Stanford: My Visit

The Program:

When my dad was in my shoes some 30-odd years ago, he chose Stanford over Berkeley because he felt that Cal was too traditional. Stanford certainly has a reputation for being the lifeblood of silicon valley's emergent technologies, and the chemistry department seems to share in that spirit. Harvard may be the only other place where the faculty made the explicit statement that they don't push their students in any one direction because of the numbers of graduates who do end up going into "unexpected" fields like government and finance. I talked to a theoretical chemistry grad student who was, in his words, getting through his early 20s so he could get a job in computational finance and a student who had pored over the list of "courtesy" faculty until he found a biomaterials lab in the med school doing suitable work for his PhD. So flexibility is ingrained in the Stanford culture, and the chemistry department is incredibly flexible for a traditional chemistry program. But it is still a very traditional chemistry program -- qualifying exams, two to four quarters of TAing depending on your funding, and even entrance exams that may lead to some remedial coursework if you fail -- and I'm becoming increasingly aware of the fact that a traditional chemistry program isn't really what I'm looking for. The department doesn't advertise programs like SPARK that are ingrained in the biosciences recruitment, and there are remnants of classical ivory tower chemistry programs like a literature presentation in the second year that must be unrelated to students' research. After spending a lot of time at newer chemical biology programs that cut out a lot of the fat, it's hard to adjust to the sorts of requirements that seem to pervade the standard chemistry curriculum (although Columbia has already done a pretty good job adjusting). That being said, the only real difference between chemistry and chemical and systems biology (the other program I was considering at Stanford) is the lack of rotations. Thanks to dual and courtesy appointments, Stanford's chemistry department extends across the med school, the engineering departments, materials science, and biology. Collaboration is still very much the name of the game, and students seem to be able to get into pretty much any lab they care to enter. So while the people I talked to may be right in saying that I should have applied to CSB, the chemistry department at Stanford is still a decent jumping off point.

The Environment:

Palo Alto is a classic California town that was basically put up in a very planned manner and cost a few rich moguls a whole boatload of money. Stanford gave me a "too perfect, too pristine" vibe when I visited before undergrad, and I'm happy to report that nothing has really changed. From Palm Drive to the main quad to the gorgeous mission-style architecture, Stanford is impeccably beautiful. When we went up Hoover Tower as part of the campus tour, I asked the elevator operators if Stanford's campus had any quirks (akin to UCSF's freezer art), and they were entirely non-plussed. Stanford is a lot of things, but quirky doesn't seem to be one of them. Likewise, the town of Palo Alto is vibrant and well-manicured, but overwhelmingly boutique and punctuated by reminders (like the SurveyMonkey headquarters across from the police station) that you are definitely in Silicon Valley. Basically, Stanford and Palo Alto are Pomona and Claremont on steroids, but Cal Train is better at getting you out than the Metro. A lot of students do find the need to get out, moving down to San Jose or even as far as San Francisco (thanks to an express Cal Train that can get you to Palo Alto in 35 minutes, it's actually a doable commute). Palo Alto straddles the border between college town and livable suburb, with the scales tipping more toward classy cocktail places than dive bars. But the nightlife seems pretty solid in town, and if you ever get bored, Cal Train runs until midnight, and Stanford is an open-container campus. In fact, it seemed that the grad students got a very good amount of mileage out of the campus housing life, with grad student house parties occurring regularly and the chem department putting on a Saturday morning tailgate before (free) football games on Saturday mornings. All in all, life in Palo Alto seems to be pretty good, and there's no doubt that it's about as pretty a place as I can imagine to do research (although the bio and engineering departments are significantly outclassing chemistry on the state-of-the-art building front).

The Visit:

Stanford's official visit lasted, quite legitimately, one day. All of the Wednesday events were optional, and dinner wasn't provided (I ended up going into town and getting some Indian food informally with a few students and prospies). I would have liked to have gotten another casual day to interact with faculty and students, but Stanford did a decent job packing everything into Thursday. And I'm glad I got to take advantage of the informal Wednesday events -- first the weekly "grab a fistful of donuts and a coffee" chemistry social, followed by a fantastic theoretical synthetic chemistry lecture by the great Ken Houk (who collaborates with Paul Wender and Bob Weymouth like crazy). As far as Thursday goes, it made for a long day. Stanford turned each faculty meeting into a bit of a marathon: each lasted an hour, but it actually turned out well, with the time split between talking to faculty, meeting students, and touring the labs. The meetings were joint, with as many as six students in the room at the same time, but I didn't mind it too much. Stanford also punctuated the meetings with a campus tour, which provided somewhat of a recharge before the afternoon sessions, and the post-meeting poster session took place outside on a balcony, which is a move that most programs wouldn't be able to pull off. After going to a couple less formal dinners at Columbia and UCSF, Stanford went back to the "potentially awkward social engineering" approach, giving prospies, students, and faculty assigned seats at a great Mexican restaurant in town. I sat next to Lynette Cegelski, who was incredibly nice but nearly impossible to hear thanks to a low-talker/loud restaurant combination. The students took us out to a bar afterwards, and a few of the younger faculty tagged along, although as far as I know no one was able to convince Noah Burns to ride the mechanical bull (which wouldn't be all that surprising if he hadn't just gotten a Macklemore haircut after losing a bet with one of his students). Overall, it was a fun visit, if too short. I should also mention the ongoing tension between the Stanford night and Berkeley morning -- while the students tried hard to keep us out, upwards of a dozen of us had to catch the shuttle to Berkeley (provided by Stanford) at 6:30 a.m., which meant we had to cut the night short before it reached epic proportions.

The Faculty:

Stanford's chemistry department is probably a little less tight-knit than the other programs I've visited in this whirlwind tour, but there's no question that the research is phenomenal. Personal styles seem to run the gamut, with Hongjie Dai and Paul Wender occupying the opposite extremes of hands-on (Dai) vs. hands-off (Wender). Wender, for his part, is inspiring to listen to (we can solve every medical problem on earth with small molecules!), and the rest of my faculty meetings were similarly enjoyable. Bianxiao Cui is doing some really cool optogenetics work, Hongjie Dai has some very cool ideas for red-shifted fluorescence imagine, and Eric Kool has an awesome DNA synthesis platform. I brought my typical chemical biology questions to Justin Du Bois, who's in the relatively initial stages of adding a heavy chemical biology component to his toxin synthesis and told me he genuinely felt that he would have benefited from more exposure to biology earlier in his career. Of course, he made the argument that Stanford (while it may not be unique) has given him the resources to expand his toolbox thanks to collaborations with industry and the medical school. Paul Wender has also made a career out of the same types of collaboration (although I did hear that his entrepreneurialism leads to a lot more patent applications than publications for his students), along with the rest of the faculty I spoke to. Wender's lab is on the larger size for Stanford, but even his fluctuates between 20 and 25 students, which is still manageable. I didn't extend beyond the chemistry department, but I talked to another chemical biology person who met exclusively with courtesy faculty. I think I'm going to need to scan through those ranks before I make any decision on Stanford (the real problem with not being able to rotate).

The Students:

Stanford students are definitely happy, and I think I got along with them pretty well. The running theme seems to be that, in places where I'm expecting students to have some sort of edge to them (in this case some level of snootiness), they end up being very down-to-earth and friendly. I think there may just be a limit to how intense the average chemistry PhD student can really be (although there are no doubt some exceptions to the rule in every class). Most of the students (and faculty) get around by bike, and there seems to be a relatively even split on the car front. The majority still live in campus housing, but as time goes on it seems that more and more trickle off outside of Palo Alto. But the benefit of being in a relatively small town with a strong campus culture is that regular bar nights and outings seem to be pretty ingrained. Some labs did feel a little more self-contained, but I think the chemistry program is pretty broadly cohesive, and Stanford has the same set-up as Columbia in that you can end up living with grad students in any program (although I got the feeling that the chemists preferred to band together at Stanford). I wouldn't say I got as much of a warm-and-cozy feel as at Columbia, but I could certainly be happy with this group at Stanford.

The Cohort:

Stanford coordinates its visits with Berkeley, which means four visiting weekends for a program that's about half the size of Cal's. So I was expecting a relatively small group, but there were about 30 or 35 of us there on Thursday. This may explain why there are so many first-years (55!) at Stanford, but it didn't feel like an overwhelmingly large group. Once again, the overlap on these visits is getting a little crazy, but I still met a few new people, including yet another Pomona senior who ended up in a couple faculty meetings with me. It's becoming harder to characterize the students visiting a particular school, because at this point a lot of people are just visiting all of them. I will say that some seemed more enamored with Stanford than others, and I think it's going to become clearer where people are going to end up as the visits go on. I'm now getting more bummed that I won't be at MIT's weekend, since it looks like that will be the capstone for quite a few people that I've been doing these visits with. As things start winding down, it's going to be interesting to see the specific programs that people find appealing. In any case, I've hung out with a lot of the people on the Stanford visit enough to know that I would be okay going to school with most of them.

The Impression:

Oh, Stanford. What amounted to a pretty fun visit may be undone by my realization that I would probably need to rotate in order to decide on a lab here. It doesn't really help that Wender (probably my favorite PI at Stanford) often likes incoming students to commit to his lab early. But these are the kinds of factors that affect decisions. I will say that my concerns coming into the visit -- the comparative isolation of Palo Alto in the Bay Area, the Stanford attitude -- ended up being moot points. The students are friendly, the area is enjoyable, and San Francisco is probably about as accessible as it would be from Berkeley. I still would have liked more time to talk to faculty casually, but what can you do? Stanford at least seems confident enough in their one-day visit to bring in enough students (although it can't hurt that they're sending a bunch of people up to Berkeley with hangovers). One more visit left on the whirlwind week, and I'm still feeling pretty good.