"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.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Friday, March 27, 2009
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.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
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.
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.
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