Columbia: My Visit

The Program:

After a month of visiting chemical biology programs, I'm finally starting my tour through the more traditional chemistry schools. And Columbia's chemistry program is decidedly traditional: three semesters of TAing, six cumes (although the students don't seem too stressed about them), and zero rotations. Yet there's something a little special about Columbia within the wider context of academic chemistry -- I suppose when you own a hefty chunk of Manhattan, you have an enhanced ability to engineer your environment. The program is small and well-balanced, and even if the inter-departmental collaboration isn't as robust as some of the other programs I've seen thus far, there is a formal effort to establish more interdisciplinary connections, and certain PIs (Virginia Cornish in particular) are very proactive about pursuing shared resources. Columbia also takes its liberal arts background pretty seriously, requiring a research proposal in the fourth year that must be unrelated to your current research and housing students with members of other departments (more on that later). The most interesting aspect of the program is the "Five-Year Rule", which dictates that no PhD can take longer than five years (with the necessary flexibility put in for maternity, family emergency, etc.). I don't really think I'm at risk for the horror stories of greedy PIs keeping their students for "just one paper more", but it is nice to see a place where the "average graduation time" statistic is rendered meaningless. Columbia has a small feel, but then again, so do pretty much all of the programs I've seen so far. It may feel more special after I visit Berkeley.

The Environment:

If I'm going based on location alone, Columbia has every other school on my list beat, and it's not really close. New York is amazing, and the Upper West Side is decidedly more fun than the East. Add to that the fact that Columbia has a legitimate, self-contained campus, and you basically have the most ideal environment I can imagine in the US. TPCB had a nice, quiet location on the Upper East Side, but at the end of the day, it was still part and parcel of the wider city. Columbia, on the other hand, has a stranglehold on Morningside Heights (they're the third-largest private landowner in New York City, behind the Church and a mysterious number 2), which means that the entire area between 110th and 120th feels like a college town. Granted, it's still a big, overcrowded college town, but the student presence is definitely palpable. There's a sufficient number of Columbia-owned apartments in the area to accommodate not only the students, but the faculty as well -- I went to two faculty dinners at apartments right in Morningside Heights, and Columbia has gone so far as to open a school for staff members' children (although I'm not so sure how I feel about that). The chemistry department occupies the northwest corner of the campus, and what appears to be the only cafe on campus is located on the ground floor of one of those buildings. Columbia has all of the typical college amenities -- discounted museum and play tickets, on-campus gym, a dining hall that none of the grad students go to, etc. And then, of course, once you get outside of the Morningside bubble, you have all New York has to offer.

The Visit:

I signed up for this particular visit weekend because it included an optional extra day on Thursday for what they called an Interdisciplinary Biosciences Open House. I was expecting a pretty casual, light day, but it ended up being much more organized -- we met for lunch, then had two hours of faculty lectures (too much) and three meetings with faculty in different departments. That was all followed by a dinner with members of different departments at a faculty member's house by campus. In addition to the handful of chemical biologists, there were also a good number of biology recruits and a couple electrical engineers. Overall, it was a really pleasant day, and we were still able to join the chemists for the Thursday night festivities at Cafe Lalo (dessert) and Jake's Dilemma (drinks, and a bar that I seem to end up at every time I'm on the Upper West Side). Friday was the traditional interview date, with no set number of faculty meetings. All of the meetings I went to were joint with other students, but I didn't mind it that much this time. Again, the pressure was basically off for the weekend, so it ended up turning into some more casual conversation about research. The standard chem bio people (Virginia Cornish, Brent Stockwell, and Dali Sames) all made for nice meetings, but I also had a good conversation with Tristan Lambert on what is becoming a running concern of mine -- the balance of synthesis and biochemistry background that a good chemical biologist should bring to the table. There were two sets of faculty dinners on Friday night. I was with the synthesis (organic and inorganic) people at Jim Leighton's house, while the physical and theoretical people were off with David Reichman. I had another good conversation with Leighton on the chemical biology issue at dinner, but I mostly interacted with other recruits despite the continued faculty and student presence. As far as the fun stuff goes, I think Columbia may have put on the best showing that I've seen so far, although the students were quick to acknowledge that New York gives them a natural advantage. Still, Friday night was pretty outrageous. We went down to the West Village, first to a quintessential hipster bar that somehow managed to combine soju cocktails, ping pong tables, and live free jazz in the same basement space. From there, we headed to The Slaughtered Lamb, which sports a faux BDSM dungeon complete with fake skeletons. The big selling point of The Slaughtered Lamb is an Irish Car Bomb chugging contest, which results in a belt-whipping for the loser. So it was far from a tame night. Those of us who were able to wake up got a full campus tour (again emphasizing Columbia's tight-knit campus) and student apartment tour on Saturday morning, and then we capped off the visit with Pippin on Broadway (which I had been dying to see and greatly enjoyed). The one quirk of the visit was that we stayed at a hotel down on 75th and Broadway, which made for a lot of subway rides between locations. But they did provide us with a $10 metro card and a very legitimate-looking guide to New York City, so we didn't suffer too much.

The Faculty:

I can probably see myself working at fewer labs at Columbia than any other school I've visited so far, but the ones that I liked are really doing quality work. What's more (and probably most important) is that the faculty are all very relatable, enjoyable people to talk to. Virginia Cornish is probably the most intense person I spoke to at Columbia, but a lot of that comes from her just being a fairly stereotypical Type A New Yorker (despite hailing from Savannah, Georgia). In visiting so many less academic programs during the chemical biology visits, I forgot how fundamental the desire to be a mentor is for college professors. Everyone at Columbia made me genuinely feel that they were invested in their students' success, and that made for an incredibly congenial and cooperative environment. By the same token, the faculty really try to keep the labs small. I think 20 is about as large as it gets, but 10 to 15 seems to be more common. The drawback to this setup is that a lot of faculty really do put a cap on the number of the students they take from year to year. Funding can also fluctuate a little more at a place like Columbia than at a heavier research institution, and I heard from multiple labs that their labs had struggled at various points (the Sames lab appears to be at the tail end of a dry spell right now). Virginia's one criticism of the program is that their resources don't always compare to larger programs, but I'm hoping that, as Columbia's new research institutes start going online (they're just finishing a new neuroscience center on 125th Street), some of that will change. So Columbia is basically a strongly academic program, with all of the goods (small, community-driven labs) and bads (fewer resources) that entails.

The Students:

If I hadn't been to Scripps Florida, I would have said that Columbia's students were hands-down the happiest group of PhD candidates I had seen yet. And those of my fellow recruits who hadn't been to Scripps Florida (i.e. all of them) seemed to think the same thing. I had really expected to see New York have the opposite effect, with the general intensity and fast pace of the city leading to a stress-laden lifestyle. But it seems that the Morningside bubble keeps the campus community very strong. The students all know and hang out with each other, and they don't allow research to rule their lives. I think this may go back to the atmosphere of having New York so readily available without being totally immersed in the local culture. Students live within a ten-block radius of campus, so taking the subway becomes associated with going out, and the Columbia area becomes more of a neighborhood. Everyone I talked to at Columbia seemed to have a good relationship with their peers and their PI, and multiple hosts (we each had our own host who walked us around on Friday) said that their primary interest in meeting the recruits was to make sure that people they liked ended up coming to Columbia. Again, people at Columbia are working hard, but I appreciate the emphasis on a comfortable social culture there. 

The Cohort:

The Columbia visit gave me my first set of interactions with people interested in things other than organic synthesis and biochemistry, which was a little refreshing. That being said, I seemed to find myself hanging out with a lot of other chemical biologists anyway. It was easy to see that Columbia had done a good job engineering the range of interests in the class, so there seemed to be a good balance of materials and small molecules, theory and experiment, energy and medicine, etc. The recruits in New York were also pretty laid back, and everyone I spoke to seemed to be looking for the community feel that Columbia emphasized. Some of the faculty meetings I attended were pretty quiet -- I'm not sure if people were intimidated by the group interview style or the faculty themselves -- but everyone was very engaged with the grad students and faculty during the more informal events of the day. I could see myself hanging out with a lot of the other recruits I talked to, but it's unclear whether any of us are actually choosing Columbia.

The Impression:

Columbia is a special place. Everything on the lifestyle front is pretty perfect there (although Tri-I may have the apartment situation beat), and there is a great group of PIs on campus. The problem with that liberal arts feel, though, is that the research environment may be a little too regressive for me. Virginia Cornish seemed to be the only PI I spoke to who was really pushing her students to publish early and often, and while I'm sure I would be happy in her lab, I've had the dangers emphasized enough to know that I shouldn't choose a school for one person (especially someone who's supply definitely doesn't meet her demand for student spots). The Columbia visit definitely made me rethink New York, though, and I'd be surprised if Tri-I and Columbia don't end up on my short list thanks to the city.