Scripps FL: My Visit

The Program:

For all of the talk of collaboration and flexibility at the La Jolla campus, Scripps Jupiter seems to walk the walk at a much higher level. That seems to be part and parcel of being such a new program with such a well-regarded older brother. The program at Jupiter is younger and hungrier than its counterpart in California, and the faculty here have smaller labs and more to prove. From a logistical perspective, the program at Jupiter is identical to the setup on the West Coast. The Scripps Florida origin story (described, depending on your cynicism level, as either the "best" or "only good" thing Jeb Bush has done for the state of Florida) is another heartwarming of lay leaders putting tremendous value in the biomedical sciences: Jeb Bush, flush with a big check for post-9/11 state seed money, decided he wanted to bring biotech to Florida, and enlisted the president of Scripps to make that happen. Scripps Florida opened in 2004, and in 2009 construction of the campus as it currently stands was completed. The program is about one-third the size of La Jolla's, and it has now graduated 18 students since its inception. Because it's newer and less well-known, students are very much in demand at Scripps Florida -- Bill Roush (the program director in Jupiter) said that there are at least five fully funded yet unfilled student positions this year, and they're attempting to bump enrollment up from 12 to 20 in the coming year. Logistically, the program is identical to La Jolla's, but the desire to maintain a "one school, two campus" feel means that Jupiter students have to be brought into the fold more actively: they fly out to California for the annual student retreat, and more often than not they're on the receiving end of the bicoastal teaching system, with Pete Schultz and Floyd Romesberg's faces being beamed across the country.

The Environment:

I'm not sure how it happened, but I had never been to Florida before this weekend. I was expecting a grimier, weirder version of Southern California, but I have to admit that I was pretty impressed with my experience. To be fair, the Jupiter/West Palm area is about as nice as South Florida gets, but the same can be said of La Jolla on the West Coast. I guess Scripps just knows how to choose the nicest areas. The benefit of being in Florida, though, is that Jupiter is inexpensive enough for students to live within walking distance of campus. That's not to say they're not driving anywhere (Cheryl, the program coordinator extraordinaire, has gone so far as to get rentals for students if they don't have a car), but it does make Scripps Florida seem more livable than the California campus. There are only three buildings on campus, and while the institute owns an outrageous amount of developable land, short-term the campus is going to remain small. It is right next door to the Max Planck Institute for Neuroimaging and the FAU Biology department (as well as the Cardinals' and Marlins' Spring Training stadium), so while biotech hasn't yet descended in earnest on Jupiter, the foundation is certainly being laid. The beach is a couple miles away, and Jupiter seems to have enough reasonably priced restaurants in the area to allow students to get off campus at their own convenience.

The Visit:

Scripps Florida had a much more navigable group of recruits than Scripps California. There were 24 of us there, and once again research interests went from strict cell biology and neuroscience to organic methodology. Jupiter had also decided to keep things a little calmer on interview day, limiting the number of faculty interviews to five and including a tour of their extremely nice high throughput screening facility. Unlike the Broad tour at Harvard, we actually got to see the screening robots in action, which was about as awesome as I could have imagined. I've now seen two of the four NIH high throughput screening facilities, and I'm hoping I'll be able to tack on one more at Stanford. Otherwise, the format was pretty similar to La Jolla's: lots of wining and dining, a Saturday afternoon outing (in our case, a boat ride up the inter-coastal for all of the recruits), and a lot of free time with grad students. A couple of my interviews were joint with one other recruit, but by and large the visit felt pretty personal. Our hotel was right on the beach, so we had plenty of opportunities for night swimming, hot tubbing, and all of the other resort-like activities. I struggled much more to keep my energy level up during this visit (my guess would be too much sun and not enough sleep), so I wasn't able to tough out the late-night clubbing on Saturday this time around, but suffice it to say that there was plenty of fun to be had.

The Faculty:

If the defining character of La Jolla's faculty is their physical fitness, at Jupiter it's their downright youth. I counted at least 10 faculty there who could have easily passed for post-docs or, in some cases, grad students. I personally want to work in a relatively young faculty member's lab, but I hadn't been to a place that had such a high concentration of them. There are some drawbacks to that kind of setup: most of the faculty just starting are still looking for a second grant post-R01, so at a soft-money school like Scripps, funding isn't necessarily guaranteed. And there's always the possibility of people leaving -- two of the grad student hosts for the weekend had flown down from New York, since they had moved up there with their PI when he went to Mount Sinai. Of course, they both rushed to get their quals done at Scripps and still came back for the visitation weekend, which says a lot about their continued connection to the campus. In any case, Scripps Florida's research is still interdisciplinary and biomedically focused, but it has a slightly more translational and neuroscience-y bent thanks to the resources (i.e. the HTS facility and Max Planck) nearby. Every faculty member I interacted with came across as very laid-back and genuine, even though most of them were in the middle of a heavy research push in the beginning of their careers. Matt Disney was the only faculty member who had a noticeable edge to him, but that's pretty understandable, since he's been working with a chip on his shoulder from the outset and just now is starting to prove the RNA drug doubters wrong. From a research perspective, Disney may be the guy that I'm most excited by so far, and I think if I ended up at Scripps I would most likely end up working for him. Other than Disney (who I had lunch and dinner with on Friday), I had some very positive interactions with Tom Kodadek, Christoph Rader, Brian Paegel (during Saturday brunch), and Paul Thompson. Scripps just nabbed Scott Snyder from Columbia to round out their synthesis team, and the grad students I spoke to who had come down from New York couldn't have been happier to be in Jupiter. You could make the argument that the faculty at Scripps Florida is on a lower tier than the other campuses I've visited, but I think a large part of that has to do with how unproven most of the labs are. Disney is just starting to get major results, and a handful of other PIs there are starting to develop their own big projects. It seems that pretty much every professor I spoke to at Jupiter is consulting with some pharma company or other, and I don't think it will be long before that campus is very much on the map. Joining a program -- not just a lab -- at that stage of development, would be very exciting.

The Students:

My roommate (who is coming from a molecular biology background) and I both felt that Scripps Florida had a much cooler vibe than any of the other schools we had visited so far. That extends to the recruits as well, but it definitely seemed to characterize the majority of the students I spoke to. Whereas Scripps in La Jolla had surfing and biking, Scripps in Jupiter has boating and spear fishing. There's one student there who is known for not going out much, but only because he decided to spend all of his stipend money on a BMW two-seater. The work ethic still seems to be there -- even in Florida, you can't escape going into the lab over the weekend -- but once again the atmosphere is set up to encourage students to have lives of their own. What's more, the density of grad students and even post-docs who attended the recruiting events was pretty astounding. Each recruit had their own host who drove them around and was a constant presence at all the events, and the students were just as comfortable talking about their research as chatting about baseball. This is the only campus I've been to so far where I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be more laid-back than even the average student.

The Cohort:

Like the students, the recruits at Scripps Florida were more fun and laid-back than at any other campus I've visited so far. My roommate and I got in a nice game of pick-up basketball, a group of us went into the ocean on Friday night, and we got in a fun (but in retrospect extremely misguided) game of Red Rover on Saturday afternoon. Basically, we all came in wanting to enjoy ourselves on this visit, and we were able to do just that. There was a generally relaxed feel to the weekend, and the level of neuroticism over grad school decisions was kept fairly low. Part of that is that the bio people were on the tail end of their visits, although even the chemistry-heavy recruits seemed to be pretty laid back. Because Scripps Florida is still working on the name recognition front, the only overlap this interview weekend was with others who had been to Scripps California the week before. But I didn't get the impression that the applicant pool here was truly weaker than any other place I had visited -- once I got people talking about their research, they all had the same slightly nerdy enthusiasm and knowledge that I've noticed to be fairly characteristic of graduate school recruits.

The Impression:

If I'm being fully honest, I think the fact that I had never been to Florida before probably played the largest part in my decision to visit Scripps Jupiter. I was expecting the atmosphere here to be less impressive than in La Jolla, and from a certain perspective, I was right. The faculty aren't as well-known, the campus is smaller, and the students and post-docs have less illustrious backgrounds. And yet, over the course of the weekend, each of these potential drawbacks seemed to be turned on its head. I truly don't think it's so much the idea of being a big fish in a small pond, but instead the fact that Scripps Jupiter seems poised to make some very big moves in the near future, and there's a certain infectious energy in that kind of excitement. I felt more moved by Matt Disney's research than any other lab I visited so far, and when you toss in the lifestyle of Southern Florida (living close to campus, tropical drinks, and lots of fish), I can at least say with a high degree of confidence that I can more readily see myself at Jupiter than La Jolla. I'm still not sure how far that enthusiasm extends, but there's no denying that I came away impressed with Scripps Florida. I'll have a serious test next week, though, as I'm cramming together four very strong chemistry programs into a very short period of time. I just hope I still have energy by the time the Berkeley visit rolls around.