Scripps FL: My Schedule

Thursday, February 27

17:00 - 19:00    Happy Hour with Students at Hotel
19:00 - 21:00    Dinner with Students at Guanabanas

Friday, February 28

09:00 - 10:10    Breakfast and Welcome
10:20 - 11:00    Interview #1: Thomas Kodadek
11:10 - 11:50    Interview #2: Matt Disney
12:00 - 13:00    Lunch with Faculty at Scripps Cafe
13:00 - 13:40    Interview #3: Patrick Griffin
13:50 - 14:30    Interview #4: Paul Thompson
14:40 - 15:20    Christoph Rader
15:30 - 16:00    Tour of Molecular Screening Center
16:00 - 17:00    Poster Session and Happy Hour
17:00 - 17:30    Wrap-up Meeting
18:00 - 21:00    Dinner with Faculty and Students at Seasons 52
21:30 - 11:30    Drinks with Students at Rum Bar

Saturday, March 1

09:00 - 12:00    Brunch with Faculty at Hotel
13:00 - 18:00    Boat Cruise with Students and Postdocs
20:30 - 11:30    Dinner with Students at Mojito

Scripps CA: My Visit

The Program:

Scripps makes a lot of claims about collaboration and flexibility, and it's hard to leave there without the impression that they're pretty true to their word on those fronts. There's no teaching requirement or core curriculum (students take six classes of their choosing), and the diplomas just say Scripps Research Institute without any concern acknowledgement of department or concentration. Of course, mileage seems to vary on the collaborative aspect of the experience -- Pete Schultz's lab has basically a campus's worth of resources in its own right, and Phil Baran has more reason to work with Sigma than any of the Scripps faculty -- but there's no denying that even the atmosphere of the place has been engineered to breed cooperation. Scripps makes the same publication claims as TPCB (4.1 per graduate), and that output seems to be due to a serious commitment to research from the outset. Students start at labs by August 1 of their first years, and there's typically a push to publish even during rotation season. The bigger chem labs (e.g. Baran, Ryan Shenvi, Ben Cravatt) tend to eschew the rotation system, but from what I hear there are still more opportunities to rotate in chemistry at Scripps than most other schools (of course, the system is still not as robust or ubiquitous as the chemical biology programs I've looked at). Erica Ollmann Saphire started off the interview day with a nice "Myths About Scripps" sessions that acknowledged and in some cases debunked the stereotypes of Scripps as an industry incubator crawling with post-docs. Apparently a full 23% of Scripps graduates currently have faculty appointments, which seemed like a pretty remarkable number (although, again, I'm ignorant of the numbers at other institutions. One of these days I'll actually compile a coherent ranking of these figures). As for the post-doc factory thing, there's no denying that, with very few exceptions (Ryan Shenvi's lab being the only one I can think of currently), grad students are in the minority at pretty much every Scripps lab. I've already gone into my feelings on this to some extent, but at this point I think I would prefer working in a post-doc heavy environment anyway. Grad students seem to be a real commodity at Scripps, and while some absentee professors are always going to be absentee professors, I think Jacob's rule about busy PIs always making time for their students seems to hold pretty true at Scripps as well.

The Environment:

The Scripps campus is a compact bubble within the wider bubble of Torrey Pines. We stayed at the Torrey Pines Hilton, which overlooks the Torrey Pines golf course, which is right next to the Torrey Pines cliffs. There's a world-class gym on campus, strip malls filled with biotech companies across the street, and jump-suited cyclists taking over most of the surrounding roads. Scripps is basically the kind of place that can suck you in without any effort. Multiple professors talked about taking walks on the bluffs when their experiments weren't working, and the ocean view is absurd, especially at sunset. Southern California is still pretty much a car-obligate society, and La Jolla is not cheap (although apparently there are some students living in Del Mar), so pretty much all of the students I spoke to lived at least a 15-minute drive away from campus. So both the positive and negative incentives serve to push virtually all day-to-day lifestyle onto the Scripps campus, including meals at the cafeterias, coffee from the coffee cart next to Beckman, and workouts at the campus gym peppered in between experiments. Of course, San Diego has a lot to offer on pretty much every front, and people do make time for fun stuff outside of the bubble: there are plenty of students and faculty who are into surfing, cycling, drag racing, brewing, etc., and the going-out options are diverse and enjoyable. We didn't make it into downtown San Diego at all, but even so we still had a nice taste of the (quite different) nightlife in La Jolla and Pacific Beach. San Diego is also quietly one of the best microbrew cities in America, and there is a great range of very good beer to be had, even if you're not a major Stone-loving hop-head. Oh, yeah, and the weather's nice.

The Visit:

Scripps is a relatively small program (30 to 40 students across all of the chemical and biological disciplines), but the blurred departmental lines served to make the visit feel very large. There were 60 people there this weekend, all with different research foci and interests. This made it hard for me to meet, let alone get a feel for, all of the recruits, but despite Nathalie Early's (the program coordinator) stress level riding high for most of it, Scripps put on a very fun weekend. Oddly, we heard no mention of Saturday afternoon activities until about a week before the visit, but in the end we got to choose between surfing, kayaking, going to the San Diego Zoo, and going on a microbrewery tour (at Alesmith and Green Flash, to be specific). I chose the kayaking, and it was certainly worth dropping my original plan to visit family. There were sea lions and pelicans, and we got to explore some caves along the La Jolla cliffs. As usual, the meals were all fantastic, and Scripps seemed to put a pretty heavy emphasis on the wining aspect of the wining and dining, with our Friday night being dedicated pretty much exclusively to drinking at Karl Strauss. The grad students in particular went pretty hard, but between the jet lag and beer consumption, I had a lot of difficulty making it past 11:00 on Friday or Saturday. As for the interviews themselves, the format was a new one for me. Pretty much all of the interviews I went to were with one or two other people, which turned the emphasis much more onto the PIs research and preempted much in-depth conversation. It didn't feel competitive, but it also wasn't as intellectually stimulating as the visit at Harvard. That being said, seven interviews would have been a lot if it had all been one-on-one, but this format kept me pretty well energized for the whole day on Friday. I even managed to add in a meeting with Dale Boger during our free hour before dinner. Unfortunately, I think I may have been the casualty of a miscommunication, as Nathalie didn't get my original interview requests and I had to resend them to her less than a week before the interview. So I wasn't able to talk to Michael Marletta or Ben Cravatt, who were two of the PIs I most wanted to meet, but the Scripps faculty is interesting enough that all of the interviews were still quite enjoyable.

The Faculty:

There are a few tidbits that get tossed around the chemistry community, and the big one I heard before visiting Scripps was that I should try to avoid staring at Phil Baran's biceps. Maybe it's something about the San Diego environment (as Ryan Shenvi said numerous times, "we can do it year-round"), but the faculty here is much more athletic than your average chemistry department. The Scripps gym is apparently phenomenal (Tiger Woods worked out there when he played at Torrey Pines), and there's even a legendary personal trainer (named Rocky, no less) who works out everyone from Phil, Ryan and Reza Ghadiri to Jin-Quan Yu (less impressive biceps). Apparently Floyd Romesberg (albeit jestingly) asked a grad student how much he benched during his quals. So yes, Scripps is very much a product of the greater San Diego culture. Of course, that doesn't make the faculty any less fantastic. In terms of pure research, Scripps has an overwhelming number of labs that I would be interested in, and even the more workaholic labs seemed to have a positive attitude devoid of micromanaging. If anything, the knock against Scripps seems to be that some of the faculty are too hands-off. This definitely seems to be the case with some of the biggest names there (e.g. Phil Baran and Pete Schultz), but regardless of style, the faculty by and large seem to be very down-to-earth and friendly. I had great conversations with Jamie Williamson (my only one-on-one interview) and Tobin Dickerson, Phil Dawson, Evan Powers, and Dale Boger were incredibly friendly, and Phil Baran and Ryan Shenvi almost made me consider going into straight synthesis. I had lunch with Phil, Ryan, and Jin-Quan Yu (apparently Scripps thinks I'm a synthesis jock), which was incredibly pleasant, and I got a chance to chat with Kim Janda during dinner on Friday. Even without meeting Marletta or Cravatt, I was impressed with pretty much all of the research I heard about during my time at Scripps. 

The Students:

This may have just been due to the extra day of activities, but Scripps seemed to have more "go out drinking with current students" time than Harvard or TPCB, and that ended up being a big positive. I feel like I got a pretty good feel for the overall atmosphere, as well as the comparative lab environments I might experience. As a general rule, Scripps students work hard but are very adept at shrugging off that fact. Of course, the synth jocks have their own culture to some extent -- jocularly giving each other a hard time about how many hours they've worked or which reactions they should know how to run -- but even they seem to find some time to have fun. And the casual conversation between grad students at the events I went to didn't seem focused too heavily on work. This actually speaks to a larger benefit of Scripps's interdisciplinary culture: due to the blurring of department lines, the neuroscientists know the biologists know the synthetic chemists, and while most of the close friendships I saw among students were between members of the same lab, the larger friend groups seem to be pretty heterogeneous in terms of background and lab culture. With that kind of environment, you kind of have to have other interests, because there's only so long you can talk intelligently about someone else's area of expertise with them. One other note that seems relevant after visiting Harvard: my host was a fourth-year grad student in Ryan Shenvi's lab, and there were a decent number of upper classmen (though certainly not as many) hanging around with us over the course of the weekend. By and large, they seemed busy and potentially a little more stressed (it's hard to tell in San Diego), but no less happy with their choice in school than any of the first- or second-years.

The Cohort:

The sweet spot for these interviews may be about 20 to 30 people. Harvard felt small, but Scripps felt really, really big. I lost track of a lot of the people I met on the visit, and I'm sure that there were plenty of recruits that I had no interaction with at all. I've also now started to run into people that I had met on previous interviews, so I probably spent more time with them, which may have taken up my ability to spread myself around. With so many people there, the personalities seemed to run the gamut of social aptitude and interesting-ness, so suffice it to say that I found plenty of good people to hang out with. In any case, from meeting the recruits I began to realize that the last two places I had visited are outside of the general purview of most chemistry PhD applicants. Scripps is a bit unusual in its approach, but still very much on the traditional chemistry circuit. I'll be running into a lot of these people at other schools I'm visiting. This also means that a lot of the recruits were more traditional chemists in their approach to grad school -- my roommate knew he wanted to come to Scripps, and the only question he was shoring up during the weekend was whether he would work for Phil Baran or Ryan Shenvi. There were still a good number of people who, like me, had a desire to rotate, but for them Scripps seems to be the most flexible choice, while I actually feel like it could be more limiting than Harvard Chemical Biology or TPCB. 

The Impression:

Scripps is an amazing program with very, very impressive research. I think Scripps has more labs that I could see myself working at than any of the schools I've visited so far, and either due to the San Diego air or the faculty themselves, the atmosphere seems to be light in comparison to Harvard -- yes, you'll work hard, but by and large there won't be too much top-down pressure for results. I think I'm self-motivated enough at this point to thrive in that kind of environment, and the flexibility of the coursework structure is also a plus. To get into negatives at Scripps, I once again have to nitpick stuff: I don't want to have to drive or live too far from campus, and Scripps is isolated enough that it might be hard to meet people from outside the program. I think those two factors may be enough to convince me that San Diego isn't right for me in grad school, but that's not to say that Scripps is totally out. The combination of a flexible format and a laid-back environment (i.e. not Boston or New York) is pretty powerful, and I'm not sure if there's any other school that combines those things (both very important to me) as well as Scripps.

Scripps CA: My Schedule

Thursday, February 20

18:00 - 20:00    Dinner with Students at Cozymel's

Friday, February 21

08:00 - 08:45    Breakfast at Scripps Faculty Club
08:45 - 09:45    Program Overview by Deans
10:00 - 10:30    Interview #1: Peter Schultz
10:40 - 11:10    Interview #2: Jamie Williamson
11:20 - 11:50    Interview #3: Evan Powers
12:00 - 13:10    Lunch with Faculty in Beckman Atrium
13:20 - 13:50    Interview #4: Phil Baran
14:00 - 14:30    Interview #5: Ryan Shenvi
14:40 - 15:10    Interview #6: Tobin Dickerson
15:20 - 15:50    Interview #7: Phil Dawson
16:00 - 17:00    Free Time for Additional Interviews or Lab Tours
17:00 - 19:00    Reception and Dinner in Beckman Atrium
19:30 - 23:00    Drinks and Snacks with Students at Karl Strauss Brewery

Saturday, February 22

09:00 - 12:00    Breakfast with Faculty at Hotel
12:30 - 18:00    Kayaking in La Jolla Cove
18:30 - 23:00    Dinner and Drinks with Students at PB AleHouse

Harvard: My Visit

The Program:

Prior to this visit, my only interaction with any current Harvard graduate students in chemistry was with one member of Tobias Ritter's lab, which is about as traditional as a synthetic chemistry lab can get: 12-hour workdays, sink-or-swim environment, tough but fair leadership. Combine that with the name, and I was expecting Harvard's Chemical Biology program to be rigid, stuck-up, and overall unappealing. I was wrong. As it turns out, the Chemical Biology track at Harvard offers what may end up being the most diverse offering of biochemistry-related research opportunities in the country. Students have full access to faculty at the Graduate School of Arts and Science, the Medical School, the Broad Institute, and Harvard-affiliated labs at Massachusetts General Hospital. Rotations are fundamental to the program, and almost every student I talked to has spent time at labs all over Boston. The curriculum is a little less flexible, and I did hear some complaints that the coursework is pretty much all med chem and drug development, which for an inorganic/nano person may be a bit frustrating. But Dan Kahne and Suzanne Walker (who are conveniently not just department co-chairs, but also husband and wife) stressed that the program didn't push its students in any one direction with respect to research or career interests, and at Harvard funding never seems to be an issue when you're looking for a lab that's taking new students. Most surprising to me was the fact that all the faculty I met with, including ones whose lab environments lean toward the intense side, were all very down to earth. Same for the students, who claimed to be happier than the average CCB (that's the traditional Chemistry and Chemical Biology department) student.

The Environment:

As a Boston native, I can get a bit desensitized to this city, but there's no denying that, if you're interested in chemical biology research, this is basically the Mecca. From a things-to-do perspective, Harvard Square has plenty of great places to eat and drink, Central Square is essentially the pseudo-hipster party capitol of Boston, and the Broad connection allows Harvard to extend its reach down to the potentially classier Kendall Square area. Because of the wide range of lab offerings, the program is split between Cambridge, the Longwood Area, and to a lesser extent the West End (MGH). Most of the students I spoke to live around Porter or Harvard Square, but there are plenty of instances of people moving down to Coolidge Corner or JP. The campus housing is oddly far from campus, pretty expensive ($2,250/month for a two-bedroom apartment), and not overwhelmingly nice. The convenience factor is slightly mitigated by the fact that the Harvard housing website also matches students living off-campus who are looking for housing. There is a funky live-in tutor situation where students can live in dorms and tutor undergrads on their floor, but it seemed that finding an apartment was the way to go. There are multiple second-year apartments made up of exclusively Chemical Biology students, so the community factor is still accessible off-campus. No one I spoke to at Harvard had a car, and classes take place in both Cambridge and Longwood, so the M2 bus between the Main Campus and the Med School seems to be a big part of every student's experience. One big piece of advice that stuck was to time the rotations so that you work in an HMS lab while taking classes down there, and vice versa. The bus, apparently, can be a bit of a time suck. And while the T isn't as robust as the New York Subway, it's still nice to be able to use public transportation to get around. Of course, Boston isn't perfect. The weather was about as representatively nasty as you could hope for: wintry mix on Thursday, snow on Saturday. But hey, you don't want to sugar-coat things for the interviewees, right?

The Visit:

Format-wise, the Harvard interview day was much heavier on the interviewing than TPCB. We each met with five faculty (instead of three at TPCB) and didn't get any fancy poster sessions or lectures tossed in. The interviewees were split between the Medical campus and the Main campus in the morning, and they switched after lunch. I had three interviews in Cambridge in the morning and then two in Longwood in the afternoon, each session lasting about 30 minutes. To make up for the long day, Harvard pulled out all the stops on the wining and dining front. We went out for basically every meal (excluding breakfast on Friday), and every restaurant was top-notch. We ended the interviews on Friday at the weekly Harvard Chemical Biology Happy Hour at HMS, then immediately headed back to Cambridge for a cocktail hour and dinner in a private room at Catalyst (which Stuart Schreiber may or may not have had a hand in naming, depending on who you believe). We also got a tour of the Broad from a fifth-year student who is exactly the type I would expect to see there: geeky, gregarious, and extremely excited about automation, with a killer Stuart Schreiber impression to boot. Inevitably, I'm going to end up comparing this visit to TPCB since that's my only other reference point so far, so I'll reel off two major differences that stuck out: first, the interviewee to grad student ratio at Harvard was absurdly small. Only 10 of us came to this weekend, and there was a constant stream of grad students at our disposal. I feel like I got a better impression of the environment at Harvard after one night than I got of TPCB over the course of the whole weekend. There is a bit of a caveat to the grad student representation at these events, though: their participation seemed fully voluntary, which basically meant that my interaction was essentially limited to first- and second-years, as they seemed to be the only ones with sufficient time and energy to hang with the recruits on a Friday night. This actually ties into my second observation, which is that Harvard's interview weekend was, perhaps counter-intuitively, much looser than TPCB's. It was pretty clear that TPCB had tried hard to get students from across the years to meet with us, and the whole program there seemed planned and polished, with Derek Tan's elevator pitches sporadically penetrating the week's events. Harvard, on the other hand, didn't seem to be gearing up to receive us in any way, shape or form. We were at least 30 minutes late to dinner on Thursday, Dan and Suzanne's program overview on Friday morning had significantly more banter than advertisement, and for the most part, the students at the party on Saturday seemed gave the impression that that wasn't just a one-off kind of event. It's possible that the casualness could come off as stand-offish (we're Harvard, we don't need or want you anyway), but for me it was kind of humanizing.

The Faculty:

Harvard's reputation in chemistry is largely built on the quality of its biochemistry and organic synthesis labs, so it stands to reason that the Chemical Biology faculty are basically killing it all around. From the outset, I felt like Harvard was just in a slightly higher league. Whereas at TPCB, my interview conversations were pretty general, but with both Emily Balskus and Ralph Mazitschek, we pretty quickly got into more intense discussions of chemistry. Nathanael Gray talked a lot about his time in industry and the drawbacks of the Broad (which essentially mirrored Mike Foley's talking points at TPCB), and Tim Mitchison spent most of the interview spitballing about his thoughts on the state of immunochemical cancer therapy. Overall, everyone was friendly and very excited about their research. I sat between Steve Haggarty and Emily Balskus at dinner on Friday, and what could have been an awkward meal ended up being extremely pleasant: I chatted with Steve about HDACs, Tau, and other brain stuff. And Emily talked about her husband's chicken beer brewing project, which is exactly what it sounds like -- apparently at some point in human history someone decided that her pint of ale would be perfect with just a little more poultry flavor. Of course, Harvard's heaviest hitters didn't show up to any of the events, but outside of potentially doing a rotation in Schreiberia at some point, I can't really see myself going out of my way to hang with the likes of Jacobsen or Nocera anyway. So while I knew coming in that Harvard's faculty were doing great things, it was nice to see that they were also pretty good people, at least when in recruitment mode.

The Students:

As I mentioned above, I had a pretty good amount of interaction with the current first- and second-years at Harvard, and I think I've got the general mindset there pretty well pinned down: "I'm at a top-tier research institution for my PhD, and that means I'm going to have to work my ass off. But considering that fact, I'm happy that I decided to work my ass off in this place." I think this may end up being a running theme for all the schools I visit. When it comes to the tippy-top-tier research institutions, you have to rely on other barometers than research to make a decision. When I asked what put Harvard over the top, the big buzzwords that came up were rotations and flexibility, with an added nod to Boston for being more fun and traversable than, say, Palo Alto or Pasadena. It also bears mentioning that the students really drove home the point that labs at Harvard never rejected students for lack of funding, and the Chemical Biology program seemed to have a pretty solid track record as far as making sure its students ended up in the labs they wanted. This may be true at other places I visit, but it was still nice to hear. The second-years in particular seemed to be a very tight-knit group, and personality-wise I think a lot of them were people I could see myself hanging out with in a more generalized context. By and large, the first-years seemed a bit more reserved and a bit less cohesive, but there were still cool people among that group. If I stayed in Boston, I would have a non-Harvard group built in already, but it seems that, for the most part, people's social lives, like everything else in their lives, revolves around the program and the wider graduate school community at Harvard.

The Cohort:

With a smaller group of interviewees, the dynamic was certainly very different at Harvard. More than at TPCB, I was aware of the fact that this group might be a poor representation of who my fellow first-years would be at Harvard, largely because our interview group made up significantly less than half of the total number of interviewees. But overall, I think my interactions with the group were pretty positive. Definitely a geeky group, but that's far from surprising, and in reality right up my alley. Everyone seemed to be excited about their research but not totally incapable of talking about other things. There was a big Boston contingent for this weekend, so I was able to talk to both grad students and interviewees about life in Boston, familiar landmarks, things to do, and the like. 

The Impression:

I have to say that Harvard was an overwhelmingly pleasant surprise. I applied there largely as an afterthought, just because, you know, it's Harvard. But the Chemical Biology program there is in a lot of ways exactly the kind of program I'm looking for: a diverse array of lab environments (all of them good) with a heavy focus on rotations. In any case, it says a lot that my only major reserve in regard to the program is spending five more years in Boston. Despite the weekend being pretty low key, I don't have as much confidence that I'll get into Harvard, but if the cards fall that way, it's definitely emerging as an early frontrunner.

Harvard: My Schedule

Thursday, February 13

19:00 - 21:00    Dinner with Students at Orinoco in Harvard Square

Friday, February 14

09:00 - 09:50    Breakfast with Suzanne Walker and Dan Kahne in Converse
10:00 - 10:30    Interview #1: Emily Balskus
10:40 - 11:10    Interview #2: David Liu
11:20 - 11:50    Interview #3: Ralph Mazitschek
12:00 - 13:50    Dinner with Students and Faculty at Harvest
14:00 - 14:40    Travel to Harvard Medical School
15:00 - 15:30    Interview #4: Nathanael Gray
15:40 - 16:10    Interview #5: Tim Mitchison
16:30 - 17:50    Happy Hour at Harvard Medical School
18:30 - 21:00    Dinner with Students and Faculty at Catalyst

Saturday, February 15

12:00 - 13:30    Brunch with students at Area Four
13:30 - 14:30    Tour of the Broad Institute
14:30 - 15:30    Tour of Student Apartments at Peabody Terrace
15:30 - 16:00    Hot Chocolate at LA Burdick's
19:00 - 23:00    Dinner and Party at Student Apartment

TPCB: My Visit

The Program: The Program in Chemical Biology is a joint PhD program through Weill Cornell Medical College, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Rockefeller University. The span of York Avenue from about 60th to 70th Avenue is basically all under the umbrella of those three institutions, and Hunter College is a couple blocks west. TPCB takes in 6 to 10 students per year, allows them to rotate at labs at all three institutions, and gives what might be the best stipend I've seen without any teaching requirement attached. TPCB has been around for about a dozen years, making it one of, if not the, longest running chemical biology PhD programs in the world. Derek Tan from Weill Cornell is currently the program director, and Scott Blanchard from Sloan and Tarun Kapoor from Rockefeller are also on the administrative team. If you end up doing your graduate work in a Cornell or Sloan lab, you'll get a degree from Cornell, while Rockefeller grants a degree if you work in one of their labs (apparently, if you end up doing your research at Rockefeller, they'll gradually turn you into one of their students, reducing your rent cost and stipend and integrating you into more Rockefeller graduate programming).

The Environment: New York is, well, New York. It's an amazing and exhausting city, but one thing I will say for this program (and Columbia may be structured this way as well) is that the location of the schools, if not a full-on campus, does feel removed from the city proper. York Avenue is significantly quieter than First, and the subsidized housing is very student-heavy. Actually, the subsidized housing may be the greatest thing about this program, because it takes what is probably my biggest qualm about living in New York and turns it into a huge plus. We toured a Rockefeller apartment right next to the 59th Street Bridge that had a huge amount of space and cost about $700/month. Apparently the apartment selection is a bit of a crapshoot, and it's more expensive at the other campuses, but a small studio for under $1,000/month still sounds like a steal on the Upper East Side. Of course, there are some other weird things about going to school in New York. Security is pretty omnipresent, and pretty much all of the labs are built vertically -- work at Sloan and you may have to add a couple more minutes to your commute as the elevator stops at every floor on the way to the 20th (they build the chemistry labs at the top of the buildings to minimize fume hood costs). But this is a program that includes two campuses that have built $600-million-plus buildings in the last five years. So for resources at that level, a longer elevator ride may be a decent trade-off.

The Visit: New York should be one of the easiest places in the country for a visiting weekend because there's so damn much going on. Oddly, though, TPCB chose to limit the city exploration and had us stay on campus for most of the visit. Our lone restaurant outing was to Maruzzella, which, according to my cousin, has the best lasagna in town (a fact that I didn't learn until after getting the salmon instead). And of all the activities we could have done in New York, bowling was a bit underwhelming at first (apparently the traditional Weill PhD program takes prospectives to a Broadway play), although the endless pitchers of beer and post-game outing to The Allie Way turned it into a pretty fun night. I had a great time wandering around the Met on Monday afternoon, dinner at Maruzzella had plenty of good Italian food, as well as the opportunity to interact some more with Derek, Tarun, and Scott. The poster session on Tuesday afternoon was pretty informative, especially thanks to Dan Heller's decision to do some matching and link me up with Kayvan Keshari for a nice conversation about Hyperpolarized MRI. Dinner on Tuesday was pretty fantastic from the food perspective: open bar, a Thai buffet and a fajita bar (just in case you were in a pregnancy-craving-level weird appetite mood), and macarons for dessert. We had assigned seats, and I lucked out in my arrangement, sitting with Heller and Nobel-laureate-in-residence Rod MacKinnon. That made for some great conversation, and I have to say that they managed to do a pretty good job avoiding the potential awkwardness that can accompany those kinds of faculty/interviewee meal arrangements. Now that I have a bit of perspective after visiting Harvard, I will say that the visit weekend seemed pretty big for a program of TPCB's size (all 31 interviewees there at the same time), and only having three formal interviews didn't give me a great perspective on the whole range of research going on there. But the poster session and faculty talks made up for that deficit a bit, and even though there were way more interviewees than current grad students around, I still managed to get my requisite student interaction.

The Faculty: In my interview with Sean Brady, he mentioned that this program was relatively unique in that it was built up by biologists who wanted to work with chemists rather than chemists who wanted to try their hand at biology. The benefit of that distinction, in Brady's words, is that it's a program comprised of people who are realistic about the kinds of work that can be achieved with different techniques. While this may be beneficial for the program as a whole, it does give me a bit of pause about the opportunities that are available for different kinds of chemical training compared to the other places I'm looking at. Of course, part of that perception may be my fault, as I didn't actively pursue conversations with Derek Tan or Howard Hang (two of the most synthesis-oriented PIs at TPCB). And I think TPCB is aware of this deficit, as they're putting a huge amount of energy and funding behind Mike Foley's new Therapeutic Discovery Institute at Cornell. Overall, my interactions with the faculty were pretty positive. Blanchard was very energetic and entertaining at dinner, Sean Brady is doing some very cool research, and Dan Heller was as friendly as could be. As I mentioned, he introduced me to Kayvan Keshari, who is a similarly enthusiastic young faculty member with a similarly small lab. Dinner with MacKinnon and Heller was very entertaining -- MacKinnon's definitely an old-guard biophysicist (he was concerned he had been questioned DE Shaw a little too roughly when Shaw spoke at Cornell the night before), and he had some great stories about his experience. Of course, he and Heller don't really overlap in terms of research interests, and their personalities are pretty far apart, so watching their interaction was just as enjoyable as talking to them individually. I should also mention that MacKinnon's history is emblematic of the whole TPCB approach: back in the mid-90s, Rockefeller offered him a huge amount of money to lure him away from Harvard so he could pursue a problem (potassium ion channel structure/function) that nobody thought he could solve. Well, he solved it, and that led to his Nobel Prize in 2003. Weill Cornell just pulled off a similar coup with Lew Cantley (whose Harvard lab website is still up), and I think TPCB is a perfect embodiment of New York City's attempt to compete directly with Boston and the Bay Area as a biotech hub. I don't think that this program's reputation would have the same resilience as Harvard's if someone pulled a similar move at their expense, but they seem to be building up some very strong labs in their own right.

The Students: As I said earlier, the interviewee to grad student ratio wasn't stellar for this program, so I didn't get a fantastic idea of the lifestyle for the average TPCB student. Of course, because it's a joint program, it may be safe to say that there isn't really a typical TPCB student to begin with. Overall, people seemed to be pretty happy, but (for better or worse), their social lives didn't seem to be intrinsically tied up with the program itself. It seemed that students' social lives were more shaped by the labs they worked in, and a good number of them were lifelong New Yorkers who made a definite split between their lab lives and their "outside" lives. None of this analysis contains a value judgment -- it's just something that seems to be generally true of the program. Of course, the subsidized housing arrangement makes it so that the majority of students are living with other students -- just not necessarily people from the same program. But overall, the students didn't seem to be overly stressed and had a pretty good perspective on things. They also seem to be doing relatively well research-wise (one of Derek's consistent brags was that the average TPCB graduate publishes 4 papers during their studies, and while I have no similar statistics from other institutions on hand, it sounds like a pretty good number to me).

The Cohort: One of the nice things about interviewing with 30 other people is the opportunity to interact with a bunch of other prospective grad students. Overall, the group was fairly geographically diverse (including a few international students) and friendly. I roomed with a pretty friendly Cornell senior, and while I wouldn't say that I made any lifelong friends during the three days in New York, I got along pretty well with everyone there and could see myself hanging out with the rest of the group if any of us end up going to grad school together. This visit was also my introduction to the whole shared-interview experience -- I'm pretty sure that 10 of the people who were at TPCB for this visit are going to be at Scripps with me next week. But despite the similarity of interview locations, it seemed that there were a good range of research interests represented, and it was nice to get an idea of where everyone else is at goal- and career-wise.

The Impression: Overall, TPCB is a pretty amazing program. Having a connection to three massively endowed institutions on the Upper East Side basically guarantees all the resources you could ever want, and it's amazing what a good amount of funding can do for a program. I actually got the impression that five years in the Upper East Side wouldn't be too overwhelming, so the only big question mark remaining is the research. My gut feeling is that I'm not as excited about the labs here as other programs, but we'll see how I feel after visiting the rest of these schools. Next up: Harvard.

TPCB: My Schedule

Monday, February 10

14:00 - 17:30    Tour of the Met with current students

18:15 - 20:00    Welcome Dinner with TPCB Directors at Maruzzella

Tuesday, February 11

09:00 - 09:45    Breakfast and Program Overview at Cornell Conference Room

10:00 - 10:30    Interview #1: Dan Heller

10:45 - 11:15    Tour of MSK Preclinical Radiochemistry Core

11:30 - 13:00    Lunch and Poster Session in MSK Lobby

13:15 - 13:45    Interview #2: Samie Jaffrey

14:00 - 14:30    Coffee Break at MSK

14:45 - 15:15    TPCB Student Roundtable

15:30 - 16:00    Interview #3: Sean Brady

16:15 - 17:30    Faculty Presentations: Chris Lima, Howard Hang, Lew Cantley, Mike Foley

18:00 - 19:30    Dinner at Cornell Faculty Club

20:00 - 22:00    Bowling with students at Bowlmor Lanes

Wednesday, February 12

08:30 - 09:00    Breakfast at Cornell

09:00 - 10:30    Tour of the Campuses

The Interviews: Preliminary Expectations

There seems to be a consistent belief among PhD students that the campus visit season is the best part of the PhD as a whole. While that doesn't bode all too well for the PhD experience itself, it has made me very excited and expectant for the next couple months. Some of my campus visits are interviews, and some are accepted student days, and we'll see if that affects the format and atmosphere.

I sat down with Jacob for a few minutes before my first interview in New York, and he gave me two general pieces of advice:

1. Don't be nervous or intimidated. Have conversations with everyone you meet -- students, faculty, administrators, and other interviewees. These are going to be the people you'll be surrounded with if you choose this school, and how you interact with them now may inform how you would act with them in the future. Even with the interviews, you're choosing them as much as they're choosing you.

2. When the visit's over, reflect on how you felt. Write down some quick notes as soon as the interviews done, and focus more on your comfort level than details about funding and teaching. At a certain point, you're choosing a place based on fit. Yes, that includes your relationship with your PI, but it also includes how you feel in the city, on the campus, with your peers -- the whole wider environment. You need to make sure that this is a place you can see yourself for an extended period of time.

I've heard some other bits and pieces from other people, and I think the overwhelming responses I've heard actually go back to these two points anyway. There is a distilled third point that seems to be coming through, though, and it's...

3. Enjoy yourself. These visits are designed to be fun, and with work taking up so much of your time in the next few years, there's no shame in letting your jimmies out. That's not to say that you should get hammered and start yelling at faculty (if you want to flunk the Scripps interview, that's apparently one of the few ways you can pull it off), but don't be afraid to take advantage of the wining and dining.

So that's it. The advice that I've heard pre-interview season. I'll come back at the end and see if there's any more stuff I wished I had thought of earlier, but for now these are the bits and pieces I've armed myself with beforehand. And yes, I'm excited.

The Interviews: An Introduction

In scouring the internet for a primer to chemistry grad school visits, I mostly came up empty. There are a few resources out there (see here and here), but mostly it's a wasteland. So I'm going to throw my hat into the ring now. My voice won't necessarily be typical, because I'm visiting more schools than is typical, and because I'm already out of school and therefore not doing homework in my spare time. But I think that gives me the advantage of a decent perspective on the whole process. Here's my schedule for the next couple months:

2/10 - 2/12    TPCB (Weill Cornell/Sloan Kettering/Rockefeller)
2/13 - 2/15    Harvard Chemical Biology
2/20 - 2/22    Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla)
2/27 - 2/29    Scripps Research Institute (Jupiter)
3/06 - 3/08    Columbia Chemistry
3/09 - 3/11    UCSF CCB
3/12 - 3/13    Stanford Chemistry
3/14 - 3/16    UC Berkeley Chemistry
3/20 - 3/22    Cal Tech Chemistry
3/28 - 3/30    Northwestern Chemistry
TBD             MIT Chemistry
4/15             Deadline Day!

I'll be in Chicago for the organized MIT visit day, so I have to organize my own campus visit for that program. Which thankfully won't be too hard, since I'll already be in Boston anyway. Decisions to all these places are due April 15, so I'll have a little processing time before I have to commit. The visits can be exhausting, so I'll probably need to take some time to get my thoughts in order. In the meantime, I'll try to do these updates in as real-time a way as possible. Happy reading!