Comment response

I recently received a comment on a post that asked,

I was wondering if i could correspond with you through email, maybe just to find out more about your graduate life in UC Berkeley, and to ask you questions like: how's the workload like? Are you expected to work independently or do the professors provide alot of guidance? etc etc.

In order to retain my anonymity (which is important to me because I might occasionally say blunt, unflattering things about people who have a lot of influence over my time in graduate school and beyond), I won't correspond with people via email, but I'm really excited to receive comments and to respond through blog posts.

The first semester at Berkeley is the most difficult in terms of deadlines. Graduate students certainly work a lot at Berkeley, but for me it's the constant deadlines and evaluations--problem sets, quizzes, exams, grading, teaching preparation, on top of research--that stress me out. I can handle spending a lot of time in lab working towards the goals of a project, but I have difficulty with the awkward regimentation of my time that comes from having things due every couple of days. Most first year students take two classes, teach, and do research starting in October. It sounds okay, but it's a lot to juggle. Teaching is supposed to be roughly twenty hours per week, but I think it usually ends up being a little less. Classes might be ten to fifteen hours per week, and then we need to try to get research done on top of that. So I'm looking forward to a week from now, when the semester will be over and I can focus on my research.

While students take classes during their second semester, I hear that things tend to be more laid back--professors know that students want to be spending their time on research, so the classes aren't as time consuming. Additionally, the first year graduate students do not teach during their second semester, so the only thing to take away from research time is one or two easy classes.

In terms of independence, this really varies by professor. In the lab I ended up joining, my guess is that I will see my professor less than I want to--it would be nice to have a little more guidance early on, but my professor is just too busy to provide it. Professors who don't have tenure are more likely to be working in the lab and to know what's going on day to day, because they're working beside you all day. So there's certainly an opportunity in those types of labs to receive a lot of guidance, but it comes at the cost of a lack of privacy--if you think something is a good idea and your professor doesn't, it's more difficult to do it on the side. Additionally, the workload in those labs just tends to be higher--70 or 80 hour weeks are the norm. Some tenured professors are also good about staying in touch, though; I have a friend in the Chemical Biology program (where students do rotations) who worked in a lab where she had a weekly 30-minute meeting with the (tenured) professor. The older professors can be a little more checked out; you might see less of them because they're spending their time on something other than chemistry.

In general, though, I've been impressed by the independence exhibited by my fellow first year students. I assumed there was going to be more hand-holding required as people got into doing research, but I think for the most part people understand that research, not class, is what graduate school is about, and they are impressively committed to making progress on their research projects.