UC Berkeley: My Visit

The Program:

Berkeley was my top choice on paper, and I don't think that's too uncommon. Apparently they got 900 applications this year, which means that that's a pretty good estimate for how many people are looking to enter chemistry PhD programs in the US -- after all, there probably aren't too many who aren't applying to Cal. As tar as I know, it's the biggest chemistry program in the country, with the resources that accompany that billing. Berkeley's chemistry department has 400 to 500 grad students and 800 undergraduates, which means not only that the shared facilities are well-equipped, but that many labs have the ability to expand to fairly ridiculous proportions. All of the chemical biology labs seem to have their hands in a bunch of different areas of chemistry, but they still maintain some very strong collaborative ties. This is actually one of the most impressive aspects of Berkeley's program: they've maintained their top spot on the chemistry rankings by maintaining a higher level of flexibility than any traditional chemistry program I've seen. There are no coursework requirements, no entrance exams, and no thesis defense (!). I spoke to Evan Miller at length (more on that), and he said that he's on a committee that's even trying to make rotations a fundamental part of the chemistry program. If you do want to rotate these days, though, you can sign up for the Chemical Biology track, which requires three rotations in the first year and has no other deviation from the traditional chemistry program. It's certainly not explicitly stated, but Berkeley does seem to have a more academic bent than the other programs I've visited on this trip. To be sure, certain labs have industry collaborations in place, but most of the faculty I spoke to seemed perfectly content to have companies pick up their lead compounds without bringing themselves into the picture. Those chemistry rankings almost universally come from academia, so it may be somewhat of a vicious circle of professorial ambitions, but there are twice as many Berkeley grads in current faculty positions than any other program (with a much more respectable gender ratio than anyone else as well), so maybe that academic focus isn't such a bad thing.

The Environment:

Going from Palo Alto to Berkeley is like entering a different world. Silicon Valley is fairly conservative by California standards, and Berkeley is, well, an interesting place. Let's just say that there aren't many places you can get a seytan Philly Cheese "Steak" at a brew pub (actually pretty tasty) or where the lines are literally around the block for the opening of a Wes Anderson movie (pretty fun). The difference extends to the campus as well -- while Cal is still pretty majestic, it doesn't have the same manicured beauty as Stanford, and it's definitely more cramped. I'm pretty sure that, despite having at least twice as many students, Cal's campus is actually smaller than Stanford's. Berkeley, though, is a bigger city, and it has enough going on to keep you engaged without needing to go across the Bay Bridge. Berkeley is famous for its homeless, hippies, and homeless hippies, but it's actually a remarkably diverse city, with the slummier areas located south and west of campus, and the nice neighborhoods typically to the north. Housing isn't provided for students, but Berkeley is similar to Boston in that there's constant turnover from graduating students, and it doesn't seem to be particularly find a place that's walking distance from campus. Rent is typical for the Bay Area, but I talked to several students who didn't have any problem landing a shared apartment with rent around $800/month. The stipend (a little on the low side at $29,750/year) comes with a Berkeley/Oakland bus pass and access to the campus gyms, although one of the drawbacks of going to a big school is that the gyms are pretty consistently packed to the gills. With so many students around, Berkeley definitely feels like more of a college town than any other place I've been to so far, and I'm not quite sure whether that's a good thing or bad thing at this moment. The nightlife there does seem to be a little lacking considering how young the city is, but I guess there's always BART. That being said, it did seem like an outing to San Francisco was, by and large, a real outing -- being closer than Stanford may not actually precipitate more trips to the city. I also talked to one of the grad students about Jewish life, and he said that students pretty typically joined a synagogue in Berkeley, which is a bit different from the minyan-heavy experience I'm used to in Boston right now.

The Visit:

Berkeley put together a relatively bizarre interview day. I guess with the sheer number of faculty with crazy schedules, they had to do some manipulating to get everyone an appointment with the labs they wanted. Everyone was on a different schedule, some with 15-minute meetings, half-hour lunches, and randomly interspersed free blocks. We did have student hosts for the whole day, so we at least had a guide hanging out with us the whole time. And my schedule was comparatively simple: I had hour-long meetings with the Changs in the morning, a full hour at the post-lunch poster session, and three 45-minute meetings in the afternoon. There's also apparently something known as "Berkeley time", where every class (and, on this weekend, meeting) starts exactly when the previous class ends, which gives everyone involved a 10-minute grace period before things actually start, so people had a tendency to trickle in at random points during faculty meetings. My host was a fifth-year in the Francis lab, and she took me to a noodle place in the "Asian Ghetto" (as opposed to the Gourmet Ghetto -- it's basically a little plaza with a bunch of cheap restaurants) for lunch and on an impromptu campus tour before the poster session. Similarly to Columbia, we had dinner at different faculty members's houses, with half going to Matt Francis's house up in the hills, and the other half going with Phil Geissler. We drove to the house separately, and there was some debate over which bar to head to after dinner (Kip's or Thalassa), so the bar night on Friday ended up being a bit disjointed, which was too bad. This is probably irrelevant for the visit writ large, but I will say that Berkeley had the most entertaining orientation session of any place that I've visited so far. Francis and Geissler had a nice bit of chemistry going during the whole presentation, and Geissler in particular had some very solid cracks. Saturday was pretty fun -- Donatela Bellone, a third-year in Felix Fischer's lab, gave a pretty impressive short talk about her work (the physical chemists heard from someone in Ronald Cohen's lab), and then we split up into groups to go hiking (including myself) or into Berkeley or San Francisco. I got to spend some time with family in the evening, which capped off a pretty nice visit.

The Faculty:

Berkeley has a bit of mega-lab reputation, and talking to the faculty there, you can understand why. People like Matt Francis, Chris Chang, and Carolyn Bertozzi give you the impression that they do pretty much everything under the sun, and to be honest that may not be far from the truth. Cal was the first place I visited where everyone I spoke to seemed to be pretty conversant in PET, although I'm sure it doesn't hurt that my current PI was in Francis's lab back in the day. Unfortunately, Bertozzi and Michelle Chang were in Davis for a conference, so I met with their students instead of them personally. According to the Bertozzi lab members, I missed the opportunity to speak to a veritable goddess of chemistry, but I guess I'll leave that as motivation to come back to Cal. The faculty I did speak to were all fantastic. I got a couple good stories about my PI from Matt Francis, who is a really nice, fun guy in general. Chris Chang is a bit more subdued, but incredibly bright. I've heard he's hands-on to a point that can get a bit overwhelming, but there's no doubt that his research is fantastic. One of the post-docs in my current lab did her PhD with Chris, and she had great things to say about Evan Miller, so I was excited to meet with him before coming to Cal, and he didn't disappoint. Miller is just starting out and has a brand new (and spotless) lab, but he comes off as an incredibly nice guy -- I have a hard time seeing him being too intense of a pre-tenure professor to work for, but he's definitely doing some pretty cool research (Cal basically has him spearheading the brain-mapping initiative through some innovative fluorophore/molecular wire setups). Every one of the faculty I spoke to had some strong collaborations in place across different departments, and they seemed to have enough going on in their labs to the point where students could pick and choose what balance of techniques they want, something I'd be happy to have at my disposal. We went hiking with Felix Fischer and Tom Maimone on Saturday, and they were both pretty relaxed, nice guys, albeit with a mild synthetic chemistry edge to them. It may not be all that surprising considering how many faculty are around at Cal, but I could see myself working in quite a few labs here.

The Students:

Berkeley is big, which means that it's a little hard to get a general handle on the student personalities there. I think the reality is that, once the program hits a few hundred students, there are enough people around that you don't feel the need to be hanging out with everyone. The students all had their own friend groups, with more inter-lab cross-talk than I was expecting. I think the chemical biology program helps with this, as it at least allows some students to interact with other labs. Berkeley also does a pretty great job of providing organized social programs, including a weekly Friday kegger in the summer, holiday parties, and a lab-by-lab softball league (if you want to get the stereotypes out of the way, the synthetic jocks get very drunk and very competitive, the theoreticians are bad, and Carolyn Bertozzi's lab is consistently and categorically terrible). This means that there's a solid core of students who show up to all these events, but another core of people who you may never meet during your time in grad school. So while cohesiveness isn't totally Berkeley's strength, I did get the impression that it wouldn't be hard to have a solid social life on campus. For the umpteenth time on my visits, the students here pulled out the "work-hard-play-hard" line, which I guess means that most students do things that aren't chemistry with some level of consistency. Unfortunately, the sports culture isn't as ingrained at Berkeley as Stanford (according to Fischer, students need to pay for tickets to football games, but there are usually seats because the team kind of sucks), but I think that's another area that's there if you want it. In fact, the "get-the-experience-you-want" attitude seemed to pervade a lot of Berkeley's personality -- you can take and TA the classes you want (at least after the first semester, when the organic people are TAing Orgo and the physical people are TAing Gen Chem), do the kind of research you're interested in within your lab, and structure the rest of your time according to your interests. To be fair, that's grad school, but I think the resources and flexibility at Berkeley seem to make that feeling a bit more apparent.

The Cohort:

I have to admit that, after 10 days of non-stop campus visitation, the usual conversations started to get a little tiring toward the end of the Berkeley visit. Other than one other Pomona grad (we seem to be getting pretty prolific on these visits), I'm not sure if I met any new people on this visit, although that may again come down to my general social burnout. The general feeling at Berkeley was that it's great but really big. One of the theoretical guys I talked to came out of his meetings a little overwhelmed at how many different types of theoretical chemistry existed at Berkeley, and the organic people I talked to seemed just shocked by sheer numbers -- Richmond Sarpong's lab in particular has about 45 members, which is a little insane. Regardless, there was no question that Berkeley was a great program, but like all the other places we've been, it's going to come down to fit. Everyone is trying to reserve judgment until the end of the visits, and everyone seems to be reaching the point where a decision is going to be very hard to make. So we're basically all in the same state of angst, which probably leads to too many conversations about grad school. I'm glad to get a little bit of time to recover before the Cal Tech visit.

The Impression:

I'm no different from my peers in the concerns over size at Berkeley. I think that led to Evan Miller becoming my default favorite faculty, just because he's guaranteed to have a small group and be more hands-on when I start, and because there are only so many opportunities to work with a brand new professor at a place like Berkeley. I think that bias may also come from my current PI, who was one of Matt Francis's first students and definitely has ridden his "tenure student" role to a great career. But outside of the size question, there's no doubt that Berkeley is an amazing program, with resources out the wazoo and a very strong institutional flexibility. I've heard that Berkeley students can be pretty unhappy, and I have to admit that I didn't get enough of a feel to be able to deny that, but based on the feel I got, I think I would do pretty well there. We'll see how it plays out.