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.