Group meetings and advising styles

In Berkeley's chemistry program, the first-year students are strongly encouraged to have settled on a research group to join by six weeks into the semester. With that soft deadline rapidly approaching, attendance at group meetings is high. Several that I've been to have been standing-room-only, or have had to be moved to a bigger room to accommodate the expected crowd--at some meetings, dozens of first-year students have shown up for meetings of groups that are 15-20 people in size. Ultimately, probably about two people will probably join a group of that size in a given year, so I did not expect that there would be such high attendance at the group meetings.

It's interesting to see how my pre-conceived notions affect my perceptions of what's going on at a given meeting. For example, Professor A is known in the department to be pretty inaccessible and is a (personable, friendly) bigshot with a large research group. Professor B has a smaller research group and is not as well-known. I went to both group meetings this week and observed a similar dynamic: both Professors A and B didn't seem to know much about what their students were presenting on. They asked basic questions that seemed to indicate they hadn't spent much time thinking about these projects. When Professor A did this as a post-doc was presenting, I thought, of course he doesn't know what people in his lab are doing--I've heard he's hard to reach and has such a large group that it's hard for him to keep up on what's going on in the lab. When Professor B exhibited similar behavior with a senior graduate student, however, I caught myself thinking, it's great that Professor B gives his students so much space! It looks like they really have the freedom to do what they want. It must be because he trusts his students to work independently, and these students seem to have cultivated that skill well.

Really, they were doing something very similar--asking questions that they probably would have asked before or thought about had they spent time discussing their students' projects with them--but I assigned completely different motives. Really, the reasons for their apparent distance are complex but encompass both of these motives: both professors are busy, and both have observed that their students--at least late in their graduate careers--will work well and produce interesting results without having their hands held.

I've heard that Professor A meets with his students when they first join the lab to make sure things are on track, and then pretty much disappears for a couple years. During this time, the students are pretty dependent on other graduate students and post-docs for advice; meetings with Professor A are only held to discuss big new ideas or a shift in direction because things aren't working out. But once his students have been around for several years, Professor A actually talks to them more than he used to because by then they have enough experience that he trusts their intuition about their science and what ideas would be good to pursue. This model seems to work well for Professor A, but I am a little wary of entering a research group where I don't have access to the "big idea" expertise that a professor has when I want it. Ideally, my research adviser will give me all the room I want, but also be there to talk when I want to discuss the big picture.

Classes and grades

In graduate school, you're no longer supposed to worry about grades. People were kept in this cycle of worrying about their grades as undergraduates because if they applied to graduate schools they needed to impress--it was like college admissions all over again.

(This was especially true of pre-med students--I knew several who spent hundreds of hours volunteering with organizations they didn't care much about, or who decided to major in something sort of bio-related but sort of quirky, based on the hope that their applications would stand out and give them an edge in admissions. I readily admit to doing this sort of thing when I was in high school, but now that I have a little more perspective I can appreciate how silly all of this was.)

To impress upon us new graduate students the worthlessness of grades, pretty much everyone gets an A or a B. Students who do really poorly might get a C, which is considered a failing grade. But it's kind of funny how graduate schools are upfront about the fact that they're going to inflate everyone's grades so that we know they are meaningless. I appreciate it. (I wouldn't mind doing away with grades altogether, but that's a topic for another post.)

Despite our professors explicitly telling us that this is graduate school and we needn't be concerned with our grades, there has still been plenty of chatter about them. For example, after the quizzes for one class were returned there were groups of students who immediately complained to one another--this looked like a scene right out of my undergraduate organic chemistry classes--about how the quiz assessed too narrow a range of the material, the grading was too harsh, the concepts weren't properly explained, etc. These may have all been valid criticisms of the format of the class and the quiz. But it appeared to me that they were grounded in dissatisfaction with a low grade, which really no longer matters. I wonder if this will continue or if we will learn to relax when it comes to grades as the year goes on.

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.

NSF Fellowship, revisited

NSF just announced the remainder of the graduate research fellowship award recipients, bringing the total to 1236 for the year. Unfortunately, my name was not on the list.

I received an honorable mention. This is supposed to signify that NSF thinks I am worth funding, but there were enough people higher than me on the list that I didn't make the cut. But honorable mention feels sort of like a consolation prize that you get just for trying (this is not actually the case since many applicants get rejected without honorable mention), since it just comes with some supercomputer access that I doubt I will use.

Before the results were announced, I was looking forward to seeing my ratings sheets so that if I did not win, I would be able to get some useful feedback on how to improve my application for next year. NSF sent me an email about the ratings sheets just ten minutes after sending the honorable mention notification. There are three ratings sheets, each consisting of two ratings for the award criteria ("intellectual merit" and "broader impacts"), with each rating followed by a one-paragraph explanation. I received three "excellent" ratings and three "very good" ratings, and all of the explanatory text was glowing. There was only one bit of criticism about my research proposal, but it came from someone who gave me an "excellent" on intellectual merit, so I can't imagine it carried much weight. I'm not annoyed that I got an honorable mention--I understand that there were weaknesses in my application and that these evaluations are somewhat arbitrary--but what irks me is that there is no indication of why I received "very good" instead of "excellent" ratings where I did, nor of how I could improve my application in the future. I was really hoping for more detailed comments--ideally, scanned printouts of my essays so that the reviewers could make comments by hand and point out their thoughts on certain parts--but now I am quite disappointed in the feedback system.

Research interests

With my arrival in Berkeley just a few months away, I've been thinking about my research interests. I feel like they are poorly defined. I can't point to specific questions I'm interested in addressing, or to subfields of chemistry that I have a long-standing interest in wanting to explore more deeply.

Last week, I sent a brief statement to Berkeley so they could match me with a first-year academic adviser. They wanted to know what my research interests were. I wrote something kind of vague describing how I want to approach my research, and what areas of chemistry I find interesting generally, but in the end, it ended up looking pretty bland and nonspecific.

The problem is that my research interests are being externally defined. The way I approach thinking about what I want to work on in graduate school is to look at what the faculty are doing, look for something I find interesting, and then sort of latch on to it. Someone's doing femtosecond spectrosopy? Sounds difficult and mathy. Someone's solving protein crystal structures? I think I would get bored. Someone's manipulating quantum dots? Maybe I could do that, too!

Ideally, my research interests would grow out of what I genuinely want to pursue, and then I would find a faculty adviser who seems knowledgeable and capable of helping me do my research. (I have the impression that this is how things tend to work more in the humanities and social sciences: a graduate student is on their own a lot, and relies on an adviser for direction. From what I've seen in the sciences, though, there is a lot more top-down delegation, whether it's in large physics projects like CERN or individual chemistry groups in which ten people are addressing a complicated problem from different angles.) But even if I were given the space to define my own goals and pursue them, I wouldn't know what to do. I think in chemistry, this is a result of the heirarchical nature of the research. There is a lot of background to know before getting to the cutting edge of the field, and for the last four years I've been building that base of knowledge. But I don't know much about where the frontiers of chemistry lie. Organic chemistry made me fall in love with chemistry, but on a fundamental level, there doesn't seem to be very much left to figure out. The physical organic chemistry done, I believe, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s gave us very good models for how organic chemistry works. I couldn't take a few organic chemistry classes and then go to graduate school and study electrophilic aromatic substitution (a basic type of reaction that people often learn about in their first or second semester), because all of that stuff is already worked out. And this is true not only of undergraduate organic chemistry, but most of the chemistry I have learned as an undergraduate--I learned about things that are well-known and uncontroversial, and was not exposed, in a broad sense, to where the frontiers of chemistry currently lie.

The transition from studying well-known phenomena to figuring out where on the boundaries of chemistry I want to be is a little confusing. I loved organic chemistry, but I would not want to spend my graduate school career doing natural products synthesis. I wasn't so excited about what we learned in my biochemistry class, but I still find biology fascinating.

In chemistry, if I do narrow something down slightly, there are still thousands of subfields, only a handful of which I am familiar with. Take my above statement--"I still find biology fasinating." What does that mean I want to study? Protein biochemistry from a mechanistic perspective? Prebiotic chemistry? Cellular imaging? Signal transduction networks? X-ray crystallography of membrane proteins? (And I'm limiting myself to biologial studies that are done in chemistry departments, here.) There are so many subfields of which I have so little knowledge that it's very difficult for me to define a personal research interest.

The only solution I currently see to all of this is to plow through and read about what happens to strike my fancy at the time. By learning more about where chemistry currently lies as a field, I should be able to formulate my own ideas on where it could go. But this is a very slow approach. In some sense, I feel like I've been duped: there is chemistry that people actually do, and then there is chemistry that undergraduates learn. And obviously, you need the latter to understand the former, but it's jarring to realize that I actually know very little about chemistry. I feel unprepared. In trying to navigate the world of modern chemistry research, I feel like I'm trying to learn a whole new discipline from scratch.

NSF Fellowship

A few days ago, NSF posted a list of recipients of the 2009 graduate research fellowships. NSF awarded 950 fellowships, which is on par with previous years (from 2005 to 2008, the numbers were 1024, 909, 920, and 913). This year, however, a notice was posted on the website along with the released names:

"Due to the complexity of the current budget situation, the 2009 GRFP awards will be announced in installments based on fields of study and other factors. The first installment is now available on FastLane. Awardees, as well as Applicants not recommended for funding, have been notified by email. Recipients of Honorable Mention and any additional Fellowship award offers will be forthcoming. Applicant ratings sheets will be available after all award announcements have been made. We thank you for your patience."

As luck would have it, my name is not on the award list, nor did I get a rejection email. So despite the delay in announcing the award recipients (which was originally supposed to be done in late March), I am still no closer to knowing whether or not I received an award. I hear there are about 2000 people in my boat--roughly 20% of the applicant pool.

During the week or two preceding the award announcements, the NSF GRFP forum at The Grad Cafe was very active, with new posts every few minutes as people scrutinized every minor change in the website to try to figure out when the results might be released. This provided for some valuable camaraderie among the people (myself included) who were sick of waiting for the results and getting no answers from NSF. For a brief period, people were able to access their ratings sheets by submitting a request to have their username/password sent to them by email; however, NSF disabled this very quickly after it was discovered, so only a few people saw their sheets. People kept holding out hope that there would be some other glitch leading to leaked results, but no such thing happened this year.

According to people who called NSF, the main reason for the delay was budget complexities--NSF simply did not know how many fellowships it could fund. The number was anticipated to be higher than normal, but it looks like the size of that funding difference was (and apparently still is) in question. NSF has received stimulus package money, but it's unclear how much of that (if any) will go to graduate research fellowships. Presumably because some people needed to make graduate school decisions based on whether or not they received a fellowship, the NSF released a first round of results probably listing most of the award recipients.

So at this point I am thinking I will probably receive an honorable mention, and there is a small chance I will receive an award, depending on how much funding is made available. My guess is that the number of second-round awards won't be trivial (or else why would the NSF have gone to all this trouble?), but I have no idea if it will be closer to 100 or 1000.