the younger interviewer, given that he was a graduate student in computer science.

Along these lines, the application allows them to make the first cut, but once you're at the interview stage, it seems like the application is pretty much irrelevant. I got the sense that they would be deciding whether I advanced to the next round based entirely on my performance at the interview.

I think I was a little too flustered during the interview and made several errors because I felt pressure and stress. But I do now have a good sense of what they were looking for. They rushed through the questions that I answered correctly and the subjects that I knew well. The point of the interview was to see how I thought about problems, so when I didn't know the answers to their questions, my responses were far more instructive to them.

After the interview, I expected that I would not make it to the second round; today, I received an email saying I had not been chosen for further consideration. There's always next year, if I can actually muster the motivation to apply again.

Fellowship applications

Over the last few months, I applied for the three big science fellowships, offered by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Hertz Foundation. I had repeatedly heard about the NSF fellowship as an undergrad, but was unfamiliar with the other two until I stumbled across an excellent article by Philip Guo detailing these fellowships--the motivations that each organization has for offering them, how to approach the essays, etc.

The application for the Hertz fellowship was the first graduate school related application that I filled out, so I spent a lot of time preparing the essays for it. In addition to providing a resume, I had to write four essays:
1. How did you choose your field and what are your primary expectations of your future career?
2. How do your proposed field of study and career constitute an application of the physical sciences or engineering?
3. What are the considerations involved in your choice of graduate school?
4. Include here information about your favored extracurricular and leisure time activities since your graduation from high school.

I was able to easily recycle essay 1 from my Hertz application into my NSF application, which asked for a statement on my previous research and preparation for grad school; a research proposal; and a personal statement. In talking to graduate students and looking around online, I received conflicting advice about the research proposal. One graduate student (who did not receive the fellowship) was convinced that non-chemists might be evaluating my application, and so I should not make the proposal overly technical. Others indicated that I should write the proposal using language similar to what would be found in a journal article. My uncertainty about what level to write at, in addition to my lack of ideas on what to write about, left me feeling very stressed about the research proposal. But I found that once I sat down to do it, it was easy to bang out in a day.

The DoD application was due on Jan. 5, which ended up being after all of my grad school application deadlines. Armed with my collection of essays from five graduate school applications and the Hertz and NSF applications, I was able to fill out the DoD application in an afternoon.

Some general advice:

Start thinking about the whole process by early September. The Hertz and NSF deadlines are quite early and will sneak up on you, especially if you're in school. This happened to me and I should have given my recommenders more notice--it took me a while to decide whether applying for the Hertz was even worth the trouble (about 15 fellowships are awarded to a self-selecting pool of 800 applicants, so approximately 2% of applicants receive the fellowship), and by the time I decided to apply, only three weeks remained until the deadline.

Stay organized with a spreadsheet or some other list detailing whether particular documents have been sent to each fellowship organization / school. I ran into some confusion over who I'd sent my transcripts to, because the process involves submitting a form that I never made a copy of. You may think you'll remember that you sent a transcript to DoD three months ahead of the deadline, but by the time late December rolls around, you may no longer be so sure.

Don't get too stressed out about the whole process. When I was worried about my NSF proposal, I had to remind myself that nothing bad would happen if I didn't receive a fellowship--as a chemistry student, I'd still be fortunate enough to receive a stipend and have my tuition covered by the department.