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.