Statistically Significant

This is Part 1 of a three-part installment of last week’s adventure to Berkeley, Santa Rosa, and Madison.

The adventure started in San Francisco. After touching down, I hopped onto BART for a lengthy but mostly above-ground train ride around the bay to Downtown Berkeley. Emerging from the train station after a long day of traveling without much food, I stumbled into the first restaurant I found: a casual little corner joint that served burgers, fries, and shakes made using natural, high-quality ingredients. I scarfed down a cheeseburger (no bun) and made a mental note to myself about the place in case I needed something quick and easy during the next couple of days. This note was quickly erased: during the 20-minute walk to my hotel, I passed approximately 23987231 casual little corner joints that served burgers, fries, and shakes made using natural, high-quality ingredients. They’re everywhere! Still, it was a nice walk over. Berkeley is a pretty town, with lots of bikers, sunlight, and greenery:

I found my hotel, which was cutely college-themed: the room service request form looked like a Scantron sheet, the shower curtain had SAT vocab words on it, and the local directory was in the style of a three-ring binder. And in my brief survey of the room, I picked up the price sheet for food and saw that, in addition to the $9 Reeses Cups and $15 mini bar options, there were $275 bong-inspired lamps. Welcome to Berkeley.

I dropped off my bags and embarked on a walking tour of the campus. After the urban sprawl of Boston University, anything coherent feels good, but the UC Berkeley campus is gorgeous. I don’t know enough about architecture to comment on what I saw, but I could totally spend the next few years here. It didn’t hurt that the campus was being bathed in my first California sunset, either. Check it out:

Monday was a busy day of welcomes, information sessions, meals with students/professors, social events, etc. I got a nice jump on the day by waking up at 4AM Berkeley time. After getting some breakfast at a local diner a few hours later, I still had some time to kill, so I started walking east and stumbled across this trail leading up to the top of a hill. 10 minutes of walking/jogging later, I was greeted with a slightly gray/foggy but still nice view of the bay.

Anyway, back to the welcomes. It was a long day, full of interesting and relevant information. A few points:

• The other ~10 prospective students were all cool, interesting people. When we went around the table at our first introductory meeting, there were some common themes that emerged in peoples’ interests: music, boardgames, and outdoor activities. This is my kind of crowd.
• I had been very worried that the current graduate students (and prospectives) would be math robots. While I’m sure that everyone I met was great at math, they were all smart, well-spoken, social people. They even did things other than statistics sometimes! Again, outdoor activities like hiking, kayaking, climbing, and running seemed popular. And eating.
• The program seems well thought out, and seems to take about 5 years. The first year is spent doing mostly coursework with some seminars and group meetings thrown in there to get you thinking about research topics. The second year is more coursework with some electives and your first teaching/assisting/research opportunities. After passing the oral qualifying exam in year 2-3, it’s onto research.
• As the day progressed, I kept asking myself, “Wait, they’re going to pay me to come here and study/research with these people? I get to actually work on these projects?” It seemed almost too good to be true. I felt totally at home with these people, and could really see myself fitting well into the department.

Tuesday was a short day, with four 30-minute interviews with faculty members. I met with Professors Nielsen, Wainwright, Song, and van der Laan, and had interesting conversations with all of them about their research, opportunities for getting involved, and the Berkeley Statistics PhD experience. Though the short windows weren’t really enough time to get into deep conversations, I think there would be no shortage of brilliant people doing interesting, relevant research projects at Berkeley.

And then, almost as quickly as it had started, my Berkeley adventure came to an end. Thankfully, there was a station wagon waiting to whisk me off to my next adventure… coming next week!