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.