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.