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.