James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

February 7, 2008

Cold Spring Harbor Lab (Installment 1)

Filed under: University Visits — Tags: , , — James @ 10:31 pm

I’ve arrived in Cold Spring Harbor, and am writing this just after midnight.

 

Instead of staying up all night to catch a 6 am flight like I did to Berkeley, I was able to sleep in a little, drive to the airport at noon, and take a direct flight to NYC, where I and a fellow student were picked up by a driver waiting for us with a sign and driven out to CSHL. On the plane ride out I was seated next to two Cornell prospective investment bankers who were getting flown out for a sell weekend. (They’ve already been offered jobs and now the banks are flying them out again to wining and dine them in an attempt to influence their decision.) One was a fellow Iowans, which is cool, as there are something like 15 of us at Cornell. (Based on a very old facebook search.)

 

The first event this evening was a talk about the approach to graduate study at CSHL vs other places. It boils down to, getting classes out of the way the first semester, graduating in four years instead of 5-7, and giving the lucky few who get admitted lots of support in their living circumstances and learning, so that the students can focus on giving 150% to their research. For example the organization provides highly subsidized housing, and if will help you find non-lab housing if you want it, especially if you need room for a partner and/or children. 

 

Then we were matched up with our individual graduate student hosts and went out to dinner in a number of small groups. Mine was 50% current or former Cornell students. The highlight of dinner was a dessert called “King Kong,” which featured chocolate cake in the shape of the empire state building, lots of vanilla ice cream, strawberries, and sparklers. I wish I’d gotten a picture of it.

 

Came back to the CSHL bar and had a chance to grill grad students more thoroughly. Note that several of the grad students were running back to labs to set up, run, and image gels between beers.

January 18, 2008

The Day of the Thousand Interviews

Filed under: University Visits — Tags: , , , , — James @ 9:04 pm

Well five actually, but everything in due course.

Actually I’m just going to hit the major high lights:

The computer support they’ve got is amazing. On our tour of one of the facilities we walked into a room built for pure computational biologists. There where giant metal sleeves of cables running up from the center of every table surface, and looking up I saw giant bundles of ethernet cables running overhead. The only word that comes to mind is awesome.

Plenty of growth chambers and greenhouses of course.

I learned a lot about soybeans. Which was good. I got something to call my interest: crop genomics.

At the poster session they had this evening I met a guy who was working with wild rice, which is only in the earliest stages of domestication. The two things that struck me where the creativity he was forced into, given the extremely limited resources the government provides for such a small crop, and the fact that a big percentage of the money he gets comes from the wild rice growers themselves, and in return he goes out and meets with the grower association. He’s only of literally four people doing work in wild rice and the only molecular biologist. So it was really cool to talk to him.

Coolest Title I’ve ever heard of: Lichenologist (The Lichens that grown on rocks and trees, not the werewolves in Underworld)

Saddest realization: Not only is it a lot more work to cross soybeans than corn, but after you’ve made that cross, you get MAYBE 5 seeds. Not the 50-200 you’d normally get from an ear of corn. It seems to me that would change the way you’d have to do experiments in all sorts of ways, though I’m not having a lot of success thinking of what they are yet.

First Night In Minneapolis

Filed under: University Visits — Tags: , , , — James @ 2:38 pm

Arrived at University of Minnesota. Today was within the range of cold I’m used to back home, but on Saturday, the day I’m leaving, the high temperature is a negative number. 

My planned route to the hotel where they are putting us up turned out to have me crossing the bridge that collapsed last summer. I hadn’t realized the hotel was on the other side of the river, so I ended up driving circles through down town Minneapolis for a while as traffic began to surge towards the 5 o’clock rush hour. But I finally found the hotel and burst in just in time to catch the shuttle to campus. I also got a surprise, two of the people from the summer internship program at Danforth are interviewing with me. I suppose if I’d thought about it, that would have made sense, but I didn’t, so it was a complete surprise to be greeted by name as a dove headfirst into the hotel.

Anyway, the only event tonight was a combined dinner between Plant Biological Science, Applied Plant Science, and Plant Pathology. Lots of awkward mingling. As one girl I met pointed out, most people who study plants tend to be shy by nature. But at least that meant it was a level playing field. If there had been pre-med and business students thrown into the mix, all us plant science people would probably be huddled in the corner (by the palm tree, of course). I also met a number of PBS students who are very interested in ecology and disturbed ecosystems. Which I guess makes sense, since the leader of the program says PBS students everything from atoms to the entire planet.

On the ride back to the hotel, I talked to another interviewee who had corned some grad students over dinner to ask about housing costs, rents are apparently pretty reasonable in St. Lous (edit: St. Paul I mean), and with the way the housing market is going, some grad students are actually buying houses! Which is not something I would have expected to be able to do on a graduate stipend, but is definitely an…interesting idea. Anyway, tomorrow I meet with faculty so I should be heading to sleep, as I’ve been told on good authority the one surefire way to blow an interview is to fall asleep during it. 

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