Orientation, day 1

I went to sleep Sunday night anxious about orientation starting. Even though orientation is a pretty laid-back time, I felt like the start of orientation marked a new phase of my life. It was like when I would lie awake in bed before the first days of middle school, high school, and college. Funny that my only experiences with this are school-related; I wonder if the same would happen to me before other long-term commitments (marriage, a new job, childbirth, etc).

When I got in on Monday morning, the chair of the department briefly greeted us. He noted the similarities between now and when he entered graduate school in the early 1970s, making note of wars, budget shortfalls in science, and a lagging economy, saying that although things seem(ed) dark it was a good time to be entering graduate school. I wasn't sure if any of it was meant to come off as subtly political. He also mentioned a new study that showed that the women who had graduated from Berkeley's chemistry department in the late 1990s and early 2000s were far more successful at landing academic jobs in top universities than their counterparts from other top schools' chemistry departments. The disparity is interesting, but there seems to be no analysis of why it might exist beyond pure conjecture from interested parties (for starters, what is the size of Berkeley's female grad student population compared to those at the smaller private schools being compared to it?).

Afterward, we had about an hour and a half of downtime and then met in groups with "peer advisors," older graduate students who shared their wisdom on the school and the city. The rest of the day was time off until a reception late in the afternoon. I always have trouble with these social events during orientations--I hadn't met too many people earlier in the day, and I'm not sure how many of the first-years stuck around all afternoon or came back to campus for this reception, so the vast majority of the people there were complete strangers to me. I showed up and wandered around a bit until I bumped into someone I barely knew and we started talking. Perhaps if I'd had more of the wine I would've loosened up in no time.

In talking to a few first-years, it was interesting to see the differences in how much people knew about the department. One first-year I talked to had a stated research interest in a subfield of chemistry, but couldn't name anyone in the department whose group she was interested in. Another had started working here over the summer and knew all about the research interests and publications of the professors she might work for. It always surprises me a bit to encounter students of the former type; it leaves me wondering what their criteria were in choosing a graduate school, if not the opportunities to do the type of work they find interesting and the likelihood that they would mesh well with their graduate advisers (I think these were my most important criteria).

Overall, it was a pretty low-key first day with few events. The American Chemical Society's national meeting (the biggest chemistry conference in the country) is going on right now in Washington DC, so many professors weren't around.

Preparing for Berkeley

It's been a quiet couple of summer months, so there hasn't really been much for me to post. There were a few periods where I hadn't heard anything from Berkeley in a while and I started to get paranoid that I wasn't getting some of the emails I should have been, or things must have been getting lost in the mail, but everything has worked out okay.

I realized that people in the graduate program at Berkeley probably try on purpose not to inundate us incoming graduate students with materials and paperwork until we arrive. I just bummed around all summer, deciding to relax and have a slow couple of months. So I certainly had graduate school on my mind and was even a little impatient to get started on the days when I felt bored. But some people were much busier--they might have spent their summers working two jobs or volunteering in a developing country, and they wouldn't have had time to bother filling out pesky forms and emailing back and forth with professors and graduate students.

My summer ended up being more chemistry-free than I would have liked. I didn't have university library access, so I couldn't really read journal articles unless I asked someone who was still in school to email them or to borrow a VPN login to my school's network. I read part of "Designing the Molecular World" by Philip Ball, a book that explains the frontiers of several areas of chemistry research to non-chemists.

Since arriving in the Bay area I've just spent some time getting things in order. I got my Berkeley public library card, bought a bike, and went for a few hikes. Orientation started this week and things are somewhat busier now; more on that soon.