Cal Tech: My Visit

The Program:

As the visits wind down, I'm finding myself almost hoping to get turned off by last few visits, just so I can keep my decision to a minimum number of options. Sadly (?), Cal Tech put on yet another great visit, and their program is another one of those move-with-the-times, flexibility-oriented setups that I've been looking for. Cal Tech doesn't have a TA requirement per se (although, because it's such a small school, pretty much everyone ends up TAing a low-level chemistry course their first year), and the course requirement is just "Five", with no specifications about which courses those might be. Chemistry students can work in any lab they want, and if you happen to want to change your degree's focus for some reason, the only roadblock seems to be a small amount of paperwork. In fact, Cal Tech prides itself on its relative lack of red tape, and it's able to pull that off thanks to a remarkably small program (900 undergrads and 1200 grad students total) and an unfairly high concentration of resources. Since Lawrence Berkeley Lab has been slow to finish its building, Cal Tech is the current epicenter of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), and the JCAP building on campus is basically the equivalent of the Broad for semi-conductors, but with half the number of people running around (if that). And even if solar panels aren't your bag, Cal Tech has core facilities out the wazoo, with no real time concern built in. Of course, when it comes to bigger crystallography projects, Cal Tech has to use its synchrotron beam-line up at Stanford, but by and large the school's reputation has allowed it to erase pretty much all the potential drawbacks of a small program. At this point in the interviews, you start noticing that every school has its curricular quirk, and Cal Tech's is a series of research proposals (or "props", as the abbreviation-obsessed student body has it), starting with two during the second-year qual season and ending with four during thesis time. As usual, Cal Tech is able to put a positive spin on this requirement, arguing that the extra thinking required for the props is the perfect lead-in to an academic career, where research proposals are the essence of your livelihood. This is not to say that Cal Tech explicitly pushes academia (and at least one faculty member I spoke to thought they should be pushing it more), but it does mean that Cal Tech does a very good job placing professors just about everywhere. Of course, the high level of research also doesn't hurt.

The Environment:

I was half expecting to dislike Cal Tech, and a lot of that expectation had to do with the location. My big turn-off at Scripps was the fact that it felt like a commuter school, and I figured that the same would be true of everywhere else in Southern California. Cal Tech, however, has a genuine community, and while size may have something to do with it, it's not really a fair argument, since the chemistry program there is the same size as Scripps's (Chemistry is the largest graduate program on campus by a mile, to the point where most other departments think of the chemists as a massive, globular clique). I think the housing situation may be one of the biggest factors: Cal Tech has a cabin-like cluster of graduate apartments called the Catalinas (or the "Cats", again with the abbreviations), which serve as a freshman-year-dorm surrogate for most of the first-years. After a year or two in the Cats, most students seem to disperse into Pasadena or beyond, but I think that first exposure to communal living, similar to UCSF, keeps the student body pretty well bonded. As for the car situation, LA differs from San Diego slightly in that most parts of the city have their own downtown area, and as long as you stay in your neighborhood, you'll likely be able to get around by bike or foot. Pasadena is definitely a town in that mold, and it feels more like Palo Alto than La Jolla, with the Gold Line serving as the Pasadena/LA equivalent to Cal Train for Palo Alto/San Francisco. The upshot is that about half the students at Cal Tech drive, and the others use bikes and public transportation to get where they need to be. As far as environment goes, Pasadena is a pretty gorgeous town. Cal Tech's campus feels very similar to Pomona, and Pasadena itself has more amenities (the Rose Bowl, the Huntington Gardens, a relatively legitimate downtown) than Claremont had to offer. The beaches and mountains are very accessible, with the closest hiking about a 10-minute drive away, and downtown LA has a good amount to offer, even if it has significantly more sprawl than San Francisco.

The Visit:

Cal Tech did a good job maximizing our chances for informal interaction with students. Our Thursday schedule was pretty much all aimed at getting us to talk to students, with a poster session, buffet dinner, and kegger in the Cats all scheduled in rapid succession. On Friday, every prospective had her own schedule, with coffee and snacks situated at random locations throughout campus with students manning the fort throughout the day. Of course, we had the obligatory Friday night dinner and party, and a Saturday fun day to top it off, so overall I had ample opportunity to interact with the current students and prospectives. There were 37 of us visiting campus, so it ended up feeling pretty similar to a lot of the chemistry programs I've seen thus far, especially since the usual suspects were once again out in force during this visit. The meetings themselves were once again communal, although the number of prospectives in attendance fluctuated pretty dramatically. Bob Grubbs apparently had a crew of about 20 people meet with him, and, since he doesn't have much interest in taking new students, he proceeded to spend the full half-hour looking at people's nametags and chatting with them about the schools they had attended. In any cases, my meetings were all very solid, with the one scheduling casualty being Dave Tirrell, whose students were nonetheless fun to chat with. Grubbs left for France Friday afternoon, so Theo Agapie (along with his dogs, wife, and child -- apparently Sarah Reisman carried her baby on a visitation hike a couple years ago and, not to be outdone, Theo's been bringing the whole crew every since) took a bunch of us hiking on Saturday up in the San Gabriel Mountains, while Tom Miller brought some people to the beach, Andre Hoelzer went to the Huntington Gardens, and Long Cai organized an impromptu Laser Tag outing (which he was, apparently, extremely jazzed about). Cal Tech, like a lot of the programs I've seen, did a lot of subgroup splitting, with each sub-discipline getting its own set of lab tours and having dinner at a different restaurant in Old Town Pasadena (the chemical biologists went to Il Fornaio with Linda Hsieh-Wilson and Andre Hoelzer for some nice Italian food). But there was a good amount of time to interact with the group at large, and there was enough free time during the visit day to keep it from getting too exhausting.  

The Faculty:

I don't know why I found this surprising at first, but Cal Tech's chemistry department writ large has its hands in a good deal of biology. There are a bunch of stories of people like Dennis Dougherty (physical organic) and Jacqui Barton (electrochemistry) making a strong transition to chemical biology, and even physical chemists like Long Cai and Jim Heath are really interested in solving biological problems, and for me that means that there's a huge amount of exciting research happening there. Dougherty and Tirrell have some amazing techniques (both, interestingly enough, involving non-canonical amino acids) for probing proteins, and Jim Heath has one of the most impressive cancer treatment platforms I've seen anywhere on these visits. Cal Tech also has a token young professor doing exciting imaging research (Mikhail Shapiro), and I had a great interaction with him, although I'm going to need to talk to some of his lab members before I start falling head over heels. By and large, Cal Tech's faculty is pretty hands-off and has pretty high expectations, which means that life can and will be stressful, especially when you add in props, but the labs are typically fairly small and have an inordinate number of resources (Shapiro, for instance, has two MRIs of his own in addition to the two core facility scanners). And the younger faculty seem to be pretty awesome people: the most famous story concerns a group of prospectives signing a form saying they would come to Cal Tech if Sarah Reisman did a keg stand (which she did, although many of them didn't keep up their end of the bargain), but there's also other weird anecdotes floating around, like Theo Agapie eating somewhere between 22 and 24 cheeseburgers to win some contest and Tom Miller trying to get a bunch of prospectives to go surfing even though he has no surfing experience to speak of. Cal Tech actually seems like a pretty amazing place to be a young faculty member, since the school seems to invest pretty heavily in its associate faculty -- Hoeltz was extremely excited about the fact that he was able to design his own lab when he was hired (and it is pretty gorgeous). So while a lot of the older faculty are constantly on the move (Tirrell and Dervan were gone all weekend, and Barton, Heath, and Grubbs at least all flew out on Friday), the ones who were around were all fun to interact with. The community feel isn't quite what it was at Columbia, but it definitely does feel like a good group.

The Students:

The Cal Tech undergraduate community is decidedly and famously weird, but the grad students can all say, at the least, that they didn't go to Cal Tech for undergrad. To be sure, there's definitely a good amount of social awkwardness present in the chemistry department's ranks, but by and large Cal Tech seems to have a very solid community of good people. There's a measured amount of lab cliquiness, fueled largely by Dennis Dougherty's group (which, to be fair, has some pretty awesome people), but overall the chemists at Cal Tech seem to do a pretty good job hanging out with each other. Again, I think part of this has to do with the Cats set-up, which would have turned me off a few years ago, but now seems nostalgically cheesy. The major social drawback of Cal Tech is that it's just a whole bunch of scientists, but it seems like the students who need a more well-rounded social life are able to find ways to get it in Pasadena. As far as the research goes, Cal Tech's students have the same "my life sucks, but I'm glad it sucks here" mentality that seems to permeate a lot of the top-tier schools I've seen. Everyone I talked to was pretty honest about the ups and downs of their experiences there, but no one seemed unhappy, although some had needed to switch labs, and Cal Tech, like Harvard, went through a rash of suicides a few years back, so there's definitely a history of unrest. That being said, Cal Tech, like Harvard, realized at a certain point that they needed to start making their students' lives less miserable, so there's now a summer softball league, weekly happy hours for each department, and a sizable number of clubs -- with more student involvement than I've seen anywhere else. The students I spoke to also talked up the comparative size of the program, saying that, while there were as many great students at Cal Tech as at Berkeley or Harvard, the concentration was significantly higher, meaning that the intellectual atmosphere was overwhelmingly invigorating. It also bears mentioning that I spoke to several female students who had chosen Cal Tech because it had many more female role models and a much more enlightened atmosphere than a place like Scripps or Harvard.

The Cohort:

The Cal Tech visit felt pretty similar to Columbia's in that many of the conversations I had were about how surprisingly great the visit had been. The size may end up being a drawback for some in the final decision, but by the end of the weekend, pretty much everyone I spoke to still had Cal Tech on their list. I met some new people on this weekend, all of whom were pretty cool, although again, there's really no telling at this point where anyone will end up. There's also the added complication that, at this point in the process, the actual decision date is starting to loom, so the concentration of "where, where, where?" conversations was on the high side. But we had the chance to let loose a little during the visit -- there was a beer pong table on Thursday night, and there were pool tables on Friday. They kept us busy enough that I didn't have a chance to go night-swimming at the hotel (the Pasadena Westin, which was pretty snazzy), but I didn't mind too much. My roommate at the hotel had actually applied to the Biophysics program, but for some reason he was accepted to chemistry. It seemed like he had a pretty good visit with the physical chemists anyway, but I didn't get a chance to ask him explicitly. This also marks the fourth time a random Pomona student has shown up to a visit, which was once again a nice surprise.

The Impression:

Cal Tech passed the gut test, which is pretty exciting, since only Harvard, Columbia, and a couple labs at Berkeley and Cal Tech gave me the same feeling of homeyness. The major drawback here is that the onus would really be on me to make sure that I maintain a healthy social life outside of school, but even if LA is more impersonal than San Francisco or Boston, I at least have the benefit of a fairly robust past life in the city. Pasadena would also give me pretty much all the benefits of the Bay Area -- lots of great outdoorsy stuff nearby, a decent connection to the city, and a fairly vibrant local downtown. As far as the program goes, I don't think I realized how important it is for me to have a smaller community on campus -- I guess it's just the liberal arts background seeping through. But Cal Tech has all of the small school feel that I love without any of the resource hangups that concerned me at Columbia. My only programmatic concern is the lack of official rotations, and while the program is certainly flexible enough to allow informal rotations (especially if I show up early), I really liked the places that have rotations as a cultural component of the grad school experience. But at the end of the day, I don't think rotations are going to be the thing that keeps me from Cal Tech. At this point, it's a matter of making sure the labs I like the most there are really all they seem to be, and that means more conversations with students. However it ends up, I know Cal Tech will be in the conversation.

Cal Tech: My Schedule

Thursday, March 20

17:30 - 19:00    Poster Session in Dabney

19:00 - 21:00    Buffet Dinner in Dabney

21:00 - 23:00    Drinks with Students at Catalina Apartments

Friday, March 21

07:45 - 08:15    Breakfast in Noyes

08:15 - 09:00    Information Session

09:00 - 09:55    Lab Tours with Andre Hoelzer

10:00 - 10:30    Meeting #1: Dennis Dougherty

10:30 - 11:00    Meeting #2: James Heath

11:00 - 11:30    Meeting #3: Jacqueline Barton

11:30 - 12:00    Meeting #4: Mikhail Shapiro

12:00 - 13:00    Lunch with Students in Athenaeum

13:05 - 13:55    Tour of Jorgensen (Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis)

15:00 - 15:30    Meeting #5: David Tirrell

16:30 - 17:00    Meeting #6: Linda Hsieh-Wilson

17:30 - 18:30    Chemistry Social Hour in Courtyard

19:00 - 21:00    Dinner with Faculty and Students at Il Fornaio

21:00 - 23:00    Ice Cream at 21 Choices and/or Drinks at Barney's Beanery

Saturday, March 22

09:30 - 10:30    Breakfast at Gates-Annex Patio

10:30 - 11:00    Tour of Housing with Students

11:00 - 14:00    Hiking with Students and Faculty at Switzer Falls

UC Berkeley: My Visit

The Program:

Berkeley was my top choice on paper, and I don't think that's too uncommon. Apparently they got 900 applications this year, which means that that's a pretty good estimate for how many people are looking to enter chemistry PhD programs in the US -- after all, there probably aren't too many who aren't applying to Cal. As tar as I know, it's the biggest chemistry program in the country, with the resources that accompany that billing. Berkeley's chemistry department has 400 to 500 grad students and 800 undergraduates, which means not only that the shared facilities are well-equipped, but that many labs have the ability to expand to fairly ridiculous proportions. All of the chemical biology labs seem to have their hands in a bunch of different areas of chemistry, but they still maintain some very strong collaborative ties. This is actually one of the most impressive aspects of Berkeley's program: they've maintained their top spot on the chemistry rankings by maintaining a higher level of flexibility than any traditional chemistry program I've seen. There are no coursework requirements, no entrance exams, and no thesis defense (!). I spoke to Evan Miller at length (more on that), and he said that he's on a committee that's even trying to make rotations a fundamental part of the chemistry program. If you do want to rotate these days, though, you can sign up for the Chemical Biology track, which requires three rotations in the first year and has no other deviation from the traditional chemistry program. It's certainly not explicitly stated, but Berkeley does seem to have a more academic bent than the other programs I've visited on this trip. To be sure, certain labs have industry collaborations in place, but most of the faculty I spoke to seemed perfectly content to have companies pick up their lead compounds without bringing themselves into the picture. Those chemistry rankings almost universally come from academia, so it may be somewhat of a vicious circle of professorial ambitions, but there are twice as many Berkeley grads in current faculty positions than any other program (with a much more respectable gender ratio than anyone else as well), so maybe that academic focus isn't such a bad thing.

The Environment:

Going from Palo Alto to Berkeley is like entering a different world. Silicon Valley is fairly conservative by California standards, and Berkeley is, well, an interesting place. Let's just say that there aren't many places you can get a seytan Philly Cheese "Steak" at a brew pub (actually pretty tasty) or where the lines are literally around the block for the opening of a Wes Anderson movie (pretty fun). The difference extends to the campus as well -- while Cal is still pretty majestic, it doesn't have the same manicured beauty as Stanford, and it's definitely more cramped. I'm pretty sure that, despite having at least twice as many students, Cal's campus is actually smaller than Stanford's. Berkeley, though, is a bigger city, and it has enough going on to keep you engaged without needing to go across the Bay Bridge. Berkeley is famous for its homeless, hippies, and homeless hippies, but it's actually a remarkably diverse city, with the slummier areas located south and west of campus, and the nice neighborhoods typically to the north. Housing isn't provided for students, but Berkeley is similar to Boston in that there's constant turnover from graduating students, and it doesn't seem to be particularly find a place that's walking distance from campus. Rent is typical for the Bay Area, but I talked to several students who didn't have any problem landing a shared apartment with rent around $800/month. The stipend (a little on the low side at $29,750/year) comes with a Berkeley/Oakland bus pass and access to the campus gyms, although one of the drawbacks of going to a big school is that the gyms are pretty consistently packed to the gills. With so many students around, Berkeley definitely feels like more of a college town than any other place I've been to so far, and I'm not quite sure whether that's a good thing or bad thing at this moment. The nightlife there does seem to be a little lacking considering how young the city is, but I guess there's always BART. That being said, it did seem like an outing to San Francisco was, by and large, a real outing -- being closer than Stanford may not actually precipitate more trips to the city. I also talked to one of the grad students about Jewish life, and he said that students pretty typically joined a synagogue in Berkeley, which is a bit different from the minyan-heavy experience I'm used to in Boston right now.

The Visit:

Berkeley put together a relatively bizarre interview day. I guess with the sheer number of faculty with crazy schedules, they had to do some manipulating to get everyone an appointment with the labs they wanted. Everyone was on a different schedule, some with 15-minute meetings, half-hour lunches, and randomly interspersed free blocks. We did have student hosts for the whole day, so we at least had a guide hanging out with us the whole time. And my schedule was comparatively simple: I had hour-long meetings with the Changs in the morning, a full hour at the post-lunch poster session, and three 45-minute meetings in the afternoon. There's also apparently something known as "Berkeley time", where every class (and, on this weekend, meeting) starts exactly when the previous class ends, which gives everyone involved a 10-minute grace period before things actually start, so people had a tendency to trickle in at random points during faculty meetings. My host was a fifth-year in the Francis lab, and she took me to a noodle place in the "Asian Ghetto" (as opposed to the Gourmet Ghetto -- it's basically a little plaza with a bunch of cheap restaurants) for lunch and on an impromptu campus tour before the poster session. Similarly to Columbia, we had dinner at different faculty members's houses, with half going to Matt Francis's house up in the hills, and the other half going with Phil Geissler. We drove to the house separately, and there was some debate over which bar to head to after dinner (Kip's or Thalassa), so the bar night on Friday ended up being a bit disjointed, which was too bad. This is probably irrelevant for the visit writ large, but I will say that Berkeley had the most entertaining orientation session of any place that I've visited so far. Francis and Geissler had a nice bit of chemistry going during the whole presentation, and Geissler in particular had some very solid cracks. Saturday was pretty fun -- Donatela Bellone, a third-year in Felix Fischer's lab, gave a pretty impressive short talk about her work (the physical chemists heard from someone in Ronald Cohen's lab), and then we split up into groups to go hiking (including myself) or into Berkeley or San Francisco. I got to spend some time with family in the evening, which capped off a pretty nice visit.

The Faculty:

Berkeley has a bit of mega-lab reputation, and talking to the faculty there, you can understand why. People like Matt Francis, Chris Chang, and Carolyn Bertozzi give you the impression that they do pretty much everything under the sun, and to be honest that may not be far from the truth. Cal was the first place I visited where everyone I spoke to seemed to be pretty conversant in PET, although I'm sure it doesn't hurt that my current PI was in Francis's lab back in the day. Unfortunately, Bertozzi and Michelle Chang were in Davis for a conference, so I met with their students instead of them personally. According to the Bertozzi lab members, I missed the opportunity to speak to a veritable goddess of chemistry, but I guess I'll leave that as motivation to come back to Cal. The faculty I did speak to were all fantastic. I got a couple good stories about my PI from Matt Francis, who is a really nice, fun guy in general. Chris Chang is a bit more subdued, but incredibly bright. I've heard he's hands-on to a point that can get a bit overwhelming, but there's no doubt that his research is fantastic. One of the post-docs in my current lab did her PhD with Chris, and she had great things to say about Evan Miller, so I was excited to meet with him before coming to Cal, and he didn't disappoint. Miller is just starting out and has a brand new (and spotless) lab, but he comes off as an incredibly nice guy -- I have a hard time seeing him being too intense of a pre-tenure professor to work for, but he's definitely doing some pretty cool research (Cal basically has him spearheading the brain-mapping initiative through some innovative fluorophore/molecular wire setups). Every one of the faculty I spoke to had some strong collaborations in place across different departments, and they seemed to have enough going on in their labs to the point where students could pick and choose what balance of techniques they want, something I'd be happy to have at my disposal. We went hiking with Felix Fischer and Tom Maimone on Saturday, and they were both pretty relaxed, nice guys, albeit with a mild synthetic chemistry edge to them. It may not be all that surprising considering how many faculty are around at Cal, but I could see myself working in quite a few labs here.

The Students:

Berkeley is big, which means that it's a little hard to get a general handle on the student personalities there. I think the reality is that, once the program hits a few hundred students, there are enough people around that you don't feel the need to be hanging out with everyone. The students all had their own friend groups, with more inter-lab cross-talk than I was expecting. I think the chemical biology program helps with this, as it at least allows some students to interact with other labs. Berkeley also does a pretty great job of providing organized social programs, including a weekly Friday kegger in the summer, holiday parties, and a lab-by-lab softball league (if you want to get the stereotypes out of the way, the synthetic jocks get very drunk and very competitive, the theoreticians are bad, and Carolyn Bertozzi's lab is consistently and categorically terrible). This means that there's a solid core of students who show up to all these events, but another core of people who you may never meet during your time in grad school. So while cohesiveness isn't totally Berkeley's strength, I did get the impression that it wouldn't be hard to have a solid social life on campus. For the umpteenth time on my visits, the students here pulled out the "work-hard-play-hard" line, which I guess means that most students do things that aren't chemistry with some level of consistency. Unfortunately, the sports culture isn't as ingrained at Berkeley as Stanford (according to Fischer, students need to pay for tickets to football games, but there are usually seats because the team kind of sucks), but I think that's another area that's there if you want it. In fact, the "get-the-experience-you-want" attitude seemed to pervade a lot of Berkeley's personality -- you can take and TA the classes you want (at least after the first semester, when the organic people are TAing Orgo and the physical people are TAing Gen Chem), do the kind of research you're interested in within your lab, and structure the rest of your time according to your interests. To be fair, that's grad school, but I think the resources and flexibility at Berkeley seem to make that feeling a bit more apparent.

The Cohort:

I have to admit that, after 10 days of non-stop campus visitation, the usual conversations started to get a little tiring toward the end of the Berkeley visit. Other than one other Pomona grad (we seem to be getting pretty prolific on these visits), I'm not sure if I met any new people on this visit, although that may again come down to my general social burnout. The general feeling at Berkeley was that it's great but really big. One of the theoretical guys I talked to came out of his meetings a little overwhelmed at how many different types of theoretical chemistry existed at Berkeley, and the organic people I talked to seemed just shocked by sheer numbers -- Richmond Sarpong's lab in particular has about 45 members, which is a little insane. Regardless, there was no question that Berkeley was a great program, but like all the other places we've been, it's going to come down to fit. Everyone is trying to reserve judgment until the end of the visits, and everyone seems to be reaching the point where a decision is going to be very hard to make. So we're basically all in the same state of angst, which probably leads to too many conversations about grad school. I'm glad to get a little bit of time to recover before the Cal Tech visit.

The Impression:

I'm no different from my peers in the concerns over size at Berkeley. I think that led to Evan Miller becoming my default favorite faculty, just because he's guaranteed to have a small group and be more hands-on when I start, and because there are only so many opportunities to work with a brand new professor at a place like Berkeley. I think that bias may also come from my current PI, who was one of Matt Francis's first students and definitely has ridden his "tenure student" role to a great career. But outside of the size question, there's no doubt that Berkeley is an amazing program, with resources out the wazoo and a very strong institutional flexibility. I've heard that Berkeley students can be pretty unhappy, and I have to admit that I didn't get enough of a feel to be able to deny that, but based on the feel I got, I think I would do pretty well there. We'll see how it plays out.

UC Berkeley: My Schedule

Friday, March 14

08:00 - 09:00    Breakfast in Tan Hall
09:00 - 10:00    Orientation in Tan Hall
10:00 - 11:00    Meeting #1: Chris Chang
11:00 - 12:00    Meeting #2: Michelle Chang Group
12:00 - 13:30    Lunch with Student Host
13:30 - 14:30    Poster Session in Stanley Hall
14:30 - 15:15    Meeting #3: Matt Francis
15:15 - 16:00    Meeting #4: Carolyn Bertozzi Group
16:00 - 16:45    Meeting #5: Evan Miller
16:45 - 17:30    Refreshment Break in Tan Hall
17:30 - 21:00    Dinner with Students and Faculty at Matt Francis's House

Saturday, March 15

09:00 - 10:00    Breakfast in Tan Hall
10:00 - 10:30    Student Research Presentations in Tan Hall
11:00 - 16:00    Hiking with Faculty on Berkeley Fire Trails

Stanford: My Visit

The Program:

When my dad was in my shoes some 30-odd years ago, he chose Stanford over Berkeley because he felt that Cal was too traditional. Stanford certainly has a reputation for being the lifeblood of silicon valley's emergent technologies, and the chemistry department seems to share in that spirit. Harvard may be the only other place where the faculty made the explicit statement that they don't push their students in any one direction because of the numbers of graduates who do end up going into "unexpected" fields like government and finance. I talked to a theoretical chemistry grad student who was, in his words, getting through his early 20s so he could get a job in computational finance and a student who had pored over the list of "courtesy" faculty until he found a biomaterials lab in the med school doing suitable work for his PhD. So flexibility is ingrained in the Stanford culture, and the chemistry department is incredibly flexible for a traditional chemistry program. But it is still a very traditional chemistry program -- qualifying exams, two to four quarters of TAing depending on your funding, and even entrance exams that may lead to some remedial coursework if you fail -- and I'm becoming increasingly aware of the fact that a traditional chemistry program isn't really what I'm looking for. The department doesn't advertise programs like SPARK that are ingrained in the biosciences recruitment, and there are remnants of classical ivory tower chemistry programs like a literature presentation in the second year that must be unrelated to students' research. After spending a lot of time at newer chemical biology programs that cut out a lot of the fat, it's hard to adjust to the sorts of requirements that seem to pervade the standard chemistry curriculum (although Columbia has already done a pretty good job adjusting). That being said, the only real difference between chemistry and chemical and systems biology (the other program I was considering at Stanford) is the lack of rotations. Thanks to dual and courtesy appointments, Stanford's chemistry department extends across the med school, the engineering departments, materials science, and biology. Collaboration is still very much the name of the game, and students seem to be able to get into pretty much any lab they care to enter. So while the people I talked to may be right in saying that I should have applied to CSB, the chemistry department at Stanford is still a decent jumping off point.

The Environment:

Palo Alto is a classic California town that was basically put up in a very planned manner and cost a few rich moguls a whole boatload of money. Stanford gave me a "too perfect, too pristine" vibe when I visited before undergrad, and I'm happy to report that nothing has really changed. From Palm Drive to the main quad to the gorgeous mission-style architecture, Stanford is impeccably beautiful. When we went up Hoover Tower as part of the campus tour, I asked the elevator operators if Stanford's campus had any quirks (akin to UCSF's freezer art), and they were entirely non-plussed. Stanford is a lot of things, but quirky doesn't seem to be one of them. Likewise, the town of Palo Alto is vibrant and well-manicured, but overwhelmingly boutique and punctuated by reminders (like the SurveyMonkey headquarters across from the police station) that you are definitely in Silicon Valley. Basically, Stanford and Palo Alto are Pomona and Claremont on steroids, but Cal Train is better at getting you out than the Metro. A lot of students do find the need to get out, moving down to San Jose or even as far as San Francisco (thanks to an express Cal Train that can get you to Palo Alto in 35 minutes, it's actually a doable commute). Palo Alto straddles the border between college town and livable suburb, with the scales tipping more toward classy cocktail places than dive bars. But the nightlife seems pretty solid in town, and if you ever get bored, Cal Train runs until midnight, and Stanford is an open-container campus. In fact, it seemed that the grad students got a very good amount of mileage out of the campus housing life, with grad student house parties occurring regularly and the chem department putting on a Saturday morning tailgate before (free) football games on Saturday mornings. All in all, life in Palo Alto seems to be pretty good, and there's no doubt that it's about as pretty a place as I can imagine to do research (although the bio and engineering departments are significantly outclassing chemistry on the state-of-the-art building front).

The Visit:

Stanford's official visit lasted, quite legitimately, one day. All of the Wednesday events were optional, and dinner wasn't provided (I ended up going into town and getting some Indian food informally with a few students and prospies). I would have liked to have gotten another casual day to interact with faculty and students, but Stanford did a decent job packing everything into Thursday. And I'm glad I got to take advantage of the informal Wednesday events -- first the weekly "grab a fistful of donuts and a coffee" chemistry social, followed by a fantastic theoretical synthetic chemistry lecture by the great Ken Houk (who collaborates with Paul Wender and Bob Weymouth like crazy). As far as Thursday goes, it made for a long day. Stanford turned each faculty meeting into a bit of a marathon: each lasted an hour, but it actually turned out well, with the time split between talking to faculty, meeting students, and touring the labs. The meetings were joint, with as many as six students in the room at the same time, but I didn't mind it too much. Stanford also punctuated the meetings with a campus tour, which provided somewhat of a recharge before the afternoon sessions, and the post-meeting poster session took place outside on a balcony, which is a move that most programs wouldn't be able to pull off. After going to a couple less formal dinners at Columbia and UCSF, Stanford went back to the "potentially awkward social engineering" approach, giving prospies, students, and faculty assigned seats at a great Mexican restaurant in town. I sat next to Lynette Cegelski, who was incredibly nice but nearly impossible to hear thanks to a low-talker/loud restaurant combination. The students took us out to a bar afterwards, and a few of the younger faculty tagged along, although as far as I know no one was able to convince Noah Burns to ride the mechanical bull (which wouldn't be all that surprising if he hadn't just gotten a Macklemore haircut after losing a bet with one of his students). Overall, it was a fun visit, if too short. I should also mention the ongoing tension between the Stanford night and Berkeley morning -- while the students tried hard to keep us out, upwards of a dozen of us had to catch the shuttle to Berkeley (provided by Stanford) at 6:30 a.m., which meant we had to cut the night short before it reached epic proportions.

The Faculty:

Stanford's chemistry department is probably a little less tight-knit than the other programs I've visited in this whirlwind tour, but there's no question that the research is phenomenal. Personal styles seem to run the gamut, with Hongjie Dai and Paul Wender occupying the opposite extremes of hands-on (Dai) vs. hands-off (Wender). Wender, for his part, is inspiring to listen to (we can solve every medical problem on earth with small molecules!), and the rest of my faculty meetings were similarly enjoyable. Bianxiao Cui is doing some really cool optogenetics work, Hongjie Dai has some very cool ideas for red-shifted fluorescence imagine, and Eric Kool has an awesome DNA synthesis platform. I brought my typical chemical biology questions to Justin Du Bois, who's in the relatively initial stages of adding a heavy chemical biology component to his toxin synthesis and told me he genuinely felt that he would have benefited from more exposure to biology earlier in his career. Of course, he made the argument that Stanford (while it may not be unique) has given him the resources to expand his toolbox thanks to collaborations with industry and the medical school. Paul Wender has also made a career out of the same types of collaboration (although I did hear that his entrepreneurialism leads to a lot more patent applications than publications for his students), along with the rest of the faculty I spoke to. Wender's lab is on the larger size for Stanford, but even his fluctuates between 20 and 25 students, which is still manageable. I didn't extend beyond the chemistry department, but I talked to another chemical biology person who met exclusively with courtesy faculty. I think I'm going to need to scan through those ranks before I make any decision on Stanford (the real problem with not being able to rotate).

The Students:

Stanford students are definitely happy, and I think I got along with them pretty well. The running theme seems to be that, in places where I'm expecting students to have some sort of edge to them (in this case some level of snootiness), they end up being very down-to-earth and friendly. I think there may just be a limit to how intense the average chemistry PhD student can really be (although there are no doubt some exceptions to the rule in every class). Most of the students (and faculty) get around by bike, and there seems to be a relatively even split on the car front. The majority still live in campus housing, but as time goes on it seems that more and more trickle off outside of Palo Alto. But the benefit of being in a relatively small town with a strong campus culture is that regular bar nights and outings seem to be pretty ingrained. Some labs did feel a little more self-contained, but I think the chemistry program is pretty broadly cohesive, and Stanford has the same set-up as Columbia in that you can end up living with grad students in any program (although I got the feeling that the chemists preferred to band together at Stanford). I wouldn't say I got as much of a warm-and-cozy feel as at Columbia, but I could certainly be happy with this group at Stanford.

The Cohort:

Stanford coordinates its visits with Berkeley, which means four visiting weekends for a program that's about half the size of Cal's. So I was expecting a relatively small group, but there were about 30 or 35 of us there on Thursday. This may explain why there are so many first-years (55!) at Stanford, but it didn't feel like an overwhelmingly large group. Once again, the overlap on these visits is getting a little crazy, but I still met a few new people, including yet another Pomona senior who ended up in a couple faculty meetings with me. It's becoming harder to characterize the students visiting a particular school, because at this point a lot of people are just visiting all of them. I will say that some seemed more enamored with Stanford than others, and I think it's going to become clearer where people are going to end up as the visits go on. I'm now getting more bummed that I won't be at MIT's weekend, since it looks like that will be the capstone for quite a few people that I've been doing these visits with. As things start winding down, it's going to be interesting to see the specific programs that people find appealing. In any case, I've hung out with a lot of the people on the Stanford visit enough to know that I would be okay going to school with most of them.

The Impression:

Oh, Stanford. What amounted to a pretty fun visit may be undone by my realization that I would probably need to rotate in order to decide on a lab here. It doesn't really help that Wender (probably my favorite PI at Stanford) often likes incoming students to commit to his lab early. But these are the kinds of factors that affect decisions. I will say that my concerns coming into the visit -- the comparative isolation of Palo Alto in the Bay Area, the Stanford attitude -- ended up being moot points. The students are friendly, the area is enjoyable, and San Francisco is probably about as accessible as it would be from Berkeley. I still would have liked more time to talk to faculty casually, but what can you do? Stanford at least seems confident enough in their one-day visit to bring in enough students (although it can't hurt that they're sending a bunch of people up to Berkeley with hangovers). One more visit left on the whirlwind week, and I'm still feeling pretty good.

Stanford: My Schedule

Wednesday, March 12 (Optional Events)

14:30 - 15:00    Donuts and Coffee with Students in Mudd Building
16:15 - 17:30    Guest Lecture: Ken Houk from UCLA

Thursday, March 13

08:15 - 09:15    Breakfast in Mudd Building
09:20 - 09:55    Orientation in Chemistry Gazebo
10:00 - 10:55    Meeting #1: Bianxiao Cui
11:00 - 11:55    Meeting #2: Eric Kool
12:00 - 12:40    Lunch with Students in Keck Lobby
12:40 - 13:55    Student-Guided Campus Tour
14:00 - 14:55    Meeting #3: Paul Wender
15:00 - 15:55    Meeting #4: Justin Du Bois
16:00 - 16:55    Meeting #5: Hongjie Dai
17:00 - 18:00    Poster Session and Happy Hour on Mudd Balcony
19:15 - 21:30    Dinner with Students and Faculty at Reposado
21:30 - 23:00    Bar Night with Students

Friday, March 14

06:30 - 07:30    Charter Shuttle to UC Berkeley

UCSF: My Visit

The Program:

Similarly to TPCB, UCSF's Chemistry and Chemical Biology is a chem program started by biologists. CCB isn't even really a department to speak of, but a program that draws from all of UCSF's medically delineated institutes. There are about 50 faculty formally affiliated with the program (and about 50 CCB students), but, again similar to TPCB, more seem to be getting dragged in every year by rotation students interested in their work. The quality of chemical biology at UCSF is extraordinary, and it's essentially the home of a bunch of very impressive techniques (high-resolution EM, cysteine tethering, kinase modulation, hyperpolarized MRI, etc.). The labs are pretty much all problem-oriented, which means exposure to a broad range of techniques and, when coupled with a lack of undergrads and some very tight-knit relationships with industry, a reputation as a post-doc factory. So the grad program is only right for a certain set of people (more on that later), but the things it does well, it does really, really well. The structure is similar to other chemical biology programs I've visited -- three quarter-long rotations required, one semester of TAing, a relatively flexible course-load for the first year, etc. But UCSF does have a few added benefits, e.g. the ability to teach (not TA, but teach) lab classes at USF and access to the Entrepeneurship Center for students interested in starting their own companies. Like many chemical biology programs (the first "C" in the name is a bit misleading), UCSF's is on the small side -- they usually take about 15 students per year, and the current first-year class is only comprised of four (!) students. This means that grad students are in high demand, which is a situation I seem to be leaning toward so far.

The Environment:

UCSF has a bunch of campuses scattered around town, but the most famous site is the Parnassus campus, which houses the medical school and hospital and has an outrageous view of the city. The research, on the other hand, happens across town in Mission Bay, which is a campus that's about as new as Scripps Florida's. There's a 20-year-plan to build up more UCSF and biotech around the area, but for now it's surrounded by a lot of undeveloped land. On the plus side, the campus is pristine and walking distance from AT&T Park (the Giants's stadium) and the main San Francisco Caltrain station. There's a very nice complex of subsidized (~$950/month) student housing across the street from campus, but there seems to be a bit of a housing crunch at UCSF: in order to allow all of the students to take advantage of the subsidized housing, the school has put a hard two-year cap on leases for those apartments. The students don't seem to mind too much (in fact, they seemed to be happy to move into more exciting areas of San Francisco), and Charlie Craik gave a whole pep talk about the housing situation not being so bad, but I can't help but be a little concerned about having to pay exorbitant rent on a not-so-nice apartment. Of course, as Charlie said, it would be nice to live in a city where everyone wants to live. UCSF runs a free shuttle service on weekdays that basically goes all over town, and there are also BART and Muni stations a short walk away. San Francisco may very well be as fun as New York City, and the added benefits of pleasant weather and accessible outdoor activities make it a very appealing place to be. 

The Visit:

With Mission Bay lacking in the hotel department, UCSF put us up at the Sir Francis Drake in Union Square. I had my own room (good luck so far this trip), and while we had a charter bus taking us around during the visit, I made the walk to campus from Union Square on Tuesday, and it only took about 45 minutes to get there from downtown. The visit itself was relatively brief, with planned events only on Sunday and Monday. Unlike at other programs I had visited, the first day was a bit more organized -- we had four faculty talks, followed by dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant with the faculty that had spoken. The interview day was packed as usual. I had one-on-one interviews with six people, but UCSF did well to break things up by giving us a tour of the campus housing and gym immediately after lunch, which allowed me to recover my energy a bit -- the immediate post-lunch faculty meeting has been a consistent struggle for me at other visits. The format for the meals was also a bit different: students took small groups to different places in town for lunch (I went to Ramp) and dinner (Grub, in North Beach). The visit felt shorter this time around, as we pretty much condensed all of the grad student bonding into a single day. To be fair, we had a decent amount of time during breakfast and happy hour to chat with students, and there was plenty of revelry at the rooftop bar on Monday night. I would have liked the ability to explore San Francisco more, but I ended up doing that on my own time on Tuesday, so it worked out okay.

The Faculty:

From a biochemistry perspective, UCSF is about as world-class as it gets. Kevan Shokat and Jim Wells have played a large part in the move to use protein engineering as a component of drug discovery just as vital as small molecule development. Wells's cysteine tethering approach gives UCSF's high throughput screening platform a nice advantage, and talking with Michelle Arkin (one of the heads of the Small Molecule Discovery Center) was pretty exciting. UCSF also just brought in Jason Gestwicki from Michigan last year, which not only rounds out a very strong roster of small molecule probe labs (in addition to Wells, Shokat, Jack Taunton, and Adam Renslo in the SMDC), but also gives UCSF an unusually student-heavy lab in a generally post-doc oriented environment. As far as my conversations with faculty went, Gestwicki and the rest were a pleasure to talk to. Bo Huang is basically the Wei Min of UCSF -- lots of very cool ideas for moving imaging forward, and a definitively infectious enthusiasm for his work -- and Martin McMahon was probably the perfect person for me to meet. At this point my biggest concern for research is trying to figure out the balance of biochemistry and synthesis, and McMahon was able to have a very earnest conversation with me about UCSF's comparative strengths and weaknesses for the PhD. My one regret is that I got sidetracked in conversations with grad students during the reception and was only able to speak to Shokat for a minute or so. Still, I came away with a good impression of the faculty at UCSF -- once again, there's a strongly collaborative and supportive environment in place, and I think UCSF is definitely on the walk-the-walk side of the interdisciplinary biosciences trend. I think the most interesting thing I heard this weekend came from Gestwicki, who was really impressed at how strongly the MDs at UCSF valued basic science. He's been able to get some neuroscience collaborations off the ground thanks to that open-mindedness of the medical community, and I think that's a major plus for the research at UCSF. Gestwicki also mentioned that the approach to collaboration in the Bay never bracketed out industry either, which means that a lot of labs are working closely and sharing IP with Genentech and other companies -- something that I don't really associate with the Boston academic community (although I may very well be wrong about that).

The Students:

UCSF has a bit of an odd setup in that they have both a small student cohort and a lack of housing in the immediate campus vicinity. I was expecting that to lead to a pretty disjointed group of students (something akin to Scripps La Jolla), but in point of fact, there seemed to be a genuine community there. It may help that they at least get two years living in the campus apartments before being forced to disperse into the city, and it may also be that the labs there are designed explicitly to foster interaction between colleagues, but I got the impression that students were very comfortable floating around campus asking their colleagues about their work (this, I should mention, seems to extend to the faculty as well). Perhaps the most unique aspect of UCSF's student programming is their "boot camp" at the beginning of the first year, which has students go over a range of chemical and biochemical techniques, but also provides some group dinners and organized bonding time. But all rationale aside, I got a very good vibe from the students at UCSF. They kept the same balance of scientific enthusiasm and interest in the outside world that I should probably now expect from these schools. They all seemed to be close with each other but also able (thanks to being dispersed in the city) to have their own social circles outside of the chemistry world. I think that's going to be important for me going forward, and even if rent is a little high, I can't say I'd have any qualms about getting to live in San Francisco.

The Cohort:

The more time I spend on chemical biology visits, the more I realize that this is the community I really want to surround myself with. I think the focus on applied research may just attract a group of students with a greater ability to (and interest in) put their research in a wider context, which can then lead to a better perspective in general. But that's just me spitballing and generalizing. In any case, there weren't too many people on this visit that I had seen before, but I did get to meet a few of the people who had been on the other Harvard Chem Bio visit weekend, and that was a really nice group. Everyone had their own interests (mostly outdoorsy) outside the lab, and I could definitely see myself getting along with pretty much everyone I talked to. I will say that the people I seemed to gel with the most may not end up putting UCSF at the top of their lists, but I can get into that in the next section.

The Impression:

In a lot of ways, UCSF was one of my favorite visits. They have an amazing amount of applied research going on, they have a few resources (the boot camp and teaching at USF) that are genuinely unique, their community is small and tight-knit, and they're actually located in a city that I really want to live in. The drawbacks are pretty much all on the "training" front, and this is the first place I've been to where I've really had to make that a consideration. The strength of UCSF's approach is that it employs a "whatever-technique-works" strategy, which means a tremendous amount of breadth at the expense of depth. For someone like me, who wants a strong foundation in synthesis to accompany his biochemical training, this makes me a little nervous, as I'm not sure there are any labs at UCSF that value synthetic methodology highly enough for me. Of course, as the field changes, having that intuition may be less important than having the ability problem solve using a range of techniques, and certainly if I'm interested in working in a biotech startup, UCSF has the requisite training. But I think I need to have a conversation with Jacob about the consequences of a UCSF education when it comes to academia, which is not a door I'm willing to close at this point. In any case, if I can get past that reservation, there are quite a few labs at UCSF I can see myself working at, and there's no question that the environment there is pretty fantastic.