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.