I forgot to mention, at breakfast yesterday they gave us a little set of gifts all inside a PMB mug… made out of corn plastic! Also, there’s a key chain that’s a cube of clear plastic lights up and there’s a three-D model of DNA inside. So those were both cool.
February 2, 2008
The Second Night … In Berkeley
(This entry, and the previous one were written last night and posted this morning when I have internet access.)
So after we were all done with interviews for the day, we hung out in the “grad pad” for about fourty minutes and I got to get to know some of the other people I was interviewing with better. One girl who was born in Iowa, but doesn’t live there anymore. Another from Texas A&M who knows Carlos (one of my roommates last summer). Another who graduated a semester early and moved from the west coast to the east coast to live with her boyfriend, now fiance who she met at a REU program. I’d estimate half the people interviewing are going to be graduating this spring and half have been out of school for some length of time already.
In some ways I feel like one of the less qualified applicants. There are people who were first authors on papers as undergrads. My roommate is from Brown. As I mentioned previously, at the airport I met another girl from Cornell who’s also a Bio-Plant Science concentration (there are only like 10 of us at Cornell, and yet the two of us had to come all the way across the continent to meet each other). So it’s not like I have a monopoly on the Ivy League thing.
Anyway at six we walked over to a pot luck that was hosted at the house of some friend of one of the program organizers. Which was a really fancy place. (And as I found out last night, Berkeley allows the use of recruitment funds to buy alcohol, which is a no-go at some other schools.) It was good the get to talk to a bunch of the grad students in a less formal setting. Either the microbiology people (Berkeley combines micro and plant biology in one department) were a lot more outgoing than the plant people, or there were just a lot more of them there, since I always ended up in conversations with them, but it was still a good time. And then hours later, I got to get a ride back to the hotel in a compact car holding seven people. Which was definitely one of those experiences everyone should have in college. (At least I got to be one of the people donating laps instead of one of the people sitting on them.)
Another Day of 1000 Interviews
(This entry, and the following one were written last night and are being posted today, now that I have the time to get internet access.)
This time I have seven. Three with faculty, and four with the labs of absent professors. And I can honestly say that I walked out of each interview very excited about the science in that lab. Also, it was nice and sunny today which was a vast improvement on yesterday.
Very briefly, I interviewed with a guy who does phytochrome research, which is what my undergraduate research started out in, so I was able to talk intellegently about that, and he knew the guy I work for at school. The meeting was very VERY brief though, they drove us out to the PGEC for an hour and I was scheduled to meet with three groups during that time. The second woman I talked to studies the regulation of cell differentiation in meristems. If I was less tired I could talk about that in a lot more detail, but the sobering part was when I realized her research was behind about a third of what we had learned about shoot meristems in my plant development course last fall. But once more fascinating (I’ll be using that word a lot.) Then a meeting with a lab group whose PI wasn’t in town, but I thought they managed it quite well, some of their work ties in with the Ramosa mutants I worked with several summers ago, and it was, you guessed it, fascinating. Then it was back to Berkeley’s main campus for lunch and MORE interviews. I was fortunate in that most of the on campus people seem to be centered in one building, the microbiology people had to run around to a lot more buildings.
Another thing that both I and a couple of the other people who are interviewing noticed was that the grad student’s here at Berkelely seem happy. I haven’t been to any schools where all the grad students seems depressed, but there does seem to be a lot of variation.
But my first interview of the afternoon was particularly exciting, I promise I’ll be very brief with the last three. It was with a woman who studies plant evolution in all sorts of REALLY weird species. Like cycads. Which are gynosperms (a group of non-flowering plants which include things like pine trees) which pollinate each other by using insects. The insects are drawn to both the male and female cycad cones. But the cones heat up on alternating schedules driving the insects out of male cones, where they’ve been coated in pollen, to the female cones, where they fertilize individual seeds. (The fact that this plant is able to generate heat, vaguely like a warm blooded mammal is pretty cool in of itself.) And then we ended up in a discussion of how cycads may have more trouble spreading their seeds now that dinosaurs are extinct. So that was really cool. As I promised, I’ll mostly skip over the last three labs, not because I was any less fascinated, but because it’s harder to describe. An imprinting lab, a epigenetics lab, and an genomics/bioinformatics/evolution lab. In the last of the three we learned about how transposons can be “domesticated” and adapted to serve a purpose within the host species. The guy I was talking to claims that’s actually the origin of the immune system in animals. Complicated story there, I’ll try to explain it if anyone asks.
Best Metaphor: “Some labs are like viking ships and some labs are like dingies.” (And dingies are the good ones)
Most “I’m definitely a potential grad student” moment:
“Um…wait…I can’t remember his name but he works on a species called bracopodia.” <– I’m better at remembing the names of new species of grass than of the people I meet who study them.