I was recently aimlessly browsing Wikipedia and came upon the entry for E.J. Corey. In case you’re unfamiliar with Corey, he is a professor at Harvard and probably the most well-known living organic chemist, largely because his lab has completed many syntheses of complex natural products and has developed a number of widely-used reactions. But there’s also some notoriety associated with his name, and in the insular world of academic chemistry, it’s difficult to remain ignorant of the gossip surrounding professors as famous as Corey. In 1998, a graduate student in the Corey lab named Jason Altom committed suicide, famously blaming Corey in one of the notes he left. I don't want to focus on the suicide here, though, since it's a far-removed event that I have no insight on.
I was reading about Altom’s suicide and came across this New York Times Magazine article, which I think does a stellar job of painting a portrait of the pressures that chemistry graduate students at top institutions feel. I would highly recommend reading it if you are thinking about a graduate program in chemistry. I want to excerpt one passage from the article that I found particularly illustrative:
“In some labs, [the graduate students] even resorted to little tricks to impress the lab chief. The extra jacket on a hook in the lab, so it looked as if you were around even if you'd gone home. Having someone open your lab door and turn on the lights in the morning, so it looked as if you were already in. Putting a stirrer -- a magnetic object that stirs liquids together -- in a flask, so it would look as if you had a reaction going on. One student told me he never left a note to a fellow student open on the desk, because it might suggest you weren't around; notes were folded over, with an X on top, to indicate there was a message within.”
I couldn’t believe this passage when I first read it. Worrying about whether someone will look for my jacket if I’m not at my desk? Wasting time and mental energy setting up a fake experiment in case someone comes by? These things would never have occurred to me, and, I believe, ought to serve as an indictment of the pressures that some grad students are under to spend all of their time in lab. I would be shocked to find out that anyone in my lab--or even in most of the labs in the chemistry department at Berkeley--was resorting to faking long hours to impress a research adviser. But I say “most” because the working environment of labs varies widely, and is often worse in small labs where it’s easier for advisers to keep tabs on their students. When I visited The Scripps Research Institute, one of the graduate students I met complained incessantly about her adviser: this adviser, a relatively young faculty member with a lab of about ten people, would check in on his students’ progress several times a day and even go through their lab notebooks when they weren’t around to check up on their productivity. In labs like these, I can imagine why students would feel that they needed to resort to the types of tricks described in the article to gain favor with a professor. I would never join a lab that had this type of culture. Most of the labs at Berkeley aren’t like this, I suspect, in part because between teaching obligations and larger lab sizes, professors at Berkeley are too busy to spend their time taking attendance.
But while overbearing advisers are often a problem, each situation is unique. The pressure that graduate students feel to work long hours is often self-generated--if I just put in an extra hour every day, I'll be able to publish an extra paper before I graduate--or is often a product of pressure applied by other students in the lab--peers commenting that a student always gets in late or chats with labmates too much. This is yet another reason to thoroughly do your homework before joining a lab.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Graduate student work habits
From what I've seen over the past year, there are three categories that graduate students fall into in terms of their work habits:
Most graduate students have committed to making a lifestyle out of being a graduate student. They've decided that they will spend most of their day on campus and then will often hang out with fellow graduate students at night. They identify foremost as graduate students and do all of the things that go along with that. But once they've decided that they are supposed to be on campus ten to twelve hours a day, their productivity drops (this category includes me, and I'm not making a value judgment here--just an observation). They take long lunch breaks, they go to the gym, or they go out for a drink in the middle of the day. After leaving campus, they might go hang out with someone from their year who works in a different research group. I would argue that these people are living a balanced life within graduate school. They work a fair amount, and they don't stress out too much because they build breaks into their work day. Their social lives are centered around the chemistry department.
Next, there are the students who work a shorter day and don't socialize as much. These students are generally quite efficient about their work and don't structure their social life around graduate school. Often it's because they have a significant other who works more normal hours who they want to get home to. They are for the most part pretty normal grad students to be around, but they don't really go out drinking or get an afternoon snack with you--they tend to be more focused on getting their work done and going home at a reasonable hour. This also describes many postdocs, who are generally more likely than graduate students to have moved on to this phase of their lives. Again, I think these people live a balanced life--they spend a good amount of their time working, but they also have other personal obligations to tend to.
Third, and pretty rare, are the workaholic grad students. These people consistently work eighty or ninety hour weeks and are constantly trying to get something done--no hour-long lunch breaks, no going to the gym, no watching Youtube videos while bringing something into the glovebox. These people are more intense about graduate school, often have loftier career goals, and are generally either spectacular successes or failures. Some of them burn out from pushing themselves too hard and failing to live up to their high expectations. Others produce a lot of results, graduate a year early, and land a coveted postdoctoral fellowship. But I would argue that they do not lead balanced lives--they push themselves to work harder than most people are capable of handling. They don't seem to be capable of relaxing. They don't have hobbies. They are unaware of what else is going on in the world, and in general are less interesting people because of their tendency to hyperfocus on chemistry (OK, now I'm judging). The worst are the ones who get cranky, and whose attitude spills over into their relations with other people in the lab.
Despite the fact that most graduate students work quite a bit, most of them wish they were getting more done. Many graduate students feel guilty because they fall into the first category of student and think they should be more productive; or they fall into the second category and think they could be working an extra hour every day. But I think these people underestimate the balance brought by having other things to do--whether that's coffee breaks with labmates or getting home in time for dinner with a spouse--and delude themselves into thinking they should be more like the third category of students. I would like to think that the people in the first and second categories have set their schedules and efficiency according to what will actually make them happiest--and if that's so, that's exactly where they should stay.
Of course, I haven't even touched the issues of how lab dynamics and research advisers pressure people into working. For a classic example of that, see this post at Chemistry Blog.
Most graduate students have committed to making a lifestyle out of being a graduate student. They've decided that they will spend most of their day on campus and then will often hang out with fellow graduate students at night. They identify foremost as graduate students and do all of the things that go along with that. But once they've decided that they are supposed to be on campus ten to twelve hours a day, their productivity drops (this category includes me, and I'm not making a value judgment here--just an observation). They take long lunch breaks, they go to the gym, or they go out for a drink in the middle of the day. After leaving campus, they might go hang out with someone from their year who works in a different research group. I would argue that these people are living a balanced life within graduate school. They work a fair amount, and they don't stress out too much because they build breaks into their work day. Their social lives are centered around the chemistry department.
Next, there are the students who work a shorter day and don't socialize as much. These students are generally quite efficient about their work and don't structure their social life around graduate school. Often it's because they have a significant other who works more normal hours who they want to get home to. They are for the most part pretty normal grad students to be around, but they don't really go out drinking or get an afternoon snack with you--they tend to be more focused on getting their work done and going home at a reasonable hour. This also describes many postdocs, who are generally more likely than graduate students to have moved on to this phase of their lives. Again, I think these people live a balanced life--they spend a good amount of their time working, but they also have other personal obligations to tend to.
Third, and pretty rare, are the workaholic grad students. These people consistently work eighty or ninety hour weeks and are constantly trying to get something done--no hour-long lunch breaks, no going to the gym, no watching Youtube videos while bringing something into the glovebox. These people are more intense about graduate school, often have loftier career goals, and are generally either spectacular successes or failures. Some of them burn out from pushing themselves too hard and failing to live up to their high expectations. Others produce a lot of results, graduate a year early, and land a coveted postdoctoral fellowship. But I would argue that they do not lead balanced lives--they push themselves to work harder than most people are capable of handling. They don't seem to be capable of relaxing. They don't have hobbies. They are unaware of what else is going on in the world, and in general are less interesting people because of their tendency to hyperfocus on chemistry (OK, now I'm judging). The worst are the ones who get cranky, and whose attitude spills over into their relations with other people in the lab.
Despite the fact that most graduate students work quite a bit, most of them wish they were getting more done. Many graduate students feel guilty because they fall into the first category of student and think they should be more productive; or they fall into the second category and think they could be working an extra hour every day. But I think these people underestimate the balance brought by having other things to do--whether that's coffee breaks with labmates or getting home in time for dinner with a spouse--and delude themselves into thinking they should be more like the third category of students. I would like to think that the people in the first and second categories have set their schedules and efficiency according to what will actually make them happiest--and if that's so, that's exactly where they should stay.
Of course, I haven't even touched the issues of how lab dynamics and research advisers pressure people into working. For a classic example of that, see this post at Chemistry Blog.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Bad group meetings
In my brief time as a chemistry student, I've seen two types of group meetings. In one, many people in the group describe what they've been working on for the past couple of weeks on a chalkboard. Most groups in the Berkeley chemistry department are large enough that they do the more formal style of group meeting: a different person in the group will give a hour-long talk with slides every week. Probably the most awkward situation I've been in in graduate school has been the bad formal group meeting.
Many people in graduate school worry about not getting enough done on their projects. Even though people in the "synthetic" groups (at Berkeley, this term doesn't mean solely natural products or inorganic synthesis, but rather is a catch-all for the non-physical half of the department) work a fair amount--60 hours is probably typical in an average week--there's always this worry about not having enough done. I think the graduate students would be happier if they could turn this thought process off--it just drives them to work harder and harder and to never be satisfied. Everyone goes through unproductive periods, but most students tend to make reasonable progress despite their worrying otherwise. Occasionally, though, people really haven't been putting in the time--or have been using their time poorly--and it shows. If a group meeting normally runs sixty minutes and you only have enough results to talk for thirty, it's kind of obvious. So to lengthen their talks, people in such a situation generally pad it--usually with a combination of excessive background information and planned experiments. These things are good to include in a talk to a reasonable extent, but when you spend three quarters of your time talking about things you haven't done, everyone realizes what's going on.
Another thing that can ruin a group meeting is a lack of peripheral knowledge. Some students work on their projects passionately and devotedly, but myopically. This is especially true when the goal of a project is very specific--for example, "synthesize molecule X." In such cases, I've seen students (this described me as an undergraduate, as well) map out a plan of how to accomplish their goal and then follow it stubbornly. But they don't spend enough time reading the relevant literature to be able to contextualize their project well: what larger questions do they want to answer? How will the knowledge gained from this project complement the body of knowledge in the field? Most importantly in terms of accomplishing well-defined goals, what recent discoveries support, refute, or complicate the evidence that the plan sketched out at the outset is an appropriate way to pursue the goals of the project? In a total synthesis project, this might involve another group publishing a method to perform a key transformation that would normally take several steps to complete. In a biochemical context, it might involve the discovery of a new enzyme in the pathway under study. Questions related to these types of discoveries naturally come up at a group meeting, and it shakes my confidence in what someone is telling me if I ask a pretty basic question and I get an "I don't know" or, worse, if their response has to be corrected by someone else in the audience.
From what I've seen and heard, most advisers are polite enough not to call someone out on a poor group meeting. In the bad group meetings I've been to (I've seen one that was awful and another that was kind of bad), the adviser tends not to ask many questions and sort of plows through the group meeting in an attempt to get it over with. Of course, I have no idea what happens in private later on.
Many people in graduate school worry about not getting enough done on their projects. Even though people in the "synthetic" groups (at Berkeley, this term doesn't mean solely natural products or inorganic synthesis, but rather is a catch-all for the non-physical half of the department) work a fair amount--60 hours is probably typical in an average week--there's always this worry about not having enough done. I think the graduate students would be happier if they could turn this thought process off--it just drives them to work harder and harder and to never be satisfied. Everyone goes through unproductive periods, but most students tend to make reasonable progress despite their worrying otherwise. Occasionally, though, people really haven't been putting in the time--or have been using their time poorly--and it shows. If a group meeting normally runs sixty minutes and you only have enough results to talk for thirty, it's kind of obvious. So to lengthen their talks, people in such a situation generally pad it--usually with a combination of excessive background information and planned experiments. These things are good to include in a talk to a reasonable extent, but when you spend three quarters of your time talking about things you haven't done, everyone realizes what's going on.
Another thing that can ruin a group meeting is a lack of peripheral knowledge. Some students work on their projects passionately and devotedly, but myopically. This is especially true when the goal of a project is very specific--for example, "synthesize molecule X." In such cases, I've seen students (this described me as an undergraduate, as well) map out a plan of how to accomplish their goal and then follow it stubbornly. But they don't spend enough time reading the relevant literature to be able to contextualize their project well: what larger questions do they want to answer? How will the knowledge gained from this project complement the body of knowledge in the field? Most importantly in terms of accomplishing well-defined goals, what recent discoveries support, refute, or complicate the evidence that the plan sketched out at the outset is an appropriate way to pursue the goals of the project? In a total synthesis project, this might involve another group publishing a method to perform a key transformation that would normally take several steps to complete. In a biochemical context, it might involve the discovery of a new enzyme in the pathway under study. Questions related to these types of discoveries naturally come up at a group meeting, and it shakes my confidence in what someone is telling me if I ask a pretty basic question and I get an "I don't know" or, worse, if their response has to be corrected by someone else in the audience.
From what I've seen and heard, most advisers are polite enough not to call someone out on a poor group meeting. In the bad group meetings I've been to (I've seen one that was awful and another that was kind of bad), the adviser tends not to ask many questions and sort of plows through the group meeting in an attempt to get it over with. Of course, I have no idea what happens in private later on.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Chemistry graduate school admissions
I originally started this blog with the desire to write about the process of applying for national-level fellowship funding in the sciences. In the course of preparing for my Hertz Fellowship interview last year, I searched in vain for examples of questions that might come up during the interview. That's what inspired me to start the blog. In a comment on the previous post asking about my credentials when applying for graduate school, Shawn reminded me that I had not yet addressed the topic of admissions. Based on the search engine keywords that lead people to this blog, I'd say he isn't the only prospective graduate student with questions about the application process.
Shawn asked about my grades and GRE scores, but the truth is that these things are not particularly important (for the record, I had good grades and a mediocre chemistry GRE score). In terms of their relative importance for graduate school admissions in chemistry, I (and professors whose advice I've heard about applying) would rank the relevant factors as follows:
1. Research experience
2. Recommendations
3. Rigor of coursework
4. Grades
5. Extracurricular activities
6. GRE scores
In the past, graduate programs in chemistry used to be smaller, and my impression is that the students were more likely to be chemistry nerds; now, plenty of aimless college seniors end up applying to graduate school because it's the next prudential step to take--not necessarily because they really want to be in graduate school. If you think you might want to go to graduate school, you should try doing research as an undergraduate to see if it's something you enjoy. This is the single most important thing you can to do: show the professors who are reading your application that you want to do research, and that you have an appreciation for the difficulties involved. If you're an undergrad at a research university, it should be easy enough to email a few professors or talk to your teaching assistants about working in a lab. No matter where you are, though, you can do research through the NSF's REU program, a summer internship at a chemical, pharmaceutical, or biotech company, or something else such as the Amgen Scholars program (I think industry is trickier for undergraduates interested in physical chemistry, but I've heard that it can be useful to do something that provides you with experience playing with optics and operating lasers).
It's a good idea to try working in a lab early on for several reasons: (1) you will learn things that aren't taught in classes and that are often more relevant to becoming a chemist, (2) working on a project for a long time makes it more likely that you'll be able to publish your work--an addition to graduate school and fellowship applications that really makes you stand out--and (3) you will learn about whether or not you like a particular discipline of chemistry. Classes often don't give you a good picture of this (many students like organic chemistry on paper, but don't want to be working in a hood all day). If you work somewhere for a while and don't like it, you can try working in a different type of chemistry lab, and you've saved yourself the difficulty of finding that out once you've joined a lab in graduate school. Or, if you work in several labs and don't like any of them, you'll know that graduate school in chemistry is probably a bad idea.
A fourth reason to get involved in research early on as an undergraduate ties into number two on my list above--recommendations. Working in an academic lab ought to give you some contact with a professor whose word can carry a lot of weight down the line, whether you're applying for a summer job or graduate school.
I don't think the rest of the list requires much elaboration--the main point here is that doing research as an undergraduate trumps anything else you might do. This isn't college admissions, which is largely a game of amassing credentials loosely related to what you might study. Professors are selecting a pool of people who might be their future advisees, so they want people with the best demonstrated track of research experience they can get. They don't care if you study really hard for the GRE and get 99th percentile, or if you volunteer at a hospital, or if you get an A or a B in your history class.
One professor put it to me this way: If you are a C student but you publish a paper in JACS as an undergraduate, you'll be a shoo-in at any chemistry graduate school. You'll have demonstrated that you're capable of and excited about doing graduate level research, which is really what professors are looking for.
Shawn asked about my grades and GRE scores, but the truth is that these things are not particularly important (for the record, I had good grades and a mediocre chemistry GRE score). In terms of their relative importance for graduate school admissions in chemistry, I (and professors whose advice I've heard about applying) would rank the relevant factors as follows:
1. Research experience
2. Recommendations
3. Rigor of coursework
4. Grades
5. Extracurricular activities
6. GRE scores
In the past, graduate programs in chemistry used to be smaller, and my impression is that the students were more likely to be chemistry nerds; now, plenty of aimless college seniors end up applying to graduate school because it's the next prudential step to take--not necessarily because they really want to be in graduate school. If you think you might want to go to graduate school, you should try doing research as an undergraduate to see if it's something you enjoy. This is the single most important thing you can to do: show the professors who are reading your application that you want to do research, and that you have an appreciation for the difficulties involved. If you're an undergrad at a research university, it should be easy enough to email a few professors or talk to your teaching assistants about working in a lab. No matter where you are, though, you can do research through the NSF's REU program, a summer internship at a chemical, pharmaceutical, or biotech company, or something else such as the Amgen Scholars program (I think industry is trickier for undergraduates interested in physical chemistry, but I've heard that it can be useful to do something that provides you with experience playing with optics and operating lasers).
It's a good idea to try working in a lab early on for several reasons: (1) you will learn things that aren't taught in classes and that are often more relevant to becoming a chemist, (2) working on a project for a long time makes it more likely that you'll be able to publish your work--an addition to graduate school and fellowship applications that really makes you stand out--and (3) you will learn about whether or not you like a particular discipline of chemistry. Classes often don't give you a good picture of this (many students like organic chemistry on paper, but don't want to be working in a hood all day). If you work somewhere for a while and don't like it, you can try working in a different type of chemistry lab, and you've saved yourself the difficulty of finding that out once you've joined a lab in graduate school. Or, if you work in several labs and don't like any of them, you'll know that graduate school in chemistry is probably a bad idea.
A fourth reason to get involved in research early on as an undergraduate ties into number two on my list above--recommendations. Working in an academic lab ought to give you some contact with a professor whose word can carry a lot of weight down the line, whether you're applying for a summer job or graduate school.
I don't think the rest of the list requires much elaboration--the main point here is that doing research as an undergraduate trumps anything else you might do. This isn't college admissions, which is largely a game of amassing credentials loosely related to what you might study. Professors are selecting a pool of people who might be their future advisees, so they want people with the best demonstrated track of research experience they can get. They don't care if you study really hard for the GRE and get 99th percentile, or if you volunteer at a hospital, or if you get an A or a B in your history class.
One professor put it to me this way: If you are a C student but you publish a paper in JACS as an undergraduate, you'll be a shoo-in at any chemistry graduate school. You'll have demonstrated that you're capable of and excited about doing graduate level research, which is really what professors are looking for.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Comment response
I recently received a comment on a post that asked,
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.
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.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Joining lab groups
The first year students were allowed to officially join labs about a month ago. Technically we had until the end of October to join a lab, but everyone I talked to a month ago had settled on a lab by the earliest possible date (except for the people in the chemical biology program, who don't choose their labs until May). There are probably a few wrenches thrown into the lab joining process every year, and this year was no exception:
-One tenured professor is considering moving to another school, so people were kind of iffy about joining his group. I think two or three people ended up joining his group; I'm not sure if this is fewer than normal.
-One professor, Richmond Sarpong gave his tenure talk in September. He had an offer for a senior faculty position at another school, so his group would probably have moved there if he hadn't gotten tenure. Several first year students were interested in joining his group. I know one who said he came to Berkeley because he wanted to work in the Sarpong lab and thus was going to join the lab whether that meant staying at Berkeley or not. I think the rumor that he was awarded tenure was leaked right when people had to submit their group choices, and quite a few first year students joined his group.
-I heard about a couple of popular groups that did not have enough room for all of the students who wanted to join. In one case, there were eleven students who, a week or two before the deadline, expressed strong interest in a group that only ended up taking three of them.
My own lab-joining process was slightly stressful, but things worked out in the end. I had two potential groups in mind, but really wanted to join one over the other. I was worried for a while that I would not get into the one I wanted, but a combination of being a little pushy and other people losing interest seemed to push things in my favor. One good piece of advice I received was to be straightforward about what group I wanted to join, irrespective of what the group's situation was. That is, this person told me I should not allow my expressions of interest in a group to be tempered by how full/popular a group seemed to be, because if lots of students do that, then nowhere really ends up where they want to be. I knew this on some level, but I think it was good for me to have someone reiterate this.
-One tenured professor is considering moving to another school, so people were kind of iffy about joining his group. I think two or three people ended up joining his group; I'm not sure if this is fewer than normal.
-One professor, Richmond Sarpong gave his tenure talk in September. He had an offer for a senior faculty position at another school, so his group would probably have moved there if he hadn't gotten tenure. Several first year students were interested in joining his group. I know one who said he came to Berkeley because he wanted to work in the Sarpong lab and thus was going to join the lab whether that meant staying at Berkeley or not. I think the rumor that he was awarded tenure was leaked right when people had to submit their group choices, and quite a few first year students joined his group.
-I heard about a couple of popular groups that did not have enough room for all of the students who wanted to join. In one case, there were eleven students who, a week or two before the deadline, expressed strong interest in a group that only ended up taking three of them.
My own lab-joining process was slightly stressful, but things worked out in the end. I had two potential groups in mind, but really wanted to join one over the other. I was worried for a while that I would not get into the one I wanted, but a combination of being a little pushy and other people losing interest seemed to push things in my favor. One good piece of advice I received was to be straightforward about what group I wanted to join, irrespective of what the group's situation was. That is, this person told me I should not allow my expressions of interest in a group to be tempered by how full/popular a group seemed to be, because if lots of students do that, then nowhere really ends up where they want to be. I knew this on some level, but I think it was good for me to have someone reiterate this.
Alcohol in graduate school
I've been a little surprised since getting here by the large role that alcohol plays in graduate students' lives. The chemistry department has a weekly social hour with free beer called ChemKeg, which is great--it gives me an excuse to socialize with people and allows me to easily see people who aren't in my classes. Several of our orientation events at the start of the school year had either beer or wine. Group meetings at the start of the year were always stocked with beer, making it easy to have a couple of beers most nights of the week--beer was often the only beverage. At night, grad student socialization seems to pretty much always involve going somewhere for drinks.
When I was in college, I certainly saw heavy drinking, but it wasn't as frequent. Instead of having a couple of drinks several times a week, people would concentrate their drinking into the nights when they had free time. They drank less often, but when they did, they got really drunk.
So it's unclear to me if this is a graduate school thing or a twenty-somethings thing. Grad students seem to gravitate towards alcohol, but is this true of most Americans our age? I don't interact with enough twenty-somethings outside of graduate school to be able to draw a good conclusion about this, but the ones who I do see on a regular basis don't drink very much at all.
When I was in college, I certainly saw heavy drinking, but it wasn't as frequent. Instead of having a couple of drinks several times a week, people would concentrate their drinking into the nights when they had free time. They drank less often, but when they did, they got really drunk.
So it's unclear to me if this is a graduate school thing or a twenty-somethings thing. Grad students seem to gravitate towards alcohol, but is this true of most Americans our age? I don't interact with enough twenty-somethings outside of graduate school to be able to draw a good conclusion about this, but the ones who I do see on a regular basis don't drink very much at all.
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