Decisions, decisions

I have one week to make a decision about whether to go to Scripps, Stanford, Berkeley, or Caltech. This decision will profoundly impact the next five years of my life. Of course, it doesn't have to be five years--dropping out is always an option if I'm unhappy in graduate school--but if things go according to plan, I am deciding where I will be living, which campus I will take strolls on, and, to an extent, who I want my graduate research adviser to be. The thing that makes this decision difficult is that by choosing to attend one school out of four, I have to decide that I won't be living in the other three cities (my options are La Jolla, Palo Alto, Berkeley, and Pasadena), that I won't get to explore their campuses, and that I won't be working with the various professors I've been excited about for a while. It's easy to say I'm excited about a particular place, but it's really difficult to take the rest out of the running, especially when I know that I would probably find something I'm interested in and do well at any of these schools.

I've been telling people that I'm pretty certain I'll be going to Berkeley in the fall, but I've been meaning to write about each school once more before making that final decision.

So, let's start with Scripps.

While I was there I noticed that it didn't really have a campus--it was just a collection of close-by buildings and parking lots--but I didn't make much of it at the time. After visiting Berkeley, though, I realized that I would really prefer to be on a campus. It might seem like a trivial distinction (many grad students in the physical sciences like to say things like, "I'll be spending all of my time in lab anyways, so who cares about X?") but I think being a student at Scripps would feel too much like working a job: you drive to this building and are inside all day. When you want to get lunch or take a break, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go unless you drive. Since there's no campus, there's not much going on other than biology and chemistry.

Scripps is different than what I'm used to, in terms of how the place operates and the type of research that's done there. Coming from an undergraduate chemistry program that is fairly well-represented across organic, inorganic, biological, and physical chemistry (no analytical / nuclear), it's quite a shift to imagine going to a place that's so bio-focused. I don't know if I'm ready to make that jump; given that I want options, it seems kind of limiting. I have options there in that there are over 100 faculty members that I could potentially work with as a graduate student, but many of those people are working in areas outside the purview of chemistry (a lot of the prospective students I met when I visited were interested in immunology, for example). I would not go to graduate school in a biology program without having a much better understanding of what biology research involves, both in content (what sorts of problems are biologists trying to solve, and what is addressable in the 6-7 years it takes to complete a PhD in biology?) and in day-to-day work (what sorts of techniques are used, and what is life like for a graduate student in biology?). Thus, many of the groups at Scripps are functionally off-limits to me.

Living in San Diego would be very different, and I could really go either way on it. It's hard to say no to the weather and the beaches (I'm not a beach person, but it was beautiful outside), but I imagine it would also be annoying to have to drive everywhere. When I first arrived at my hotel (about a five to ten minute walk from Scripps) the day I was visiting, I was really hungry but couldn't find anything to eat--there was nothing within walking distance.

After the day that I spent meeting the faculty at Scripps, I was pretty sure I did not want to go there. This was largely due to a mismatch of research interests between me and the faculty; while I'm sure there are many things going on there that I would be excited about, I just don't have enough of a background in biology to really appreciate a lot of it at this point. My interactions with graduate students on the second day left me viewing the place more favorably. But looking back on all of my visits, all of the graduate students talked up their schools, so I eventually learned to take graduate student praise with a grain of salt.

So, Scripps is something of an unknown in terms of how well my research interests would mesh with what's going on there, and I'm not excited about the work atmosphere there. Research-wise, I could probably find something there that I'd be happy doing, but at this point I'm just not certain about that. It's probably not a good idea to go to graduate school some place where I don't have a strong idea of what I want to do going in.

Next, Stanford:

I was seriously considering going to Stanford until I visited. I guess I just felt disappointed. Really, it just wasn't for me in terms of there being a match between my own research interests and those of the faculty there. None of the professors there is particularly interested in having me as a student. The whole visit was rushed--I didn't get a good sense of how the grad students felt about the place. And I'm not excited about living in Palo Alto. I think it's pretty easy to nix Stanford.

Caltech:

Caltech seems like a great place to do chemistry. I think I could be very happy there. My impression is that the students there work longer hours than students at other schools, but people there seemed pretty happy.

I liked the feel of a small department. Because of the greater emphasis Caltech seems to have on dividing the department into disciplines of chemistry, it felt more like a department within a department--I got the impression that there are these communities made up of five or six research groups that are pretty close (members of the community know each other, know what others are working on, and so forth).

Pasadena isn't my ideal place to live, but it seems good enough: there are things to do within biking distance, the weather is beautiful, and Caltech's campus, while quite small, seemed like enough of a campus that I'd be happy with that aspect.

If there were a couple more faculty members I wanted to work for at Caltech, there is a good chance I would go there. As it stands, I'm not really sure who I would work for if I went. There's one professor who seemed pretty interested in recruiting me, but I think her research program aligns more closely with what my interests were a year or two ago rather than what they've become. Some other aspects of the department seem a little old and entrenched, just like the adherence to subdivisions of chemistry: there seem to be numerous professors who are continuing to bang away at the same projects that have fueled their entire careers. They're still getting results and pushing forward, but somehow it seems stale to me. I have to admit that I'm more excited about doing new chemistry--showing proof-of-concept with a new technique to address an interesting problem, in a manner that ideally will present tools for others to use or influence how people approach the problems they're working on--rather than doing what I think of as old chemistry--using tried and true techniques to delve deeper into questions of interest. Some people consider some of what I think of as "new chemistry" to be flashy and over-hyped; indeed, I view several large areas of chemistry research this way (for example, to my bewilderment, the practice of attaching everything to carbon nanotubes or other nanoparticles seems to be in vogue). I may look back on how I thought about chemistry at this stage and be ashamed of my shallowness, but for now, it's what excites me. The point of this aside was that in my field of chemistry, some of my potential graduate research advisers at Caltech seem to be delving deeper into their areas of study and optimizing things rather than starting entirely new projects.

There are people I could work for at Caltech. The professor who tried hardest to recruit me would be a reasonable match, although working in that group would probably be pretty intense--lots of 70-80 hour weeks. Another professor I met with does research that I find pretty fascinating, but I didn't get a good vibe from my (brief) interactions with her, and I didn't get a chance to speak to any of the graduate students her group. One professor was out of town, but his research still interests me; and another might be good to work for, but I heard she keeps her students on a pretty short leash. So it's kind of a grab bag. No one seems ideal at Caltech, although the first guy I mentioned seems pretty good.

Finally, let's look at Berkeley:
When I visited Berkeley, I thought by lunchtime that I wanted to go there. I got along well with the grad students I had met; I loved the feeling of being on a large, active campus with a surrounding neighborhood full of restaurants and shops; and I was excited about living in Berkeley (independent of grad school considerations, if I was picking somewhere to move to, it would probably be San Francisco or Berkeley).

As the April 15 deadline to matriculate gets closer, though, I find myself less sure that I want to go there. I'm having a few nagging thoughts:
-I might not actually be as excited about working in various groups there as I once thought I was. It's hard to tell if I am actually less excited, or if this is just me getting cold feet about making a commitment to the program. I think it's just cold feet.
-I don't want to teach for three semesters. That is a long time (though the semesters spent teaching are not consecutive).
-I've heard a troubling story about one of the people I'm most interested in working for there, involving kicking someone out of her group.
-As I noted above, I'd be turning down some other great opportunities to go to Berkeley. I don't feel as sure about the decision as I wish I did.

Berkeley it is.