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.