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.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
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.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
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.
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.
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