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!

Another week in the life of Hoxie.

This was one of the more exhausting weeks I’ve had in recent memory. Productive but draining.

Before work on Wednesday, I rode down to the Boston University School of Public Health to meet with Professor Josee Dupuis, who is the wife of my adviser at BU (Eric Kolaczyk), the PhD adviser of my supervisor at work, the ex-coworker of my supervisor’s supervisor at work, and a key player in securing my summer internship at Biogen Idec. (It’s a small world.) As I’m preparing grad school applications and thinking about the shape I’d like my career to take, I’ve been tracking down successful people in the field to hear their story, and Josee seemed like an obvious choice. We talked for the better part of an hour about her background, statistics in industry vs. academia, the past, present, and future of statistical genetics, the Stanford PhD program (she earned her PhD there in 1994) and programming languages. It was a very interesting talk, full of short-term things to include in applications and long-term things to think about. I really appreciate the time she gave me.

Wednesday afternoon was my big presentation, and it went very well. I was a little intimidated (most of the people in attendance are senior scientists who have been doing this stuff for years), but once I started talking, everything flowed nicely. There were a few good questions, which tells me that people actually understood the material. Chunyu and I are approaching the problem from a different angle (via host statistical genetics) than many of the people on the project are, so it’s always nice when people understand what we’re doing.

Continuing my quest for conversations with successful scientists and statisticians, I had lunch with the head of non-clinical biostatistics at Biogen Idec on Friday. He worked at the Harvard School of Public Health for a few years before coming to Biogen Idec to do clinical trial work, so he was a valuable resource for insight into academia, government, and industry. He seems to think that I’d be happiest in academia, but I think it’s just too early to tell. Still, it was an enlightening conversation.

Speaking of grad school applications, I submitted my Duke app earlier this afternoon. One down, seven to go. Next on the calendar are Berkeley, Harvard, UNC, and Wisconsin. They aren’t due until mid-December, but I’m going to try to get them done in the next couple of weeks. It looks like I’m going to NYC for Thanksgiving weekend and a friend of mine is going to be staying with me while doing med school interviews in early December, so the sooner I can cross these off the list, the better.