Budapest

It is hard to say whether my fondness for Budapest should be attributed to its own merit as a city or to my general longing for a big city after spending a month in the small village of Cambridge. Either way, I was very happy when my advisor extended an invitation to everyone in our group to spend one week in Budapest visiting him. Highlights of Budapest included the nighttime views of the city, the hills, the architecture, the Turkish baths, and the bakeries.

The Danube River runs right through the center, dividing the city into Buda (west) and Pest (east), which were originally two separate cities that gradually grew together. Across the Danube stretch several bridges, which are all lit up spectacularly at night, along with many of the major buildings. My initial impression of the city was that it was proof that communism is a recipe for poverty and ugly buildings, but walking across the bridges after dark and pausing for views of Parliament and Castle Hill quickly reminded me that Hungary has done fairly well for itself after leaving the nest of Mother Russia.

In the mornings, I took advantage of Buda’s steep hills (especially Castle and Gellért Hills) to get in some proper runs¹ (the steepest thing I can run up in Cambridge is the curb) and soak in more views of the city. I even had the opportunity to go for a nice run with a friend from the States who happened to be visiting the city for a conference.

By day, I worked at the Central European University with my advisor. Without the distractions of Cambridge, the week turned out to be very productive scientifically, including the initiation of a collaboration with an experimental neuroscientist in Budapest who is willing and able to test a model of single-cell computation that I have been working on.

By night, I took long walks and reveled in the array of non-British restaurants. While Hungarian cuisine is not known for catering to vegetarians,² I managed to find several excellent vegetarian or vegetarian-friendly restaurants and cafes (especially Govinda-Buda, Hummus Bar, Edeni Vegan, Falafel Önkiszolgáló, and Napos Oldal Ökocafé), as well as sample the goodies of several famous Hungarian bakeries (especially things filled with spinach, poppy seed, or chestnuts, and especially from Ruszwurm).

On one weekend afternoon, I also visited one of Budapest’s lavish Turkish baths – Gellért fürdő. Known for its spectacular art nouveau architecture, the bath (like most) had co-ed, male- only, and female-only sections. The main attraction was the hot tubs, though there was also a (freezing cold) pool for swimming. While the co-ed area was impressive, the male-only area had larger hot tubs, smaller crowds, and spectacular tile work. It also had saunas but they were so hot and foggy that I could neither breathe nor see and so left after approximately three seconds. The price to pay for these additional luxuries was a constant stream of naked old men going to and fro. While the baths are definitely worth a visit for solo travelers, the steep price of admission makes it a better deal for small groups who might stay and chat for several hours, as I found myself leaving after about an hour (admission tickets are good for the day).

My next visit to Budapest is scheduled for early April, during which time I look forward to checking out the zoo and another bath (Széchenyi), in addition to running in the hills again.

Granada & Sierra Nevada, Spain

The theoretical neuroscience community has a superb tradition of scheduling major conferences near ski resorts. Thus, my winter travels kicked off with several days in Granada at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) main conference, followed by two days of workshops (and skiing/snowboarding) in Sierra Nevada.

The “Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation” was founded 25 years ago as the first and only (at the time) professional society devoted to theoretical and computational neuroscience. Since then, the “NIPS” conference has gradually drifted more towards research in machine learning.³ Many theoretical and computational neuroscientists see this as a “hijacking” of a conference they founded and nurtured, but others (including myself) see it as an opportunity to get an update on the latest in machine learning, while simultaneously meeting up with the few neuroscientists who still attend.⁴

Those few neuroscientists can be divided into two groups. The first are those who command an expert knowledge of machine learning and allow it to strongly influence their neuroscience. This group includes my own advisor and several collaborators. The second group include the old fuddy-duddies who cannot seem to let go of NIPS and accept that it is no longer a neuroscience conference. This group is disproportionately represented on the board and hence gets the opportunity to deliver incongruous speeches each year on the exciting new research on “neural” information processing systems that their conference features.

One (unforeseen) benefit of having so few neuroscientists present was that I find the conference much more manageable and relaxing. With only half a dozen or so posters to see each evening, I found myself with plenty of time to grab dinner and sleep (luxuries I do not enjoy at the other main conference I will attend this year – Cosyne).

Another (also unforeseen) benefit was that I find myself with enough time during breaks to see a bit of the city. As the main conference was held in Granada and this was my first trip to Muslim Spain, this was a welcome opportunity. Two friends and I spent one day during the lunch break wandering through the Muslim “medina” in the northeast part of town. Built on a hill just across from the Alhambra,⁵ the medina offered stunning views of the palace and the rest of the city. We managed to find a terrace bar and sat for a while, enjoying the sunshine and high viewpoint foreign to the Cambridge-bound. We also stumbled upon a turnstile inside on the outside of a nunnery with pictures of baked goods. Curious, we put 5 euros in it and turned it. We heard some scurrying around and out popped a huge bag of homemade cookies and sweets! By far the best mysterious turnstile into which I have ever put money.

The conference itself was divided into three pieces – tutorials, main conference, and workshops. The tutorials, delivered on the first day, are 2-hour introductory sessions on exciting new areas of research. Among them was a tutorial titled “Flexible, Multivariate Point Process Models for Unlocking the Neural Code”, which is related to my own work at Cambridge and which I found quite helpful. I ended up spending several hours over the course of the conference discussing my current project with the professor who gave it and received a number of interesting suggestions to follow up on.

The main conference included both talks and poster sessions. As I have a strong preference for conversations and poster sessions over talks,⁶ I skipped many of the talks to meet with other researchers at the conference but spent 4-6 hours each evening browsing and discussing posters. Due to the relatively small proportion of work in theoretical and computational neuroscience, I was able to see all that I wanted to see, as well as catch a few posters on machine learning.

Finally, the workshops feature a series of talks on more specialized topics in rooms that can accommodate only 20-40 people and are thus meant to promote more discussion than the talks at the main conference. Unfortunately, out of almost 30 workshops, there was not a single one on theoretical neuroscience. Fortunately, I still found a number of interesting talks embedded in workshops whose topics I was not particularly concerned with. Even more fortunately, the workshops were held in the Sierra Nevada mountain range a little over an hour from Granada, so I also managed to squeeze in an afternoon of snowboarding.⁷

Despite the (relatively) relaxed pace of the conference for me, I found myself simultaneously exhausted yet bursting with ideas I wanted to work on back in Cambridge. However, it would be almost a month before I would get the chance to do so, as I was immediately headed for Italy for a couple of days of ice climbing, followed by a series of other holiday trips. In the future, I will likely try not to tack on vacations at the end of conferences, as I often find myself most inspired to work at those times.

All in all, I would say that I benefitted greatly from the conversations, posters, tutorials, and location of NIPS, but that the lack of neuroscience at the workshops was a bit disappointing. Although I would not consider NIPS a “must-see” for me, I will likely drop in periodically when working on an appropriate project.

Torino & the foothills of the Alps, Italy

The first serious research opportunity I was ever given was for a summer internship at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Torino, Italy with USC physics Professor Paolo Zanardi. In addition to hooking me on science, Paolo also introduced me to mountaineering and the Alps. Ever since that summer, I have been looking for opportunities to return and when Paolo heard I would be in England for the year, he invited me to fly out to Torino for a couple of days of ice climbing in the foothills of the Alps. We were joined by a childhood friend of Paolo and our expert mountain guide Muyo, who had also led our initial mountaineering trip in the Alps.

Like any proper Italian outing, each of days began at a café with espresso, cigarettes, and croissants and was, in remarkable incongruence with the physically demanding sport we were pursing, dotted with frequent cigarette breaks. The ice park we climbed in was absolutely stunning. Massive icicles and icy stalagmites formed an intricate, deep blue playground that I could have spent (and did spend!) hours staring at.⁸

Though I was a bit worried about my ability to ice pick my way up those beasts with only two days of rock climbing experience and a cushy Cambridge life-weakened body, Muyo made the introduction as gentle as possible. We spent the first half-day in “ice school” on a notably- less-steep-than-everything-else ice sheet, learning proper position, and navigating our way through pick ax “courses” that Muyo would engineer. By the end of the first day, we took our first stab at the real deal – vertical sheets of ice stretching perhaps 50m in the air. Though I was neither graceful nor fast, I did manage to make it to the top.

My rappel back to earth introduced me to a phenomenon the Italians refer to as the “boils” – the feeling of blood rushing into your hands after being raised above the heart for the duration of your climb. It is one of the more painful things I have willingly inflicted upon myself.

Our day finished with (what else?) espresso, wine, and cigarettes, followed by dinner.

The next day was spent conquering three different (and more difficult) faces of the same ice sheet we had climbed the previous day. By the end of the day, I was utterly exhausted and spent a significant fraction of my time dangling pathetically from one ax, with only a rope saving me from a very unpleasant fall. Nevertheless, I did manage to make it up every climb we attempted and so left with (most of) my dignity intact.

Munich, Germany

My winter travels next took a marked turn for the urban. Courtesy of a night train from Torino, I met fellow Churchill Scholar Samantha Strasser in Munich where we spent the next two days exploring Christmas markets and museums.

Since I arrived a few hours before Sam, I first visited Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp in Germany, after which all subsequent camps were modeled. Less than half an hour outside the city center and free to all visitors, Dachau was one of the most powerful museums I have visited. Virtually the entire site, from the bunkhouses and work yards to the gas chambers and crematoria were open to the public. The combination of the (excellent) audio tour and bitter cold and snow that day made the experience even more, well, depressing (which, in this context, felt appropriate).

Sam and I’s first targets were the Christkindlmarkten, or “Christmas markets.” Despite their angry-sounding language, the Germans apparently have no shortage of Christmas cheer and flood their streets with little booths selling ornaments, handmade crafts, baked goods, and ample supplies of Glühwein (mulled wine) and other warm alcoholic beverages. Sam and I were careful to keep warm by stopping for Glühwein frequently.

Knowing the German penchant for science and engineering (and suckers for both ourselves), Sam and I next visited the Deutsches Museum, Munich’s monument to all things involving science and technology. The highlights included a huge sailboat with cutaway hull, a massive collection of early computers, and plenty of old scientific instruments. Another notable feature was the German no-nonsense approach to explaining science. While most American science museums I have visited try to dumb down the science and replace it with flashy demonstrations and games to attract children, the Germans had no qualms about using words like “eigenvalue” and “resonant frequency”, as well as equations and laws of physics, to explain their exhibits.⁹

That evening, we had dinner at the Ratskeller München – a restaurant beneath the town hall.¹⁰ Upon looking for the rest rooms, we discovered that there was not just one restaurant under the town hall but rather a vast complex that stretched seemingly forever in every direction, shifting atmosphere as one passed the (not at all obvious) borders between restaurants. We both found ourselves using the rest rooms far more often than necessary.

We spent the night at the Wombat Hostel, one of the nicest, cleanest, and safest hostels I have ever stayed at (highly recommended for visits to Munich) and Sam’s (entirely unrepresentative and misleading) first hostel ever.

The next day we were led on a 4-hour tour of the town by a flamboyantly gay, black R&B singer named Ozzie.¹¹ The fast-paced tour took us to the site of Hitler’s infamous Beer Hall Putsch, pointed out the few original buildings that had survived the bombings during World War II, and educated us on the difference between Bavarian and German culture (the former is responsible for the “German” stereotypes of lederhosen and well-endowed females serving beer and pretzels, for example). Though I rarely go on tours and even more rarely enjoy them, I would most definitely recommend Ozzie’s tour (leaving from the Wombat every day at 11am) to anyone visiting Munich.

The remainder of Sam and I’s time in Munich was spent pursuing Glühwein, smoked fish, and hearth-baked bread in the Christkindlmarkten.

Vienna, Austria

The next morning (December 23) we took a train to Vienna. True to form, the German trains arrived and departed precisely on time, contrary to those of some other countries.¹² We had decided to spend a week in Vienna, after a friend at Churchill, Frederica Stahl, had offered her family’s apartment while they were spending the holidays in New York City.¹³ Thankful to have free housing, we were unprepared when we found that we were staying in a three-story penthouse overlooking the former summer palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy. We decided immediately that we were slightly indebted to the Stahl family and spent the remainder of the week buying them gifts to assuage our embarrassment (of riches).

Also meeting us in Vienna were another Churchill Scholar Jonathan Wang and another Churchill student Sherry Gong. Our first day there was spent checking out the Christkindlmarkten, which were similar in spirit to those of Munich.

Christmas Eve and Day turned out to be the least traditional of my short life. On Christmas Eve, I met up with a Viennese friend and his girlfriend and they took me up into the hills northwest of town to get some nice views of the city and to marvel at the art nouveau architecture of the insane asylum located there. Part way through our (frigid) walk, we decided that a coffee would be hit the spot and found a nearby café. As we sat down and awaited the arrival of our drinks, we gradually noticed that the other customers seemed a bit more disheveled than the typical fashionable Viennese resident. When one of them suddenly burst out yelling in monologue, we realized that the café was actually run by and for asylum inmates. We shrugged and soaked in one of the more entertaining cups of coffee any of us had ever had.

That evening, hungry and without groceries, I ventured into the city to find something to eat. Not exactly sure what to expect to be open (I had never spent my Christmas Eve wandering a foreign city), I found that it was just me and the Turks and so settled down to a non-traditional Christmas dinner of falafel, hummus, and pita.

Christmas Day was even stranger, as the four of us ventured to the western edge of town to visit Schönbrunn (the former summer palace of the Habsburgs), which, in addition to the palace, contained a Christmas market, several greenhouses and cafes, extensive gardens, and the world’s oldest zoo. Although I usually loathe palace tours (too ostentatious), the included audio tour made it a tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable, experience.

My favorite part of the visit though was the zoo. Given that it was winter in Austria and that we had never heard of this particular zoo, our expectations were very low. Thus, we were stunned to find penguins, giant pandas, elephants, koalas, hippos, tigers, orangutans, naked mole

rats, and pretty much every zoo-worthy animal you could imagine. It is very possibly one of the finest zoos in the world and certainly the highlight of the Habsburg summer estate.

Though Jonathan and Sherry left the following day, Sam and I spent the rest of the week exploring Vienna’s famous kaffeehaus culture and museums. The kaffeehausen range from magnificent marble palaces with tuxedoed waiters (Café Central) to cozy, intellectual retreats for those who wish to read or discuss philosophy and politics (Café Hawelka) to smoky, 50s diner- like cafes that only the Viennese could love (Café Prückel). At each location, a simple espresso can be quite pricey (3-4 euros), but you are really paying for the right to sit in the café for a couple of hours, chatting with friends or reading a newspaper or book, which just so happens to come with a free cup of coffee. My personal favorites were probably Hawelka, Central, Sperl, and Savoy,¹⁴ albeit all for different reasons.

In addition to the kaffeehausen, the Viennese are also known for their bakeries and, in particular, their cakes. While I am not an especially big fan of cake, the multi-layered pieces of art that we did try from Oberlaa (several locations throughout the city) were the pinnacle of cake evolution, while the chestnut dishes and cheeky service at Sluka (near the Rathaus) were alone reasons to return to Vienna.

Of the museums Sam and I visited, my favorite by far was the Haus der Musik (“House of Music”). Although I was unimpressed by three of the four floors of the museum (those hero worshipping Viennese composers and hosting puzzling demonstrations for children which tried unsuccessfully to make connections between music and the brain), the floor on the science behind acoustics, sound perception, and music production was excellent. Combining the German tradition of no-nonsense science education with the American penchant for showy demonstrations, the exhibit was entertaining and informative and I spent perhaps two hours in that section alone.

The ultimate (in both senses of the word) highlight of our visit to Vienna was a walk from the top of the hills north of the city down through the heurige (vineyards). Not one to usually spend my vacations in cities, I was eager for something approximating a hike and Sam was kind enough to oblige me. The walk turned out to be far more impressive than either of us anticipated. We wound our way along and through several heurige, enjoying unmatched views of the city the entire time, before finishing at one of the few that was open in winter. Occupying a complex that included an alleged former apartment of Ludwig van Beethoven,¹⁵ the Mayer am Pfarplatz was a cozy, rustic tavern-like space, complete with pretty courtyard and, most importantly, excellent house reds and whites, all for surprisingly reasonable prices (2-3 euros per glass).

After a week of luxurious Viennese living, we finally packed our bags, arranged a pile of wrapped gifts and thank you notes for the Stahls, and headed to London for New Years’ Eve.

London, England

Unfortunately, I awoke that morning with a cold and decided not to stick around London for midnight. After meeting several friends from Churchill for a dim sum dinner, I caught the train back to Cambridge. I was not too disappointed with my fate, however, as the overwhelmingly large (and drunk) crowds deter me from wanting to ever spend a New Years’ Eve in London anyways. I spent the next two days nursing my cold and preparing for my trip to Morocco.

Marrakesh, Fes, & the Atlas Mountains, Morocco

Joining me for this 9-day trip were fellow Churchill Scholars Alicia Schep and Ethan Schaler. Our trip included three days of hiking in the Atlas Mountains, two days each exploring the medieval cities of Marrakesh and Fes, and two days riding trains between the two cities.

The time we spent in the mountains was the unanimous highlight of our trip. Our trek took us through Berber villages, snowy mountain passes, and terraced farms, and along snaking rivers and high mountain ridges. For 150 euros per person, we received a private taxi to and from Marrakesh, accommodations in Berber guesthouses, all meals, two mules, a muleteer, a cook, and a guide. Though we had some idea of what we paid for in advance, the luxury far exceeded our expectations, to the point that we were actually quite embarrassed on the first day when we found out that we had a 1:1 ratio of support staff to hikers, that the mules could carry everything, and that the cook was going to make us hot meals even on the trail. Furthermore, it turned out that the Berber guesthouses, which we were expecting to be no more than a mat on a floor, possibly amidst goats, actually had hot showers, toilets, beds, and satellite TV. Thus, our second night was spent watching Bollywood movies and Rambo II. Our embarrassment of riches felt slightly less undeserved on the second and third days, during which our journey included some serious elevation gain.

Besides the fantastic weather and views, a key component of our enjoyment was the interaction with our guides and the Berber villagers, all of whom were nothing but hospitable. Our guide, who had grown up in a nearby village and spoke fluent English,¹⁶ was eager to answer any questions we had about the Berbers and Morocco as well as ask his own questions about England and the US.

Besides the luxury, another big surprise during this part of the trip was the lack of foreigners. We were the only white people we saw until the very end of the third day when we approached the largest town in that part of the country, where some Europeans were staying in hotels and making half-day treks into the mountains. We seemed to be the only ones who were actually doing multi-day trips through the villages. Given the dismal weather and depressingly short days in the UK and much of Europe throughout the winter, we were shocked that more British and Europeans did not spend their holidays walking in Morocco. Apparently, winter is even low season in Morocco, and those who do visit tend to do so in the summer, at which time the temperatures in Morocco often reach 40C (104F). This seems entirely backwards to me. If I find myself again spending a winter in the UK or Europe, Morocco will be my go-to outdoors retreat.

While the Moroccans we met in the mountains were unfailingly hospitable, the cities were a considerably more mixed bag of hospitality and hustling. Common greetings included “Hey, my brother!” and “Remember me?” My favorite, offered by one restaurant owner, was, “You and me, we have same color blood. Its red, no?” In most (all) cases, however, the goal was to sell us something or extract a tip. Males young and old all eagerly offered directions… after which they staunchly demanded a fee, offered to take us to family stores where we would get a great discount… when in reality the price was hiked to cover their commission, and pointed out that wherever we were going, be it a hotel, restaurant, or historical site, was closed, regardless of the time of day, and that they would show us to an alternative location… which of course would

have been happy to offer our benevolent guide a commission. Beyond these more standard requests, however, I had the questionable honor of being offered marijuana approximately once every fifteen minutes. That Ethan and Alicia received not one such offer is a clear statement by the Moroccans about my appearance. After only a couple of days in the cities, we were quickly trained to be pessimistic and misanthropic, ignoring, frowning at, or even scolding anyone who approached us unsolicited.

To be clear, however, the Moroccans whom we approached were consistently friendly, helpful, and hospitable. This leads me to propose the following rule of thumb for traveling in Morocco – if they approach you, expect a hustle; if you approach them, expect hospitality.

Although we managed to escape unrobbed, unconned, and unrepentant, our closest brush with being hustled occurred on the train ride from Marrakesh to Fes. Having paid for first class seats in a small cabin for six, we felt reasonably safe and well-protected from the second class cars, the suspected haunt of the hustlers. Among others, an older man with a newspaper sat down across from us. After a bit of conversation, we described our trip and told him that we were headed to Fes and would be staying in a riad called Dar Hafsa. We chatted for a bit longer before he excused himself for a phone call. A couple of hours later,¹⁷ the man returned and introduced his friend, whom he claimed was an official tourist guide. The friend quickly flashed a badge at me, which I neither had time to see nor knew what to look for anyways, and then unleashed a five-minute tirade against our riad. Highlights included his prediction that a dark man would offer us tea, but that we should not trust him, for he was in cahoots with the maid and together they would steal our bags. They were also, allegedly, involved with the mafia. When the man concluded and rocketed out of our cabin, Alicia, Ethan, and I were left slack jawed, wavering between nervous laughter and a serious reconsideration of our plans. Deciding to continue to our riad but to remain alert and leave if uncomfortable, we departed the train in Fes and made our way towards the riad. It was by now after dark and we were having considerable trouble finding our way. We finally identified our intended path as a small, dimly lit alley off the main road. As we entered the narrow passage, a man shouted, “Be careful! The mafia operates there!” Right on cue, loud wails began blaring on unseen speakers and a swarm of children began running behind and around us. My heart was doing gymnastics in my chest. Nearly ready to turn back, we stumbled upon a dark wooden door labeled “Dar Hafsa.” We desperately knocked on the door and were immediately welcomed in. The interior of the building stood in stark contrast to the alley outside – beautiful tile work stretched for three stories above on all four sides, a large comfortable-looking couch wrapped around a glass table with a silver tea set, and a host that could do nothing but smile. He was also, however, a dark man and offered us tea, as the prophecy had stated. Over the next day and a half, we remained suspicious and responded to any offers to show us around, clean our rooms, or otherwise interact more than minimally necessary with nervous rebuttals. The man’s sister, and co-owner, finally approached Ethan and asked what was wrong. Eventually, we realized that the train had tried to scam us, that no one travels from Marrakesh to Fes with just a newspaper, that “a dark man will offer you a tea” was about as vacuous as Moroccan prophecies come, and that the loud wails we had heard were an announcement for Muslim prayer time. Relaxing our trigger fingers, we thoroughly enjoyed the rest of our stay at Dar Hafsa.¹⁸

Although we explored historical sites and museums in both Fes and Marrakesh, the obvious highlight of both cities were the medinas – the medieval, walled, inner cities free of cars and full of narrow streets and bustling marketplaces. While the medinas were initially sensory and social overloads, their excitement and charm quickly grew on us. Other favorites in Fes included the views from the Merenid Tombs and the food at Café Clock and the restaurants near Bab Bou Jeloud (“The Blue Gate”) and in Marrakesh included the Jardin Majorelle, a beautiful garden established by French fashion icon Yves Saint-Laurent, the ornate Saadian Tombs, and the Djemaa El-Fna, one of the largest and busiest squares in Africa (and the world).

For only about £50 and 3.5 hours each way, Morocco was not only inexpensive and accessible, it was likely my favorite of my winter travel destinations, and for my own sake, I hope the British and Europeans continue to unjustifiably ignore its opportunities for winter hiking.

This post is part five¹⁹ of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Photo gallery: click the “i” in the upper right for captions, the “SL” in the bottom right for slideshow mode, and the “FS” in the bottom right for full screen mode.

Life £20 North of the Continent

travels during my first four months at (or at least in the same hemisphere as) Cambridge

Széchenyi Chain Bridge in Budapest
Dobos torte and carrot cake at Augustz in Budapest
view from Budapest's Gellért Hill
Gellért fürdő: one of Budapest’s Turkish baths
magical baked goods turnstile run by nuns in Granada
important conference business meeting
CBL group dinner overlooking the Alhambra in Granda
"ice school" in the foothills of the Italian Alps
"candela de giacco"
striking fear in the hearts of ice sheets everywhere
Dachau concentration camp outside Munich
warming up with Glühwein in Munich
site of Hitler's "Munich Beer Hall Putsch"
pandas at the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna
the high ceilings of Vienna's Café Central
walking through Vienna's Heurige
trekking in Morocco's Atlas Mountains
walking through the farms in the valleys
watching Bollywood movies in a Berber village
generic snowy mountain pass
summiting on the final day of our trek
the beautiful Dar Hafsa in Fes
wood work in Fes
shoes... omg...
picnic on the rooftop terrace of Dar Hafsa in Fes
marveling at the only mosque in Fes open to non-­‐Muslims
We ate all the bread in Fes for breakfast. None is left. I am sorry.
views from the Merenid Tombs in Marrakesh
Jardin Majorelle in Marrakesh
Marrakesh's Saadian Tombs

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part II – Life in England
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part III – Life in Cambridge

Cambridge is a much smaller and quieter town than I expected. Besides the early café closings, most stores close by 5 or 6pm and bars and pubs close by 11pm. Ethiopian, Israeli, and many other ethnic cuisines are nonexistent, while those cuisines that are represented (e.g. Indian, Chinese, Thai, British) are not represented particularly well. While I initially thought that I would revel in the quaintness of Cambridge, I found it almost unbearable after a month and arranged for twice a week visits to a research institute in London. More recently, however, this aspect of Cambridge has been growing on me, especially as I have made friends and figured how to find the activities and stores I need access to.

Another feature of Cambridge that gradually swooned me is the atmospheric setting it is known for. Riding my bike home through dark and fog, past the ominously lit facades of several hundred year old colleges to the sound of church bells only gets better each day.

An annoying and unexpected drawback of Cambridge’s ambience is the hordes of tourists that pour into the city every day. While we are lucky enough at Churchill not to have tourists peeking in our windows, it is impossible to avoid them. In particular, it is quite difficult to avoid them when riding down the street on a bike. Apparently foreign to the concept of roads, they wander on and off the streets with not so much as a glance over their shoulders. I make a sport of trying to ride as close to them as possible without hitting anyone. My hope is that, over time, this may help educate them about the dangers of the road and that my humble self may play a small role in making Cambridge a better, safer place.

Besides the colleges, another major target for the tourists is the market square. Because of this, I was initially hesitant to venture there myself, expecting overpriced, inferior quality goods. However, when I finally did muster the misanthropic courage to brave the crowds, I found that the market was one of the best places to go for fresh-baked bread, soaps and shampoos, bike repairs, and many other edibles and non-. I now drop by at least once a week.

Despite the hordes of tourists, Cambridge is still dominated by students, faculty, and other university personnel. The snippets of conversations at pubs and restaurants that I overhear are among the most intelligent conversations I have ever overheard in public. I once sat on a train to London on which two men in front of me were chatting across the aisle about how to design some new genetics experiment. In most parts of the US, I am impressed if the people sitting in front of me on a train manage to speak in complete sentences.

With the positive benefits of an old, prestigious university come the negative, including bureaucracy. And given 800 years, Cambridge has perfected the stereotypical enormous, multi- layered, and inefficient bureaucracy. It took me three days to get internet access at my college and another two weeks to get wifi access to the three (!) different networks in my department. Getting my university card activated for department access took another several days,¹ and woe be it to he or she who attempts to arrive in Cambridge before his or her official start date. I moved in three weeks early to get settled and my arrival at the department inflicted mass panic and, I kid you not, meetings about how in the future to handle such situations. It was as if no human being in the 800-year history of Cambridge had ever arrived before the term began.

Despite its impenetrable bureaucracy, there are things that the University does well and one of them is student clubs. With two wine tasting societies, two math clubs, a tea club, a sci-fi club, a dozen or so dance clubs, another dozen or so science clubs, a club for just about every ethnicity represented at Cambridge, a cheese tasting club, multiple clubs for any sport you can name, and half a dozen outdoors groups, you would have to be comatose not to find a group of like-minded people. The standard way to get acquainted with your options is to attend the “Freshers’ Fair” in early October, during which pretty much every club sets up a booth over two floors of a nearby gym (Kelsey Kerridge), as well as a large park across the street.

The existence of half a dozen outdoors groups was one of the biggest surprises for me. Located in the flattest part of one of the flattest countries, Cambridge actually has far more outdoors clubs than my previous university (USC), which was nestled among the mountainous paradise of Los Angeles. There is the Hillwalking Club,² the Mountaineering Club, the Rambling Club, the Caving Club, the Orienteering Club, the Scout and Guide Club, and the Rock-Climbing and Trekking Society, among others I am likely missing. In case it is not eminently obvious, the Hillwalking Club goes on biweekly weekend hiking trips, the Mountaineering Club climbs mountains, the Rambling Club goes for day/half-day walks near Cambridge, the Caving Club organizes weekend caving trips, the Orienteering Club competes in orienteering competitions (races with compasses), the Scout and Guide Club is involved with the British co-ed equivalent of Boy Scouts, and the Rock-Climbing and Trekking Society climbs a few days a week at a local climbing wall, as well as climbing outdoors every weekend.

My only (very positive) experience so far was with the Hillwalking Club. While only one of their trips has coincided with a weekend I have been free, that weekend was my most enjoyable in the UK. For ~£30, their trips include transportation, accommodations in a bunkhouse (which includes a kitchen, living room, and beds), and excellent company. The trip I went on was to Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales, though other common targets include the Lake District, Peak District, and Snowdonia, all of which require about 3-4 hours of driving. Trips depart early Friday evenings, conveniently from the Churchill Porters’ Lodge,³ and return late Sunday, employing a combination of cars and mini-buses. Friday is spent driving, unpacking, and hanging out in the bunkhouse, while Saturday and Sunday are spent hillwalking during the day and hanging out or driving back to Cambridge in the evening. While I was convinced that I liked the club on the first day (it is made up of scientifically literate outdoors enthusiasts – an easy sell), my first experience with hiking in the UK was unconvincing to say the least. After a muddy scramble to our first “summit” (elevation gain ~100m), I realized that I had made a big mistake in not bringing waterproof boots. This notion was reinforced as the fog closed in around us, the wind and rain were unleashed with hurricane force, and the temperature flirted with freezing. The ultimate summit we reached that day featured us huddled together trying to stay warm and peering off into the thick fog, imagining the views one might enjoy on a fictitious clear day in Wales. As I lost all feeling in my body and was repeatedly blown over only to fall into a muddy puddle, my inner monologue consisted only of repeatedly wondering whether this was the most miserable day of my life. I concluded that it was. All of this changed, however, when we finally, after ~7 hours, returned to the bunkhouse and I discovered what turned about to be the greatest shower stall in which I have ever had the pleasure of shivering. I nearly cried with joy. The rest of the evening⁴ was spent gorging on all sorts of food, mulled wine, hot tea, and biscuits. Although most folks had arranged in advance to collectively cook a pesto spaghetti, I had chosen to go solo due to a staunchly anti-pasta philosophy. My own dinner consisted of falafel, beets, and peanut butter and banana sandwiches. After dinner, we spent several hours chatting and playing music. Although I was tempted not to don my soggy boots and return to the harsh Welsh weather the following day, the surprising sight of sunshine changed my mind. Fortunately, the nice weather held for the day, and we enjoyed a beautiful hike past several waterfalls and through the classic rolling meadows of the British countryside. Although we still found ourselves knee deep in a bog, praying that our boots would not be sucked into the earth, by the end of the afternoon, that day of hiking prevented me from leaving Wales with nothing but spite. I look forward to more hikes with the Hillwalking Club, though perhaps after the purchasing of waterproof boots and the arrival of warmer weather.

A final note on life in Cambridge for vegetarians – I am sorry. Cambridge is not particularly accommodating. There exists just one vegetarian restaurant in Cambridge, the Rainbow Café. Although almost every restaurant will offer vegetarian options, they will not necessarily be impressive (by British standards, baked potatoes qualify as vegetarian “entrées”). Often the best bet for vegetarians is an Indian, Thai, or Chinese restaurant, though there are a few British/European restaurants that do cater particularly well to vegetarians (Zizzi and All Bar One being among them). The most economical options for vegetarians, however, are the college dining halls or cooking for one’s self. As for the colleges, I believe all serve vegetarian entrées and offer a salad bar on a daily basis. As for cooking, the major grocery stores do reasonably well at catering to vegetarians. Sainsbury’s and Tesco in particular sell tofu and plenty of vegetarian proteins and ready-made dishes. If ever there is something you cannot find there, Revital on Bridge Street, Arjuna Wholefoods on Mill Road, and the several Asian and Middle Eastern grocery stores also on Mill Road are all great options for vegetarians.

This post is part three of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Photo gallery: click the “i” in the upper right for captions, the “SL” in the bottom right for slideshow mode, and the “FS” in the bottom right for full screen mode.

Life in Cambridge

my first four months in Cambridge

Enjoying the views while they last.
Pen y Fan peak - Soon after this picture, I became too cold and sad to take any more pictures. Midway through this afternoon, I was convinced that this was the most miserable day of my life. California has made me soft.
The better half of the weekend.

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part II – Life in England
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part V – Life £20 North of the Continent

Life in England is an endless series of miscommunications. If you go to the store wishing to purchase eggplants, zucchini, shrimp, rubbing alcohol, or q-tips, prepare for disappointment; the English only sell aubergines, courgettes, prawns, surgical spirits, and cotton swabs.¹ My persistent lack of knowledge on the names of products, brands, and stores has made mundane purchases into scavenger hunts.² While one does gradually assimilate, I still find myself regularly consulting my British friends on what things are called and where I might buy them.

Consulting my friends before I go to the store is essential, as asking a British person for advice in a store is among the greatest of personal intrusions. On my first trip to Sainsbury’s (the standard British grocery store), I found myself overwhelmed by a wall full of soups and asked the gentleman next to me, who was also eyeing them, whether he had any recommendations. He snorted and immediately scurried away. Thinking that perhaps he did not speak English or was just in a particularly bad mood, I waited until another person, this time a young woman, wandered up to the soups and asked her the same question. Her eyes widened in fear and she too scurried away. Though I was tempted to conclude that this whole episode was due to my hulking frame and intimidating masculinity, I found it slightly more plausible that the British are incurable introverts and now do my best to avoid eye contact or conversation with anyone I do not know.

An even better way I have discovered of avoiding conversation in grocery stores is to avoid them altogether. While I would rarely consider the British to be on the cutting edge of anything related to technology or food, they have made surprising advances in online grocery shopping. Just about every major grocery store in England, as well as a few that do not even have brick & mortar storefronts, offer the ability to shop online and have groceries delivered directly to your door. The advantages of this method of shopping include easier searching (search by food name instead of wandering up and down aisles), not having to haul your groceries home, and, if you are British, avoiding the awkward event of having American strangers ask you questions in the store.³ If something you order happens to be out of stock, the store will offer a substitute item which you can either decline or choose to purchase for the price of the original or substitute item, whichever is cheaper. It is also still possible to take advantage of in-store specials, read nutrition and ingredient labels, purchase household items such as detergent and soup, and amend your order up until the evening before your delivery. All of this can be had for a modest delivery fee of £3-5.

While we may agree about the joys of online grocery shopping, the English and I perpetually disagree about the culinary status of the potato.⁴ They believe it is the pinnacle of vegetable evolution. I believe they are insane. I have seen “vegetarian” menus that consisted entirely of jacket potatoes (baked potatoes), chips (French fries), and mash (mashed potatoes). I also once ordered broccoli and brussel sprouts from an online grocery vendor whom I shall not name (rhymes with “Stainswury’s”) and had substituted for them two giant bags of potatoes. As a friend had accepted the grocery order on my behalf after I had gone to bed, I awoke to find myself stuck with the embarrassing excuses for vegetables and threw a mild temper tantrum.

Perhaps the final characteristic of the English worth noting here is their ability to conjure up tea in the strangest of places. I was once hiking in Wales in some of the worst weather I have ever experienced (think of a hurricane… on a mountain… at nearly freezing temperatures) and another hiker offered me a cup of tea. I thought he was mocking me and replied, “Only if you have some biscuits as well.” He had both. I could do nothing but stare in amazement (and hypothermia) as he poured me a hot cup of Tetley’s from a thermos (the lid doubled as a tea cup) and produced a sleeve of biscuits (a hybrid between an American cracker and cookie). Another time, the driver who was delivering my grocery order called me to let me know that several trucks had broken down and that it would be of great convenience to him if he could drop off my grocery order a few hours early. I replied that this would be fine but that I would not be home for another half an hour. He replied, “Oh that’s perfect! That will give me time to make a pot of tea.” Apparently, electric tea kettles are standard appliances on delivery trucks. A final story on this note – Churchill College once sent three men to paint the walls in my kitchen and hallways. They arrived early in the morning with their set of tools: paint, brushes, sheets to protect the floor and tables from the paint, and… an electric tea kettle, a box of tea, three cups, and a jug of milk. In the 2-3 days it took them to paint our house, I saw far more tea drinking going on than painting.

This post is part two of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part III – Life in Cambridge
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part V – Life £20 North of the Continent

I live in college accommodations known as the “Pepperpots” – 10-bedroom homes with a shared kitchen, living room, and laundry facilities, so named for their alleged resemblance to a pepper shaker (falsely accused, in my opinion). In particular, I live in Pepperpot 63… if you ask the college. Or 40a Storey’s Way if you ask the postal service. Or Broer’s House if you ask the wealthy man who ostensibly paid for its construction. In typical Cambridge fashion, my house has three names, depending on the particularly bureaucracy involved. Whatever you choose to call them, the Pepperpots are undoubtedly among the most luxurious of Cambridge college housing. My room is large enough that, if it so pleased me, I could make snow angels on the floor and not injure myself. I have more storage space than I know what to do with, massive windows, a private heater, and my own bathroom (with a heated towel rack!). The only drawback of the latter is that I must clean it (eventually). Although the single washer and dryer we share among the ten of us tends to get backed up on weekends, the convenience of not needing to leave the house to do laundry is appreciated. The enormous kitchen and living room are wonderful for hosting dinners and parties. With two ovens, three fridges, six burners, and acres of counter space, it is quite possible for half of the house to make dinner simultaneously. Perhaps our best use of the space yet was to host about 25 people for a DIY pizza baking night, during which almost 40 pizzas were baked.

Such an event would not have been possible at most colleges. Churchill has the distinction of being one of the furthest colleges from downtown Cambridge. Although the 15-minute schlep (by Cambridge standards) to my office at the engineering department is a slight inconvenience, Churchill’s remote location gives it something most colleges seriously lack – space. Churchill’s vast sporting fields and tennis courts are a luxury other colleges can only dream of. Our distance from town also helps to deter the hordes of tourists that plague the other college grounds.¹

A major surprise for me about college life is how often I eat at the dining hall. Mind you, this is definitely not due to the quality of food. The English have yet to discover any spices beyond salt and pepper (and even these they seem reluctant to use), seemingly too preoccupied with inventing new ways to wrap sausages in bread (and oh how many ways they have found). The main draw of the college dining hall is the opportunity to meet other members of the college. Undergrads, grad students, faculty, and sometimes even staff gather thrice daily, sharing tables and good conversation.² I regularly dine with a linguist, several lawyers, a German scholar, the son of Nobel Prize winning physicist Ernest Walton, and a cadre of scientists and engineers that dominate the Churchill population.³ This spontaneous interaction across disciplines and between students and faculty is one of the great benefits of the Cambridge college system.⁴ In addition to being a convenient way to meet others outside your discipline, the dining hall is also surprisingly more economical than making dinner at home, at least for vegetarians. A large plateful of hot vegetables and cold selections from the salad bar runs between £2 and £3. Moreover, the salad bar always includes an array of protein options (beans and meat daily, hard boiled eggs and tuna often, and salmon all too infrequently).

Three times a week, the College also hosts a “formal hall.” This is essentially an opportunity to dress up in formal ware, pay three times as much for the same food that was served at the normal dinner, and be restricted to not leaving your seat for approximately two hours. Needless to say, I am not terribly enthusiastic about this tradition, however it is certainly worth indulging in on occasion and provides a reasonable excuse to meet friends for dinner.⁵ Although I have not participated in it, attempting to attend one formal hall at every college (there are 31) is a popular Cambridge sport.⁶

Another highlight of the Cambridge college system is the social life. The student body, especially the graduate student body, is among the most international groups I have been a part of. Among the ten people living in my house, for example, we have four Americans, a Greek, a Thai, three Chinese, and a Sudanese. This diversity has had three main effects on my life at Cambridge. First, on any given day, there is a significant probability that someone’s country is celebrating a holiday, providing ample excuses to throw a party or go out for drinks (I am writing this on a stomach still full from an “Australia Day” barbecue). Second, the diversity in our culinary backgrounds not only encourages us to collectively host several dinner parties per week, but the results are almost unerringly delicious.⁷ Third, I have found myself acting more obnoxiously American than I did when living in the States. While I am not quite ready to don cowboy boots and overalls, I do find myself talking about the joys of American national parks, highways, and football more often than I ever was tempted to do in the past.

Despite the diversity of the student body, Churchill is certainly guilty of hosting the largest contingent of Americans at Cambridge, likely due in part both to the Churchill Scholars program (and the requirement that all applicants specify Churchill as their preferred college) as well as Winston Churchill’s fame in the States. One entertaining manifestation of this infestation is that Churchill College is, to my knowledge, the only college which attempts to host an annual Thanksgiving dinner. I say “attempt” because our dinner was notably lacking in pumpkin pie, stuffing, and several other key components of Thanksgiving, but we could not help but be flattered at this gesture.⁸

A final important staple of social life at the Colleges are the “common rooms”, including the “junior common room” (JCR) for undergrads, the “middle common room” (MCR) for graduate students, and the “senior common room” (SCR) for the imminently deceased (ok, for faculty). The Churchill MCR includes both a TV/game room, as well as a bar/lounge with beautiful views of the Churchill fields and unprofitable drink prices (e.g. £1.25 for a glass of wine). The bar is run by grad students on a volunteer basis and seems to be open most nights of the week. The MCR also hosts several parties (e.g. welcome, Christmas, Super Bowl), trips to London (e.g. British Museum, National Gallery), dinners, pub quizzes, pub crawls, and other events, all free or heavily subsidized. These events are yet another great excuse to meet people outside of your discipline.

One of the more disappointing features of Cambridge in general and Churchill in particular are the gyms (or lack thereof). Since the colleges operate as their own fiefdoms, there is no motivation to build a large, central university fitness center. Instead, each college operates its own woefully underequipped facility. Although Churchill’s is considered among the best, the existence of just one treadmill, one bench press, and no more than one of anything else leads to a complicated strategy game to find a time when no one else in the college wants to use the same equipment as you.⁹

This post is part one of a six-part series on my first four months in Cambridge adapted from a mid-year report I submitted to the Churchill Foundation – the sponsor whose generosity is allowing me to spend one year at the University of Cambridge. It was written in January 2012.

Photo gallery: click the “i” in the upper right for captions, the “SL” in the bottom right for slideshow mode, and the “FS” in the bottom right for full screen mode.

Life at Churchill

my first four months at Churchill College

Pepperpot 63
Pepperpot 63 - what she lacks in outer beauty, she makes up for with a massive kitchen + dining + living room.Churchill fields
Churchill College - what we lack in quality, we make up for in quantity. Built in the 1960s, Churchill does not exactly have the charm or location of Trinity or King's, but it does have more open space than any other college in Cambridge (another benefit of being ugly and far away is that we don't wake up to tourists peeking in our bathrooms).The sculpture
Legend has it that Churchill College once had the opportunity to buy this sculpture or a swimming pool. It was decided that swimming pools were much too fun for the English.First formal hall
Our first formal hall at Churchill College. I had fantasies of running and diving across the table like a slip n slide.Churchill Scholars
The Churchill Scholars posing with our sugar daddy.DIY test pizza
The "test pizza" for DIY pizza night two days before the real deal - kale, butternut squash, sweet potato, red onions, peppers and pine nuts on a homemade wholewheat flax crust.DIY pizza night
DIY pizza night - "Nice choices on ingredients, but do you think you could have bought more mushrooms?"

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part II – Life in England
2. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part III – Life in Cambridge
3. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part V – Life £20 North of the Continent

Why should we listen to you?
If you are considering basing your entire grad school application process on a single obscure blog post, then perhaps a life in research is not your best option. I highly encourage you to seek advice from a range of professors, administrators, researchers, and grad students, especially those who know you and can offer more personal advice. The lessons and suggestions below are merely anecdotes drawn from my own experiences applying to grad school during Fall 2010/Spring 2011.

For full disclosure, I applied to a hodgepodge of programs that would support research in theoretical neuroscience (which translated to Neuroscience, Biophysics, Physics, and Applied Math programs), as well as just about every fellowship for which I was eligible. With the generous guidance of about a dozen professors and grad students, I managed to snag a Churchill Scholarship to spend one year at the University of Cambridge and a Department of Energy Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) to support my PhD studies in the US thereafter (at the time of this writing, I have not decided exactly where). I was also fortunate enough to receive offers of admission from the majority of schools I applied to but deferred or declined them all to spend a year in the UK.

My goal in writing up this guide is not to help you design your college experience, craft the perfect resume, and con your way into grad school, but rather (1) to leverage the obscene amount of time I spent gathering information on grad schools and fellowships to save you time and (2) to help you make a reasonably well-informed decision.

The Process

1. Identify faculty, schools, and programs (in that order)
2. Contact faculty and students
3. Apply for fellowships
4. Apply for grad schools
5. Worry
6. Interview and/or visit
7. Worry
8. Decide

1. Identify faculty, schools, and programs (in that order)
Why in that order?
You are going to grad school to learn how to do research (or to escape a poor job market, but my recommendation stands); finding an appropriate research advisor is one of the most challenging and important parts of ensuring that you have a good experience. By focusing on schools or programs first, you may become distracted by far less important details, such as coursework, impressive web pages, and ambitious program names.

Are you saying schools and programs do not matter?
Not quite. A school defines where you will live and who you will interact with, and a program defines your first-year course requirements and may restrict who you can work with. My point is that working with a great advisor at a good school is, for most people, going to be a better experience than working with a mediocre advisor at a great university.

What criteria should I consider in looking for faculty?
Interesting research – Obviously, you need to be interested in their research.

Well-connected – Since your advisor will likely be your primary liaison for establishing collaborations during grad school and finding jobs afterwards, you might want to find someone who is well-connected and collaborates frequently in your research community. Frequent invites to speak at seminars and conferences, a diversity of co-authors on publications, and frequent citations of his/her research (in journals, not USA Today) are all good signs.

Advisement style – Advisors vary widely in how closely they interact with students. Some will assign their students projects and meet with them for a couple of hours multiple times a week. Others prefer to let their students struggle a bit to define their own research problem and may not require any meetings, serving only as a source of advice a couple of times per month or semester. Where your optimal advisor falls on this spectrum of involvement depends on your own personality and preferences. Emails to grad students, interviews, and visits (discussed below) will help you determine the advisement style of the faculty in whom you are interested.

Availability – Your advisor also needs to have the time and funding to take on students. At a minimum, they need to be willing to advise you, but depending on your preferences for interaction, you may want to consider how much time they actually have for their students. A quick glance at their website may reveal whether they are taking on students but if not, a brief email asking this question is absolutely acceptable. As for determining how much time they actually have, emails to grad students, interviews, and visits are again helpful and will be discussed below.

Great explainer – Another helpful quality in an advisor is the ability to clearly explain complicated ideas. Not all great researchers make great mentors, and having an advisor who is a great explainer can help you learn a lot more during your time in grad school. Looking up talks and papers by a professor, as well as interviews and visits, can help you infer how well they explain their work.

Personality – Finally, you need to get along with your advisor. Choosing an advisor because you thought they were “funny” or because they shared your interest in crocheting may sound absurd, but you will be spending between four and seven (or more) years working with them. Due to the nature of scientific research, you will inevitably run into many failures, dead ends, and frustrations, and overcoming such obstacles will be far easier if you have an advisor you enjoy working with. Again, not all great researchers make great mentors.

These criteria of course reflect my own particular preferences, and your own may differ. I strongly recommend drafting your own list before contacting professors or visiting schools, so that you have some idea of what questions you should be asking and what you should be looking for. Update your list as you learn more throughout the application and visiting process.

What criteria should I consider in looking for schools and programs?
Livability – If you grew up in Orange County and will need to be rushed to the hospital if a snowflake impinges upon your sensitive tanned skin, then perhaps the University of Chicago is not your best option. If you were raised climbing trees and having picnics in Oregon, then think carefully before applying to NYU. If you are a diehard rock climber, then perhaps you should pass on the University of Kansas. At a minimum, you should be sure that you can lead a moderately satisfying life in any city containing a grad school to which you apply.

Community – Your school and program more or less define the people you will collaborate, eat lunch, and socialize with for several years. The people in your program are usually the first that you get to know (since you will likely take classes with them for at least a year or two), though how close-knit these communities remain over the next few years varies greatly by school and discipline (mathematicians, for example, typically shun human contact and live in hermit caves after year 3). I have had one professor tell me that the single factor that contributed most to his positive experience in grad school was the enthusiasm and motivation of the students around him; it is much easier to deal with the trials and tribulations of PhD research when you are constantly reminded of how much fun science can be. In addition, your colleagues in grad school will likely become your collaborators afterwards, so surrounding yourself with people who do good work may serve you well in the future. Visiting your program and talking to students ahead of time is the best way to assess whether the community will be a good fit for you.

Multiple advisors – While you may enter grad school gung ho on working with a particular professor, your interests may shift, that professor’s interests may shift, funding may be an issue, or you simply may find that you two do not get along. To prevent yourself from needing to switch schools (or worse, work on something you are not interested in), look for schools and programs that have more than one faculty member you can see yourself working with. Also, if your interests span multiple disciplines, you may need multiple advisors with different areas of expertise anyways.

Funding – It is socially acceptable to ask faculty and students about the funding situation. (I ignored this question throughout my applications and visits until professors actually started asking me to ask them about funding.) In my experience, most programs fund students for their first year or two while they are finding an advisor (which may be done through fellowships, teaching assistantships, or both), and advisors fund their students thereafter. Though funding will likely not be an issue if you are in the sciences, grad students complaining about excessive teaching loads or that they could not work with their first choice of advisor due to funding problems are red flags. Ultimately, you can circumvent this issue if you are lucky enough to snag your own funding (see discussion of fellowships below).

Advisor flexibility – Make sure that your program gives you the flexibility to work with any of the multiple advisors in which you are interested, regardless of their department affiliations. In my experience, this was never an issue, though some more traditional departments may emphasize “training their own.”

Coursework – This criterion is listed last for a reason. While long lists of interesting courses make for impressive websites, it is your advisor, research, and colleagues that will be far more important in the long run. In addition, many (most?) grad students end up teaching themselves and each other skills as needed during research. Do not be distracted by the red herring of coursework. That said, make sure that you can tolerate the course requirements for any program you apply to.

Just as for faculty criteria, this is my own biased list, and you should draft your own as well.

How should I find faculty, schools, and programs?
Ask professors and/or grad students who know you well and/or are knowledgeable about your area of interest for suggestions. Browse review articles, textbooks, and papers and note faculty whose research interests you; follow up by browsing their websites. Diligently scanning the complete faculty profiles for schools and departments in which you might be interested also works, though exhaustive search is linear in problem size (in other words, its time-consuming). As for programs, do not feel as though you must apply to only programs with a particular name; it is more important that you find a program that will give you the flexibility and support to do the research you want to do with the people you want to do it with (again, I personally applied to programs with titles ranging from “Physics” to “Neuroscience” to “Applied Math”). Keep a detailed list of faculty, schools, and programs as you go. For perspective, the Google Doc I used for this purpose outputs a 53-page PDF. Gird thy loins!

2. Contact faculty and students

*Gasp* You can email professors?!
Yes, and you should. It will (1) help guide your decision of where to apply, (2) help you write a more-informed application, and (3) possibly help your chances of admission, since a professor may lobby the admissions committee on your behalf. All of this assumes that you avoid racial slurs, links to raunchy YouTube videos, and absurdly poor spelling and grammar in your emails.

How should I email professors and what should I ask them?
Keep your messages short. The likelihood that a professor will read your email varies inversely with its length. Avoid sending resumes or making lengthy introductions. Simply include a sentence or two mentioning your relevant background, that you are applying to grad school, and that you are interested in their research group. Appropriate questions include whether they have the time and funding to take on PhD students and specific questions about their research or potential projects. Be sure to read their webpage and a few of their papers (or at least the abstracts) before contacting them. Failing to do so and instead asking “So what do you do?” will likely give off the impression that you are incredibly lazy and may actually hurt your chances of admission. Also, if you email a couple of professors in a row, be careful not to mix up their names. I did this once and, not surprisingly, I did not receive a response.

Why would I want to email grad students?
First of all, they are a goldmine of useful information about programs, universities, and particular labs. Second, they are much more likely to respond to your messages than professors, as they typically have far more time and receive far fewer emails. Throughout the application process, I actually found grad students to be far more helpful than any other single resource. Many are eager to talk about their own research, the advisement styles of various professors, details of their programs, and just about any question you might come up with. I even had lengthy phone conversations with several especially helpful students. Of course, as I mentioned for professors, make sure to do your due diligence first. Read faculty websites, relevant papers, and program websites before contacting students, and avoid asking questions that are answered elsewhere.

3-4. Apply for fellowships and grad schools

What are fellowships?
Funding, mostly distributed by the government though also by several private organizations, that will follow you to whichever school you choose.

Why should I apply for fellowships?
Preparation – Fellowship deadlines are typically earlier than those for grad schools, and many of the essays, recommendation letters, and other application materials that you prepare can be reused. Inevitably, you will start putting together your grad school applications too late, and the forced preparation of fellowship applications will save you from missing deadlines.

Grad schools care – Many grad programs require their current students to apply for fellowships, and if you can say that you have done so before even applying, you may impress them with your apparent competence.

Academic freedom – There is a slight chance that you might actually win a fellowship and if so, you will then have a reliable source of funding that follows you to whatever university and research group that you choose. This means that funding is no longer an obstacle to your working with a particular group. It means that your research will not be tied to a particular grant so that you have far more freedom in selecting a thesis topic. It also frees you from taking on teaching assistantships for funding, thus giving you more time to focus on your research. You may still decide that you want to teach or your program may still require a semester or two of teaching in order for you to graduate, but you now have flexibility. Lastly, if you are wait-listed or rejected from a school that you are still keen on attending, a fellowship may encourage the admissions committee to reconsider, as you are now essentially free labor.

What are the major fellowships?
In increasing order of benefits, there are the Ford, NSF, NDSEG, DOE CSGF, and Hertz fellowships. Each involves some combination of tuition, living stipend, research/travel grants, research internships, and conferences, lasts for 3-5 years, and may only be used at schools in the US. I will abstain from listing the benefits of each program, as they may change year to year. Check their websites for up-to-date info. In my case, I missed the deadline for the Ford, applied for the NSF, NDSEG, CSGF, and Hertz, received the NSF and CSGF, and made it to the final round of interviews for the Hertz (more on this experience below), so I will offer comments on each of the NSF, NDSEG, CSGF, and Hertz.

What about international fellowships?
There are several fellowships available to Americans interested in heading to the UK for grad school, including the Rhodes (1-3 years, Oxford), Marshall (2-3 years, any school in the UK), Churchill (1 year, Cambridge), and Gates (1-4 years, Cambridge). Fulbright Scholarships (1 year) are more flexible and eligible for study in countries all over the world. International fellowships typically have earlier deadlines (September-October) and require nomination by your undergraduate institution. Note that many of these programs allow you to pursue a master’s (or two) and then return to the US for a PhD program and so provide an excellent opportunity to sample another academic culture and travel without committing to a PhD overseas. I will not comment further on any of the international fellowships here, except to mention that, beginning this September, I will be spending one year at Cambridge on a Churchill Scholarship and will write more about this experience as it unfolds.

What can you tell me about applying for the NSF?
The NSF is by far the largest of the fellowship programs. In 2011 for example (the year I applied), they gave out about 2000 fellowships. The NSF also has the earliest application deadline (mid-November) and so is likely the first application you will submit. Three other unique features of the NSF are that (1) the application requires a project proposal (in addition to a personal statement and summary of previous research), (2) the selection committee strongly emphasizes “broader impacts” on society, and (3) once the results are announced, you will receive “ratings sheets” which offer brief feedback on your application from three reviewers. Given that in all my years of applying for schools, scholarships, jobs, and library cards, I have never received any more feedback than a simple rejection or acceptance letter, I found this third feature of the NSF alone worth the time spent applying. As for the project proposal, I found it to be the single most time-consuming piece I had to prepare while applying for fellowships and grad schools. Writing (and re-writing) an NSF-style project proposal is, however, great practice for applying to grad school and, if you are aiming for academia, applying for the grants that will feed both your children and grad students. In preparing your proposal, I highly recommend (1) starting at least two months before the deadline and (2) eliciting feedback from professors, grad students, and other researchers. Starting early will give you plenty of time to write, revise, seek feedback, and repeat. Eliciting feedback is essential because, unless you are a child prodigy, this is the first real grant application you have ever written and you will be amazed at how much your proposal will evolve with a few rounds of feedback. I should also mention that the NSF will not hold you to carry out the exact project that you propose. The proposal is really meant to test your knowledge of your field and ability to express your thoughts clearly. For this reason, it is probably better to write a proposal about something concrete that you know well (such as an extension of your undergraduate research) rather than the ambitious yet vague project you would really love to work on. Finally, while grad schools and most fellowships will focus almost entirely on your research potential, the NSF also emphasizes your “broader impacts” on society, which include the direct impact of your proposed project, public outreach efforts, participation in mentoring programs, and even promotion of international collaborations (a complete description is available from the NSF). Do not overlook these. The ratings sheets that I and other applicants with whom I have spoken all mention the presence or absence of broader impacts in all three essays, and I am fairly certain that if you submitted a surefire proposal to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, explain consciousness, and solve three Millennium problems in one brilliant swoop, but left out references to broader impacts, you would be swiftly rejected by the NSF (if it makes you feel better, you would still get the Hertz). Now, if your research is in mathematics or the pure sciences and is unlikely to change your grandma’s life in the next three years, then you are probably terrified at the notion of being forced to write about broader impacts. Fear not! As I alluded to above, broader impacts include public outreach efforts, mentoring, and other activities not directly related to your research, and the NSF will not penalize you for not attempting to cure cancer. Given the novelty of writing about your “broader impacts” and drafting a full-blown NSF project proposal, it can be quite helpful to begin by looking at a few sample essays and ratings sheets, and I have provided such links in the section on additional resources below.

What can you tell me about applying for the NDSEG?
The most unique feature of the NDSEG is that your application must pique the interest of a Department of Defense research office. This does not mean that you necessarily need to be building the Death Star or mind control devices. In fact, every NDSEG fellow that I contacted mentioned that they made no special efforts to reference military applications of their work when they applied. Also, while the NDSEG site mentions that you can browse the websites of the various research offices to see what kinds of projects they find interesting, I would advise against it for two reasons. One, no NDSEG fellow I contacted mentioned any perceived benefit in doing so. Two, government websites are notoriously difficult to navigate and out of date. It seems the best strategy is to apply just as you would for any other fellowship and hope for the best.

What can you tell me about applying for the CSGF?
The CSGF stands for “Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship”, but “Computational Sciences” is broadly defined as any research leveraging computers and/or mathematics, thus you need not have a server farm in your basement to qualify. In addition to the very generous financial benefits, the CSGF is unique in requiring a summer internship at a national lab. This feature can either be viewed as a necessary obstacle to receiving your funding or as a great opportunity to try out a non-thesis-related research project at one of 17 stellar labs across the United States.

What can you tell me about applying for the Hertz?
Not only is the Hertz the most competitive (about a dozen superstars pick one up each year), lucrative (5 years of stipend and tuition), and prestigious fellowship in the US, it is also by far the most fun to apply for, as it includes two rounds of intense interviews.

After the initial applications in October, about a quarter of applicants are invited to interview. If you are among this lucky bunch, you will receive an email reminiscent of a James Bond movie, requesting that you don a suit, meet at a hotel, and:

At five minutes before your interview time, please go to a house phone in the lobby, dial the operator and ask for Dr. [your interviewer's name here]‘s room. He will pick up and let you know what suite they are in and if they are ready for your interview. The interview will take place in a completely separate living room area of the suite. The interview is a formal technical interview, lasting 45 to 60 minutes. It is patterned after the PhD oral exam and you may be asked to perform calculations, discuss your previous research work, and to demonstrate the breadth and depth of your technical knowledge. Please bring paper and pen in the event you are asked to perform calculations during your interview.

After receiving this message, I was preparing to be doing push-ups and integrals at the behest of a military officer. In reality, although the interviewers asked impeccably sharp questions, the conversation was quite casual. (I was, admittedly, slightly disappointed that I did not get to do push-ups and integrals.) My question topics ranged from my personal motivations (e.g. “How did you become interested in neuroscience?”, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”) to my previous research (e.g. “Tell us what you did in this project.”) to creative puzzles (e.g. “If you had a friend on the other side of the moon and were banned from launching anything into space, how would you communicate with him?”). In all cases, the interviewers (there are typically two) continually peppered me with sub-questions, ranging from clarifications on specifics (e.g. “And about how large is a neuron?”) to speculations on broader issues (e.g. “And what implications do you think that has for the field of neuroscience?”). Note that you will almost certainly be stumped by one or more of the questions asked and that this does not necessarily disqualify you. I stumbled on at least two questions in the first round and still managed to limp my way to the second round. (The second round interview is very similar.) Personally, I applied for the Hertz mainly because the interviews sounded like fun and I was not disappointed. If you have a similarly sadistic sense of pleasure, then this is the fellowship for you!

UPDATE (11/25/2011)

Several people lucky enough to score a first date with the Hertz Foundation have requested additional interview tips. Here are a few additional thoughts:

Know your research well, not just the technical details but also the broader significance. Be able to explain why your projects were important and exactly what role you played in each one. One question I was unprepared for was: “What is the most creative idea you have had in your research?” Another was: “What is the most interesting new tool available to scientists in your field?” You should be able to come up with better answers to these than “I vectorized my Matlab code” and “Google Plus”.

Most importantly, be prepared to be humbled. The interviewers will probably be nice, but they will also probably push you to and beyond your intellectual limits. That is their way of testing you, so do not feel ashamed if you cannot answer some of their questions. What you should not do is remain silent for long periods of time, mumble, or bullshit your way through an answer. Instead, vocalize your thought process, and be honest and precise about any uncertainties you have. The interviewers want to see how you think, and they cannot do so if you sit there daydreaming.

Finally, remain confident. Treat the interview like a game, and I am sure you will have lots of fun. I truly enjoyed my interviews and would do it again in a second.

Sounds great! Can I receive all of these fellowships?
Up until 2010, it was possible to accept multiple fellowships and use them one after another. Beginning in 2011, however, the US government decided to spread its funding and no single student can accept more than one scholarship from a federal source (which includes the Ford, NSF, NDSEG, and CSGF). Since the Hertz is awarded by a private organization, it might be possible to accept it along with a federal fellowship, but this is between you and your funding sources. In any case, if you win a Hertz, you should have cured cancer and disproved P=NP by your fifth year, so a second fellowship should not be necessary.

What are applications like in general?
Applications typically ask for a mixture of essays (e.g. personal statement, summary of previous research), recommendation letters (typically three, though as many as five), general GRE scores, transcripts (sometimes official, sometimes unofficial), and personal info (address and such). Some may ask for a subject GRE score in your area of focus. Grad schools have application fees (typically $60-$120), but fellowships do not.

How should I prepare to apply for fellowships and grad schools?
Contact your recommendation letter writers and start preparing your personal statement early (I started during the summer and found it to be just enough time to hit all of my deadlines in the fall). If you can, consider taking your general and subject GRE even earlier (during your junior year) so that (1) you can retake them if you are not satisfied with your scores and (2) you are not preparing for GREs, classes, and applications simultaneously (personally, I found applications to be almost a full-time gig). Make organized spreadsheets of every item that is due; when you are juggling half a dozen deadlines in a single week, you will inevitably forget to send a transcript (or even an entire application) if you are not organized. Be sure to gently remind your recommenders of approaching deadlines; they will forget (though rumor has it that faculty members are so notorious for late letters that review committees will wait a week or more for letters to trickle in anyways). In general, do not worry about contacting the various organizations to make sure that your materials have arrived. They will contact you if something important is missing.

How should I prepare for the GREs?
If you are a native English speaker, all you need to do for the general GRE is to take a couple of practice tests ahead of time to understand the format. ETS (the inept company that administers the GREs) offers test prep software that allows you to simulate the riveting experience of using a computer in the early 1980s… and taking the painfully primitive test in an official GRE test center. There are also plenty of practice books available from companies like the Princeton Review that offer additional practice tests. The test is similar in nature to the SATs and your score is probably not particularly important, so you should not spend too much time preparing for or worrying about the test. If you are not a native English speaker, I hear the test is considerably more difficult. Sorry.

The subject tests, on the other hand, are far more challenging and do require practice. The only subject tests I have had experience with are physics and math. As for math, it is rumored that universities do not particularly care how well you did on the subject test, though they require it anyways. Physics programs, on the other hand, worship the physics GRE, and rumor has it that you need a 900+ score for top programs to even look at your application. Fortunately, there are four old exams floating around the interwebs as well as a fantastic website discussing various approaches to solving the individual problems. I recommend taking each of the (timed) tests on your own and reviewing the web solutions afterwards to fill in the gaps in your learning (I took each twice over a period of 6 weeks and did fine on the exam). Ignore prep books for the physics test; they are a waste of money, as the practice exams and web solutions offer plenty of preparation.

Who should I ask to write my recommendation letters?
Ideally, a Nobel Prize winner who swears that you are the spawn of Isaac Newton and Mother Teresa and will revolutionize your field before quals. Realistically, at least two professors who have overseen your research and an academic advisor who can speak about your coursework, participation in academic programs, and general background and personality. Having recommendations from a professor outside of your university (e.g. from a summer research program) or one who plays poker and shares oscilloscopes with faculty on the review committee (yes, scientists are humans too) are considered pluses. However, the party line is that you are better off with a good letter from an unknown professor who knows you well than a mediocre letter from a Nobel Prize winner who met you once at a seminar.

How should I write my personal statement?
As far as I can tell, there at least three things that grad schools want to hear about: (1) your interest and motivation for doing research, (2) your experience in and preparation for doing research, and (3) your short and long-term goals. Grad schools commit a lot of time and money to accepted grad students, and a PhD student who burns out after two years and heads to Hollywood to pursue a life in film is generally considered a poor investment. For this reason, grad schools want to know that you have reasons for being interested in research and, ideally, a history of pursuing it. In addition to demonstrating that you have faced the frustrations of research, have a realistic picture of what to expect, and yet are still naive enough to want to pursue a career in it, a history of research indicates that you will be able to hit the ground running in grad school and will require less initial training than a born-again English major who decides upon graduation that they want to investigate the origins of our universe. Finally, grad schools want to know that you have invested some thought in your future and thus have some idea of why you want to go to grad school and what you expect to get out of it. You should mention professors you might be interested in working with as well as general project ideas that you might pursue. If you have contacted those professors (and you should), you might mention that, as well as project ideas that stemmed from your exchange. You need not specify fine details, such as the exact molarity of the buffer you will use in step 2 of your first experiment or the variance for the Gaussian noise model you will use in your modeling project. In fact, if you are too emphatic about one particular project, this might even be detrimental to your case, as grad schools may assume that you are inflexible and might be disappointed or even drop out if that particular project does not work out (for example, because the advisor has too many students already). Unfortunately, if you claim to have interests in every field from C. elegans genetics to atomic microscopy to quantum field theory, grad schools will assume you are naive and have not thought hard enough about your future. In summary, you must navigate between Scylla and Charybdis and convince grad schools that you are creative and goal-oriented yet realistic and flexible. Most importantly, start writing early and get feedback from friends, grad students, and (if you are very lucky) professors. Seeking multiple rounds of feedback on each of my essays was probably the single most helpful thing I did while applying.

Fellowships, on the other hand, are slightly different. They seem to be slightly less interested in your interests and motivations and more interested in your previous and proposed research. Several fellowships, including the NSF, require project proposals, and in these cases, feel free to go into far more detail than in your grad school applications.

Will I be hanged, drawn, and quartered for breaching the page or word limits for essays?
I doubt any one actually counts words in your essay, although an extra page may raise eyebrows. Streamlining your essays for readability over poetic flourish is a good idea, but do not stress over a few extra words.

How many schools should I apply to?
As many as you see yourself potentially striving at. I know students who applied to as few as 3 and as many as 15 (and pre-meds are known to commonly apply to 20 or more schools), though the average is probably between 5 and 10. I personally applied to 13 schools, a number at which I arrived by applying to every school which I could plausibly see as my top choice after visiting. Reasons to limit the number of schools to which you apply include applications fees (typically $60-$120/school), time spent applying (though this decreases rapidly since you can recycle essays), and difficulty scheduling visits in the spring (if you are fortunate enough to be accepted). Reasons to apply to more schools include increasing the probability that you get in somewhere, increasing the number of visits you get to do in the spring, and allowing for a “borderline” school to surprise you during a visit. Your own optimum school number will depend on how many schools fit your interests, your pre-application confidence in your admission likelihood and school preferences, your financial status, and your time for and interest in spring visits.

Where can I find more additional resources on applying for fellowships and grad schools?

• advice from other previous applications, including:
• fellowship and grad school application from Stanford CS grad student and NSF fellow Philip Guo
• NSF advice and sample essays from Boston University physics student and NSF fellow Alex Lang
• my own application essays, including:
• NSF Personal Statement
• NSF Previous Research Experience
• NSF Proposed Plan of Research
• NSF ratings sheet
• sample 2-page grad school personal statement
• sample 1-page grad school personal statement
• additional tips from the NSF (though I found these to generalize to other applications) on:
• review criteria
• tips for applying

5. Worry
Now that you have submitted all of your applications, it is time to sit in front of your email inbox, hitting refresh on your browser 24 hours a day for the next couple of months.

In all seriousness, relax. If you have taken the time to read this far in an obscure blog post on applying to grad school, you have likely worked reasonably hard throughout your college career and on your applications, and your hard work will soon pay off. You can also take solace in that you will get to spend the next several years (at least) doing something you love while your sucker college classmates get jobs they hate, slowly lose friends and gain weight, and decay into a passion-less existence. You can also track user-submitted admissions decisions at GradCafe, but I recommend against it. Admissions decisions and interview offers are not sent out all at once, so finding out that others have been accepted, rejected, or offered an interview before you have heard back is not predictive of your own situation. Therefore, you will likely do little more than fuel your own delusions and anxiety.

6. Interview and/or visit

Wait, I have to interview?
This varies by discipline. Some programs require in-person interviews, others may conduct phone or Skype interviews, and still others may admit/reject students based on their applications alone. In the latter two cases, accepted students may be invited to visit before making a decision. For some reason, interviews and invited visits seem to be more common in the life sciences than in math and physics. This may either reflect the cultures of the fields (biologists are usually slightly more gregarious than mathematicians) or the amount of available funding (as a general rule, the more applied departments usually have more money).

Should I be nervous?
Not at all. Interviews and visits are the best part of applying to grad schools! Be prepared for several weeks of:

• one-on-one time with faculty to discuss their current research, potential projects for yourself, or just about anything else
• plenty of time to talk to current grad students
• lab tours
• the opportunity to meet other students from all over the country and world with similar interests
• …and (surprise!) free travel, meals, booze, and entertainment!

That’s right – spring visits are basically extended science parties. For both interviews and visits, programs typically plan a mix of one-on-one meetings with faculty (30 minutes to one hour), info sessions, lab tours, faculty talks, student poster sessions, lunches, dinners, and receptions with students and/or faculty, and entertainment, including everything from parties to hikes to aquarium visits. “Interviews” are as much recruitment as they are actual interviews, so prepare to courted. Also, in my experience, any reasonable expenses will be reimbursed, from baggage fees to taxis to lunch to coffee. I even heard one rumor of a group of students who ran up a $2000 wine bill during dinner and managed to get comped, though I recommend against trying this yourself.

Does that mean I am guaranteed admission if I am invited to interview?
Not quite, though the odds are in your favor. Most programs claim not to have a particular quota in mind, but rumor has it that typically somewhere between 50% and 75% of interviewees are accepted. Note that more students are accepted than desired to enroll since programs anticipate that not all students will accept their offers. Note also that a post-interview rejection does not necessarily mean that you were a disappointment in person. Interviews are as much about judging your own fit and interest in the program, and faculty may have sensed that your interests were better served elsewhere.

How should I prepare?
Publish three Nature papers, lose 20 pounds, and memorize all of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

But if you do not have time for that, remember that interviews are far more fun and casual than you likely imagine. Be ready to discuss your previous research (partially to test your understanding of your work and partially to direct the conversation towards topics of your interest). Be ready also to describe your current interests, with an eye towards potential projects. For those faculty with whom you will be interviewing (schedules are typically sent the week before you arrive) or with whom you are interested in speaking with at receptions and other events, read their websites and recent abstracts, and prepare questions about their research, intersections with your own interests, and possible projects. Thoroughly reading every paper they have published since their 5th-grade book report on “The Phantom Toolbooth” is however unnecessary, as most faculty are quite happy to give you an overview of their work in person. Essentially, you should read just enough to satisfy your own interests and prepare a few questions. Preparing questions will not only help you gain information relevant to your own decision, it also displays your interest, creativity, and preparedness and will likely help your chances of admission.

What should I ask faculty during my interview/visit?
See the advisor criteria I posted above for some ideas. Besides asking about current and potential projects, consider explicitly asking about advisement style and the funding situation.

What should I ask current grad students during my interview/visit?
While you can also discuss research with them, grad students are your go-to resource for questions on local living and entertainment, coursework, and what it is actually like to work with particular professors. In addition, I found the following three questions to be very helpful: (1) what is the worst thing about your school/program?, (2) what was the biggest surprise?, and (3) where else did you consider going and why did you choose to come here? See the school and program criteria I posted above for some other ideas.

What if I do not get to meet with a faculty member who I am really interested in speaking with?
Many faculty may be traveling or otherwise unavailable during interview/visit weekend, while others are simply over-requested by prospective students and cannot meet with everyone. If someone you requested is missing from your interview schedule, try asking the program administrator if you can replace a less desirable interview or fit in some one-on-one time elsewhere. For example, you might meet with a professor at a reception, over a meal, or during a lab tour. You can also speak with current grad students advised by that professor or other prospective students who interviewed with that professor. If you still feel neglected at the end of your visit, feel free to email a professor to ask questions, set up a phone discussion, or plan to meet at an upcoming conference.

What do I do if I was accepted but not offered a visit and would like to make one?
Let the program director know that you are interested in visiting and, in some cases, they may offer to help pay for a visit (the only school to which I applied that did not offer visits was willing to do this). Even if they do not have the funds to do so, they will likely be willing to set up meetings with professors and students if you can cover travel costs. If you are in this situation with regards to a school you are very interested in, I highly recommend investing in a visit. Choosing a grad school is a major commitment and you do not want to condemn yourself to several years working with an advisor you do not get along with on a project you do not care about in a city you despise simply because you were too cheap to splurge on a visit.

7. Decide
First of all, do not spend too much time during your visits trying to weigh your options and make a decision. Given the limited time of your visits, it is better to avoid this distraction and immerse yourself in the local research and social environment. Also, do not be surprised if you leave every visit wanting to call your friends and family to let them know you have a new top choice. As I mentioned, visits are disguised science parties and you will be swooned by almost every one. In the weeks afterwards, signal and noise will begin to separate, and you will slowly whittle down your choices. If you are fortunate, you will soon realize that every school is awful except for one perfect school that caters to your every need and desire. If you are less fortunate, you will realize that there are two or more schools at which you could be quite happy and productive. If this is the case, review the criteria on faculty and schools that you drafted in the fall (or if you were too lazy to do so, consider my own listed above) and consider your decision in light of these criteria. If you are still stumped, talk with friends, family, academic advisors, and research advisor about your decision. Other prospective students whom you met on your visits are also great for this purpose, as they are in the midst of a similar decision. Encourage and reflect on the feedback you receive, but also monitor whether your explanations of your indecision consistently belie an underlying bias toward one particular school. Often, I find that, long before I feel confident about a decision, my discussions with others betray that I have already made up my mind. If you have particular questions that remain unanswered, contact professors, grad students, or program directors, as most are quite happy to discuss your position in decision space, given their own vested interest in the outcome. Hopefully, you converge on a confident decision by April 15, the sacred agreed-upon admission decision deadline, as declared in the US Constitution.*

Acknowledgements
Thank you to Paul David, Alex Lang, David Sheen, Henry Yuen, Chris Rollins, Nick Steinmetz, Samir Menon, Peiran Gao, and Matt Goldstein for several rounds of generous feedback on my various application essays. Thank you to Nick Steinmetz, Samir Menon, and Peiran Gao for also seeding my initial list of faculty and schools with their own suggestions. Finally, thanks to Bartlett Mel, Andrew Childs, Paolo Zanardi, Stephan Haas, Kwabena Boahen, and Gene Bickers for their mentorship and guidance, as well as putting up with dozens of at-the-buzzer recommendation letter requests. I will spend the next several years trying to earn the generosity that each of you has offered to me.

Postscript
For students currently planning to apply or currently applying to grad schools and/or fellowships, feel free to post additional questions in the comments. For those who have run the gauntlet and survived, feel free to post additional advice (or refutations of my own) in the comments as well. I will periodically update this guide with any intelligent conversation that emerges.

*Unverified.

Related posts:

1. Programs in Time & Space
2. Now Reporting from the Frontiers of Science!
3. Itinerant Science: Out of the Office and into the Wild

What I Did Right
1. Not Selling Out Until I Found My Passion
I entered college without a clue of what I wanted to do with my life and entertained doing everything from making films to being a chef to being a sherpa. Instead of giving up on finding my passion, pursuing a career in medicine, law, or finance, and relegating my enjoyment of life to weekends and semiannual vacations, I spent my first couple of years at USC “shopping” for a passion by sampling from just about every program and opportunity USC had to offer. I explored international commerce in Hong Kong with the business school, tried to bring clean water to villages in Honduras and India with Engineers Without Borders and the USC Stevens’ Global Impact program, immersed myself in Chinese language and business through a summer internship in Shanghai via the USC Global Fellows program, led an initiative to bring the Flexcar car rental service to USC (now acquired by Zipcar), and backpacked western Europe. My major shifted officially from history to business to computer engineering to chemical engineering and unofficially to probably another dozen disciplines.

It was not until my third year at USC that I found something that stuck. That year, I took an introductory course in electricity and magnetism with Professor Paolo Zanardi that undoubtedly changed my life. Though I had taken physics classes in the past, it was Professor Zanardi’s style of teaching that introduced me to a new way of asking and answering questions about the world that resonated with my natural curiosities and loves of mathematics and problem-solving. I unashamedly abused his open office hours by drilling him with questions for hours on end multiple times per week and his ad-hoc whiteboard lessons and suggestions for further reading fueled late nights curled up in bed with a textbook, furiously solving problem after problem. In addition to being an excellent teacher, Professor Zanardi served as a living example to me that science was a viable and rewarding career path. Though I had fallen in love with mathematics in first grade, I had never known a scientist until college and had subsequently adopted the utterly false stereotype that scientists are no more than automatons who mindlessly carry out the “scientific method” at lab benches. It was meeting Professor Zanardi and other scientists that conveyed me to just how creative and exciting an endeavor science truly was. Professor Zanardi also offered me my first significant research experience the following summer in Italy, which made it clear – science was indeed the career for me.

After my decision to focus on science, life became, in many ways, far easier. I stopped worrying about classes or homework because I wanted to do the assignments anyways. I no longer felt an inclination to “build my resume” because the activities required to do so were exactly what I would have chosen to do in my free time. In summary, my internal motivations became aligned with external incentives and there was no longer any struggle to define what I should be doing – I just did.

An important caveat to this story – I was, in many ways, completely miserable during my first two years at USC. Devoid of any clear goals or direction, I felt foolish for not knowing exactly what I wanted to do. How could I not summon an answer to such an obvious question as: what is your passion? I spent hours and days writing and reflecting, trying to “discover” the answer by looking inward, and learned two important lessons. One, identifying your passion is not necessarily easy. Two, looking inward to “find yourself” is not necessarily an effective way to find your passion. Instead, I found that serial sampling of each of your latent interests and allowing yourself to get lost in each and every activity can be far more effective.¹

Given my experience, I offer the following suggestions.²

Suggestions for students: your first goal in life should be to identify at least one thing you truly enjoy. (Note that you may, or even should, find multiple such things.) Then, and only then, might your goal shift to receiving a particular type of training or degree. If you find at least one such thing before college, great; pursue it. If you do not, use college to carry out massive parallel experiments in each of your possible interests. Actually, even if you come into college with clear goals, consider sampling from secondary interests anyways. In each case, lose yourself in these activities. While reflection is important, constant reflection can be a barrier to actually experiencing anything resembling passion, so reflect with caution. And have patience. Do not settle for a career in something you do not truly enjoy. Dabble widely until you find something you are truly passionate about. Ignore stereotypes about possible career paths and the pressure to chose something based on your parents’ preferences or potential for fat paychecks. When you pursue something you are really passionate about, happiness and success will come naturally.

Suggestions for educators: encourage students to spend time testing out their spectrum of unexplored interests. Offer and advertise optional programs that introduce students to other disciplines without forcing them to change majors. Most importantly, encourage academic advisors to ask students what they really enjoy doing and hope to accomplish, instead of merely focusing on helping them to fulfill degree requirements and resolve scheduling conflicts. Be careful in making decisions and defining goals for students; learning to make your own decisions and form your own goals is an essential part of life that should also be an integral part of education.

2. Finding Great Mentors
Mentors played an essential role both in helping me find my passion and in pursuing it. Paolo Zanardi stoked my interest in physics, fueled my self-study outside of the classroom, showed me that science was a viable career option, and gave me my first significant research opportunity. It is safe to say that I am a scientist because of him. Bartlett Mel taught me how to combine mathematics and biology to “see the neural forest for the trees” and intuit how brains do what they do, as well as how to effectively bridge the communication gap between theoretical and experimental neuroscientists. Andrew Childs taught me how to become a more independent researcher and gave me my first opportunities to give a research talk and write a journal publication. Gene Bickers and Stephan Haas introduced me to the quirky world of academia, answered long lines of physics questions, and helped me navigate many professional and personal problems. Kwabena Boahen and Ted Berger allowed a naive physicist-mathematician to charade as a biologist in their labs and, hopefully, absorb some knowledge about the brain.

Reading books and websites or attending classes is no substitute for working with a great mentor. Great mentors have followed a similar route to your own and can offer recommendations that take into account your strengths and weaknesses and anticipated obstacles on the road ahead. Finding appropriate mentors can be challenging and time-consuming because (1) they must possess knowledge relevant to your goals and (2) you must get along with them, but the trial & error necessary to find them is worth every bit of time and energy.

Suggestions to students: seek out multiple appropriate mentors. The great value of being on a college campus is not the ability to take classes (you can do that online); it is the interaction with people who are currently or have in the past pursued goals similar to your own and can offer relevant advice.

Suggestions to educators: establish programs that help professors learn and share best practices on mentoring. Additionally, establish formal programs for students across the university to help them identify and learn from appropriate mentors. Emphasize mentorship as an essential piece of undergraduate education.

3. Building the Communities I Wanted that Did Not Exist
While I spent my first semester of college reveling in the sheer number of different communities available to me, I soon realized that there were still a couple missing.

First, I wanted to live among a community of inquisitive, clean, and passionate people, so that my day would be infused with interesting conversations (and not marred by the overflowing sinkfuls of dirty dishes, typical of a college dwelling). Initial attempts, including my misguided joining of a fraternity, failed miserably. Eventually, I decided to build my own living environment. I found a 7-bedroom house and hand-picked friends and friends of friends to fill it. That was easily one of the best decisions I have ever made. The three years since have been chock-full o’ stimulating conversations³ and have convinced me of the benefits of communal living.

Second, I wanted to get off-campus, out of the city, and into nature more often. Despite USC’s prime position as a basecamp for hikes and camping trips exploring the geological chaos surrounding Los Angeles, I could not find a single student hiking group. So I started one. What began as a small group of friends organizing under the banner “USC Trekkers” soon ballooned into a 300-member Facebook group, and I have spent the past three years hiking just about every other weekend. Though I rarely use that Facebook group for organizing hikes these days, it seeded a now quite strong community of hikers at USC. I hike and camp now more often than ever with a revolving community of friends, and a fantastic official USC student group, SC Outfitters, has since spawned and gained popularity.

Suggestions to students: if you are searching for a community that does not exist, build it. It certainly takes effort to organize and develop a new community, but the results and experience are well worth the time and energy. If the communities you are searching for already do exist, great; join and improve them. However, due to the sheer volume of students organizations at a large university, it is easy to drift apathetically from organization to organization, feeling that each one is tolerable but “not for you” and finding yourself at graduation realizing that you did not experience college as you wanted to. Do not let this happen.

Suggestions to educators: make it easy for students to find the guidance and resources necessary to start new communities (USC does this quite well actually). In particular, offer avenues for students to easily organize living communities around mutual interests.⁴

4. Learning Outside the Classroom
As my family and friends know, I read textbooks like novels and have since high school. Doing so has helped me in several ways. One, it guided my selection of courses by indicating areas of interest or weakness. Without reading on my own, I would have been at the mercy of degree requirements and minimally informative course descriptions in allocating my time and energy at college. Two, it allowed me to get much more out of my classes, in part by knowing how to ask the right questions. I have found that learning requires at least two passes through a body of knowledge. During the first pass, one gains a sense for the general concepts and relationships between them but spends a great deal of time confused and unsure of what questions to ask to alleviate this confusion. During the second pass, one now has a sense of the general story and can focus on the details as well as asking the right questions to clarify confusion, recognizing the essential assumptions and tools necessary for the production of knowledge, and solidifying links between the important concepts.

Of course, textbooks are neither the only nor necessarily the most appropriate route to learning outside the classroom. In fact, I would argue that what I did outside of the classroom and beyond textbooks was most important to my education (textbooks and courses merely enabled me to do some of these things). For example, leading an initiative to bring Flexcar to USC taught me that proactively solving your own problems often helps others in the process, an 8-week internship in Shanghai developed my Chinese language skills far more than 3 semesters of coursework, working to bring clean water access to a village in India with students from engineering, international relations, and health promotions taught me the value of interdisciplinary teams, starting a weekend hiking group taught me how to organize and motivate people, helping to build an open-source web platform for scientific collaboration (CoLab) taught me how to monitor the zeitgeist of a community and channel it into a useful tool, and perhaps most importantly, doing research at and outside of USC conveyed to me the joy of scientific problem-solving and taught me how to pursue original research and communicate it to others. Looking back at my time in college, it is these non-coursework opportunities that I value most, not the classes. As I mentioned above when discussing mentors, the value of college is not the coursework; it is the professors, students, and opportunities that one gains access to.

Suggestions to students: do not restrict your learning to your coursework. Read outside of classes to inform how you choose courses and projects in the future. Preview course material so that you can ask the right questions and get the most out of your time with a professor. Perhaps most importantly, go beyond courses and textbooks; seek out opportunities and start projects to help you explore your interests and solve problems important to you.

Suggestions to educators: your primary goal should be to instill a curiosity and love of learning and problem-solving in your students. With that in place, they will carve their own paths. Also, de-emphasize the lecture. Encourage students to view video lectures or read textbooks outside of class and emphasize Q&As, discussion, and collaborative problem-solving in the classroom in order to maximize the value of student-professor interaction time. Integrate into courses projects that allow students to solve real-world problems of interest or importance to them. Offer plenty of non-major-specific, optional programs that allow highly motivated students to gain real-world experience solving problems of interest to them. Offer resources for students to easily propose and implement new projects and programs. Be flexible in allowing students to take less courses, forego homework assignments, or take a semester off to pursue such opportunities.

Where I Screwed Up
1. Teach
I have found that I do not truly understand something until I can (and do) teach it. When teaching, you are forced to understand every nuance of the relationships between concepts, the big picture as well as the fine details, and which assumptions are required for certain arguments and why, and you must be able to anticipate and answer every question that a naive but inquisitive student might ask. Combining this with my suggestion above that learning requires two passes, my educational mantra for achieving deep understanding has become: learn twice, teach once. Ideally, I would love to see teaching experience integrated tightly into education so that each generation of students is encouraged to teach and mentor the generation younger than them. For example, middle schoolers might help first graders learn to read, high schoolers might help middle schoolers learn algebra, college students might help high schools learn neuroscience, and so on. Beyond gaining additional familiarity with some body of knowledge, teaching also offers valuable experience in presentation, including how to combine an understanding of someone else’s background and the material to be presented into a coherent and satisfactory explanation.

Despite my love, appreciation, and proselytization of teaching, I failed to gain any consistent, formal teaching experience in college whatsoever. I did not mentor local high school students,⁵ tutor other college students in introductory material that I knew quite well, or even study or do homework in groups, which would have exposed me to spontaneous opportunities to teach. My rationale for foregoing the first two opportunities was that I did not have enough time to learn all the things I wanted to learn and do research and teach. My rationale for not studying in groups was that I did not want to water down my learning with socialization, piggyback on the problem-solving abilities of classmates, or devote the additional time required to organize such study sessions. In retrospect, I may have been mistaken in both of these choices. As I mentioned, teaching is an excellent opportunity for learning, as well as a rewarding experience in its own right. In the future, I will find ways to inject more teaching opportunities into my life.

Suggestions for students: teach! Teach to solidify your learning experience. Teach to learn to present. And teach because its fun and rewarding to witness and be responsible for the spark of understanding in the eye of another.

Suggestions for educators: integrate teaching experience into every level of education. Have middle schoolers teach primary schoolers, high schoolers teach middle schoolers, and college students teach high school students. Recognize that peer-to-peer teaching is not only valuable for conveying ideas to the taught student, but also for solidifying the understanding of the teaching student and for providing opportunities for spontaneous mentoring on additional academic and non-academic issues. Offering small, optional tutoring problems is not enough; make teaching required and easily accessible.

2. Have a Long-Term Project
I changed research groups in college more often than I changed running shoes (approximately 10 times to 3 times). I dabbled in groups working on everything from cognitive science and neuroscience to nanoengineering and neuromorphic engineering to quantum information and computational physics.⁶ In doing so, I gained an appreciation for the spectrum of how science is done as well as confidence that I have chosen the field that is most exciting and important to me. However, I also missed out on the opportunity to nurse a research project from vague proposal to implementation to publication. Most of my projects were done in collaboration with grad students or post-docs and focused on a sub-problem of someone else’s project. Only once did I feel that I truly owned a project and even then, the original project proposal was made by a professor (we collaboratively worked out the details).

In retrospect, my serial research sampling seems like a necessary part of converging on what I wanted to do with my time and energy in the future (I did not even consider science as a career until late in my sophomore year and had a bit of catching up to do). However, ideally I would have converged on a general topic before college, carefully chosen a research group based on advisor compatibility and research focus, and nursed my own project from vague proposal to publication throughout my undergraduate career.

Suggestions for students: to the extent possible, come into college with an idea of what you want to accomplish. Start a project or organization as early as possible to tackle a problem of interest and importance to you. Explore every aspect of that project and own it.

Suggestions for educators: encourage students at an early age (well before college) to begin considering what they enjoy doing and what is important to them. Emphasize reflection, independent decision-making, and goal-setting, so that students are more likely to enter college confident of what they want to accomplish. In college, emphasize these same themes in academic advisement and work with students to develop a set of goals that include an independent, long-term project of personal interest and importance.

In Summary…
…I found my passion, learned from great mentors, built the communities I wanted but did not yet exist, and did not restrict my learning to the classroom, but I also missed out on opportunities to teach and pursue a long-term project. All things considered, I have changed a lot over the last few years and while that is not sufficient for indicating progress, it is at least necessary.

Feel free to learn from my perceived successes and failures… or make your own mistakes. I confess the latter is probably more fun.

Related posts:

1. Mid-Year Dispatch from England Part I – Life at Churchill College
2. When and How Do I Learn Something?
3. What’s Your Ideal Classroom Experience?

A good science writer must combine the dry precision of a mathematician with the relaxed storytelling of grandpa. Error too much on the side of the mathematician and you produce an unmotivated collection of facts that is about as fun to read as a 1960s computer punch card. Error too much on the side of grandpa and you leave your reader stealthily checking his watch and wandering when you will return from yet another sidetrack on the merits of the seat cushion textiles used in pre-1973 Chevys and get back to your main point.

In his Wisdom of the Hive, Seeley struck this balance perfectly, balancing a brilliant overview of all that is known on the foraging behaviors and allocation of workers in honeybee colonies with informative discussions on the methods and motivations behind the seminal experiments.

In “Honeybee Democracy” however, Seeley errors a bit too much on the side of grandpa. The first eight chapters of this book are bloated with anthropomorphic speculation on the inner lives of bees, gushing commentary on the brilliance and diligence of Seeley’s colleagues, and various anecdotes unrelated to his experiments. The admittedly interesting results and experiments on how honeybees select their new hive locations could easily have been summarized in a magazine article but instead are spread thinly over 200 pages of stealthy watch-checking and anxious squirming.

That said, the last two sections shine. Chapter 9 covers a lucid analogy between honeybee home selection and the neuroscience of primate decision-making. The underlying message is clear: replace bees with neurons and the mathematical principles behind the two systems are tantalizingly similar. Though I mentioned it in my review on Wisdom of the Hive, I echo: neuroscientists and entomologists would do wise to start throwing parties together. The computational problems faced by social insects and neural networks are often very similar and if Nature is as clever as we credit her for, then she has likely recycled her best evolutionary solutions.

Chapter 10 concludes the book with an insightful overview of lessons on effective group decision-making that Seeley has borrowed from his bee friends. While I usually find these extrapolations to human behavior cringeworthy (for the last time Deepak Chopra, special relativity and quantum mechanics do not imply that all viewpoints are equally valid and all of the Earth’s creatures are connected by a magical consciousness field), Seeley’s suggestions are well-motivated by his studies of bees and genuinely helpful for human groups. He advises that groups [1] be composed of individuals with mutual respect and shared interests (to unify goals and enable discussion), [2] led by a leader who acts as mediator rather than driver of discussion (to avoid Bush administration-like kowtowing), [3] initially seek diverse proposals independently generated by group members (to ensure that all potentially useful ideas are laid on the table), [4] aggregate group knowledge through debate (to enable each group member to make an informed and ideally independent decision), and [5] to anonymously survey the group opinion often (to effectively identify contentious decisions and accelerate convergence once a clear winning proposal begins to emerge). I found the most interesting feature of honeybee home selection to be that bees “advertising” a new home site do not directly recruit the support of their fellow bees; instead they recruit their independent assessment. That is, recruited bees play the role of skeptic, examine the candidate home site for themselves, and perform an assessment that is independent of the initial enthusiasm conveyed by the original advertising bee. Seeley is (rightfully) emphatic in his discussion of lessons [3]-[5] that a certain level of independence among the members of a group is essential to effective decision-making.

Seeley also includes a very brief but fascinating review on the concept of “signal ritualization” in the context of bee behavior (I first encountered this concept in the work of theoretical biologists Maturana and Varela). The idea is that evolution may sometimes seize upon an incidental action and modify it to produce an intentional signal over time. The example Seeley offers is the “buzz-run signal.” In order to prepare for flight, a bee must rub its wings together. Thus, wing buzzing is a natural indicator of impending bee flight. Yet bees have even learned to buzz their wings without flying in order to encourage other bees to prepare for a group takeoff. In other words, buzzing has been “ritualized” from an incidental predictor of flight in the buzzing bee to a signal encouraging flight in nearby bees.

Two questions I have for any entomologists that happen to stumble across this review. One, in light of Seeley’s suggestion that honeybee colonies have responses resembling metabolism and immune responses, I am curious whether colonies also exhibit behaviors analogous to aging and learning? Two, Seeley mentions that the number of dance circuits in a waggle run reflects the quality of the advertised home site, but have any studies probed whether rate and duration of waggle runs serve as separate channels of information?

In conclusion, if you are considering reading this book, I suggest replacing the first eight chapters with Wisdom of the Hive and then reading the last two chapters of “Honeybee Democracy” for their fascinating connections to neuroscience and human group decision-making.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Related posts:

1. Book Review: The Wisdom of the Hive by Thomas Seeley
2. Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
3. Book Review: Elements of Information Theory by Thomas Cover and

My Goodreads Rating: 3 of 5 stars

Clearly Braun is not familiar with the recipe for modern pop science texts. Where are the extrapolations from statistically insignificant correlations to bold sermons launching the next consumer craze? Why have they been replaced with tempered, conservative statements accurately reflecting the uncertainty of the scientific process and our current state of knowledge?

Genre-bending accuracy aside, Buzz is a handy user manual for the human body and the two drugs you almost certainly abuse it with – caffeine and alcohol. Braun employs an entertaining, Magic School Bus-style strategy of conveying the science from the point of view of our molecular stars as they journey through your poor unsuspecting body. If you maintain a healthy information diet (or frequently [ab]use either substance), you are unlikely to find many stunning surprises in the discussion of behavioral consequences (Egads! Alcohol disrupts learning and proper sleep and caffeine improves cognitive speed on mundane tasks and is a mild diuretic?!), but the basic science behind their commercial production and effects on the human body offer a few fascinating tidbits:

1) Alcohols are actually a quite large family of molecules. The one you are most well-acquainted with and commonly refer to as “alcohol” is ethanol. However its not the only member of the family capable of getting you drunk. Methanol, just a carbon atom away from ethanol, can also induce intoxication. The reason you do not see methanol on the shelf at your liquor store, however, is that a methanol hangover comes with a slightly less appealing side effect than a mere hangover – permanent blindness. Methanol is broken down into formaldehyde by an enzyme that is found in your retina… and formaldehyde is not something you want your eyeball getting cozy with.

2) That most of the table wine you find weights in at 12% alcohol content is no coincidence; its a necessary condition of the production process. Ethanol is typically produced by the gasping breaths of suffocating yeast cells, and in a 12% ethanol bath, ethanol can no longer diffuse across the yeast cell wall, inducing the drowning cell to shut down.

3) Caffeine, contrary to popular belief, is not exactly brain fuel. It works by blocking the activity of adenosine, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that seems to build up in the body throughout the day. Thus caffeine works by “turnING off the brake” rather than “hitting the accelerator.” This is important because it makes it nigh impossible to overdose on caffeine. On the other hand, this means that if you are a lifeless drone devoid of passion, caffeine cannot rescue you.

One question I leave for researchers of caffeine is: does there exist a biochemical means by which caffeine might make us think or remember that we are/were much smarter under its guidance than we really are/were? Many claim to be granted creative superpowers by caffeine but current research has not been able to support these claims. Perhaps caffeine only increases our beliefs about our cognitive abilities and not our abilities per se.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor
2. Book Review: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
3. Book Review: Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais

Book Review
Never have I read a book that communicates the process and logic of scientific discovery so well. Like erotic literature for the scientist, Wisdom of the Hive not only conveys what entomologists know about bee colonies but the graphic details of they found out. Seeley prefaces every discussion of experimental data with the precise thought process that led him or colleagues to perform the experiments as well as a clear overview of all methods used. He follows each discussion with scandalously honest assessments of what can and cannot be concluded from the results. He even has the grit to discuss competing hypotheses (i.e. views he does not hold), past and present misconceptions in his field (i.e. times he and others were wrong), unresolved problems (i.e. stuff he hasn’t figured out), and suggestions for future experiments to resolve these problems (i.e. ideas he has not yet had time to pursue and that could be taken up by others). Perhaps most importantly, Seeley has the discipline to not blow his scientific load early and lead discussions with experimental results and conclusions. Instead, he carefully walked me through the historical results and thought process that lead to a particular question, considered possible routes to resolve this question, and only then revealed that: “Oh by the way, I’ve performed this experiment and here are the results and how I interpret them.” In other words, Seeley never answered a question I didn’t have; he takes careful steps to ensure that I was practically begging for the answer when he presented it. The only danger in going into such detail is that Seeley has to spend the first four chapters and eighty pages introducing the reader to bee physiology, experimental methods in entomology, and the broad topics covered in the ensuing discussions of experiments. I was sipping from these initial pages like a forager bee from a 2.5 mol/L sugar solution feeder after a week-long thunderstorm, but those not sharing my enthusiasm should take note – the book really shines from Chapter 5 onward.

Despite the focus on experiments, Seeley also paints a coherent theoretical picture over all by emphasizing abstract principles of information flow within a hive. Thus, despite the dozens of experiments mentioned and the dazzling complexity of the beehive, I feel confident that I could take up a summer internship in a beehive and never break decorum. He also includes a summary at the end of each chapter to highlight the most important experimental results and open questions. Every field needs a Seeley – someone to provide a comprehensive and even-handed review of methods, past experimental efforts, current agreed upon and disputed hypotheses and models, open questions, and suggestions for future research directions and experiments.

This masterful work can be read as a comprehensive review of information flow in bee colonies, a how-to guide for designing and carrying out experiments, or a near-perfect example of scientific writing for a general audience.

What I Learned
Despite several endeavors into the complexity and chaos literature, I’ve never encountered a better treatise on how global organization emerges from local interactions. Bee colonies elegantly optimize the allocation of labor and collection of resources to satisfy current and projected needs even though colony resource levels and needs are neither known to any single bee nor readily available in a centralized signal. Instead, individual forager bees integrate information about their colony’s needs with the profitability of resources they have discovered, and if the resource is judged important by that bee, the bees performs a “waggle dance” to recruit other bees to join him in foraging from his discovered source. The details of the waggle dance indicate the location of the resource while the duration of the dance is a measure of how important the bee thinks his discovery is to the colony. Since other bees sample dances unbiased, longer dances result in more bees recruited. No Department of Labor or managerial staff – just individual, information-processing, dancing bees. Foragers can also regulate their personal foraging vigor to increase or decrease resource collection as well. (Why not go all out all the time? Its not energetically efficient to do so, and energy seems to be a constraining resource in bee colonies. There is no bee McDonalds or manufacturer of bee Oreos.) The emerging picture is this: if you want to design a complex and powerful organization in which individual members possess as little information on the actions and goals of the organization as possible, the US government a bee colony would be an excellent model.

How do foragers determine their colonies’ needs? Again through local mechanisms – the search time for a processor bee to unload their delivery (in the cases of nectar, pollen, and water) and personal level of protein (in the case of pollen). Short unload time for nectar? Clearly not enough nectar is being collected. Dance a waggle dance to recruit more foragers. Long unload time for nectar? Clearly the processors need to ante up. Dance a tremble dance to recruit more processors. Sustained success of nectar foraging? Clearly the black locust trees are in full bloom. Perform a shaking signal to recruit more foragers. Surplus of protein in the diet for a pollen forager? Clearly the colony has plenty of pollen. Cease pollen foraging and go check out the waggle dance floor to see what the colony really needs.

These mechanisms also introduce the distinction between cues and signals. A signal is produced explicitly to communicate information, while a cue is a byproduct that may act to communicate information. Search times and protein in the diet are both cues while waggle and tremble dances are signals. Why would bees use cues? One reason is that they are easier to evolve. A cue requires only the evolution of a recognition mechanism for an exiting observable instead of the co-evolution of signal production and recognition. There are also cases in which signals would be difficult and expensive, such as employing a bee to survey the colony’s entire resource stores and broadcasting his findings. Why then do bees also use signals? For some information, there does not exist a cue. A returning forager loaded with nectar may be adorned with the scent of flowers which provide some information about his collection source, but the direction of these flowers is not encoded in him in any way. Thus, to recruit more foragers to a profitable source, an explicit signal (the waggle dance) is required.

Colonies also exhibit the influence of resource requirement variability on collection mechanisms and the differences when that variability is supply-driven vs. demand-driven. Because nectar and pollen availability are highly variable, bee colonies do not send all foragers to optimal collection sites but instead distribute them among non-optimal sites as well. This provides for the continual monitoring of resource sites and robustness against rapid shifts in supply. Also, since the variabilities in need for nectar and pollen are supply-driven, bees maintain stores of these resources in their hives. The variability in need for water, on the other hand, is demand-driven, and bees do not store water but merely collect it when needed.

Colonies are also capable of integrating external and internal signals to make decisions. High nectar availability (external) and nearly full combs (internal)? Clearly the colony is running out of space for honey storage. Build more combs. (By the way, how do processors detect comb fullness? Though results were not conclusive at the time of this book’s writing, probably long search times for empty comb.)

Colonies also employ combinations of mechanisms acting on various timescales to regulate their function. Pollen foraging is regulated both by the collection rate per forager (short) and the total number of pollen foragers (long). Why two mechanisms? The former is faster to adjust but provides less dynamic range, while the latter is slower to adjust but provides more dynamic range. The result is a rapid and robust combination of mechanisms allowing colonies to match pollen collection rate to pollen demand and supply.

The above also highlights evolution’s ingenious reuse of biological design principles: the use of search times in nectar, water, and pollen collection to indicate balance between colony demand and supply and the use of dances for communication (waggle and tremble) of resource needs and locations.

In closing, the above language I use is not accidental but is meant to suggest analogy with another system whose investigators might benefit from considering the design principles of bee colonies and the experimental techniques and theoretical concepts of its researchers. That system is the human brain. For those who listen carefully, discussions of global organization implemented by local interactions, the dual use of cues and signals, the essential role of variability, the integration of external and internal signals, the interaction of mechanisms acting on various timescales, the distributed storage of information, the use of excitatory and inhibitory feedback, and the elegant reuse of mechanisms should sound eerily familiar.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley
2. Book Review: Elements of Information Theory by Thomas Cover and
3. Book Review: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

1. The Synergy Between Microfinance and Open Science
At least in the US, the most typical flow of funding for science follows the pattern: taxpayer -> government -> scientists. FundScience, SciFlies, and EurekaFund ask, “Why not cut out the middle man?” Their idea is to enable citizens to fund scientific projects directly. While any one citizen probably can’t afford to fund anything but mathematics (coffee is cheap), the collective donations of many science groupies can easily add up to support more resource-intensive projects.

I really like this idea because it beefs up the incentive for scientists to adopt open science practices. Why? Consider which projects are most likely to be funded by microfinance. If I’m a citizen about to throw several hundred dollars into a scientific project, I want to be able to see the science. A published paper every few months (or year) is not enough. I want to see the process, I want live updates, and I want to feel like my donation is moving science forward. In other words, citizens will be more likely to fund open science projects than traditional proprietary projects.

Microfinance needs open science because it needs a way to attract citizens and get them excited about the ongoing science of a particular lab. Open science needs microfinance in order to create clearer incentives for scientists to share their science.

2. Reproducibility as the Standard for Open Science
Science is supposed to provide a systematic way for us bumbling fools to avoid deceiving ourselves. One way it does so is by enforcing that our theories be based on results that are reproducible. Yet consider the last paper you read. Where was the raw data from which plots were produced? Where was the simulation code? Where were the exact experimental protocols? Could you really reproduce the results of that paper without this information?

Science should not require trust in another’s scientific infallibility. If you publish an interesting new discovery, I should have the opportunity to convince myself of your discovery by reproducing it. Science that is not reproducible is not science; its marketing.*

The standard of reproducibility provides an answer to the question: “Just how open should science be?” If we truly mean to do good science and avoid deceiving ourselves, we need to release every bit of data, code, protocol, and communication that would allow a colleague to reliably reproduce our results.

If you’re interested, you can read, listen, or watch more on this idea from computational scientist and policy wonk Victoria Stodden.

3. Come for the Closed, Stay for the Open
There’s a problem with websites whose main benefits come from a large community of users – they’re only useful once plenty of people sign up and early adopters will be bored in the meantime. Successful websites should be useful to single users or small groups, even if all their friends & colleagues haven’t signed up yet.

For web apps promoting open science, this means that the successful sites will be those that prove useful to individual researchers or research groups, regardless of whether or not their colleagues also use the site. For CoLab (a website enabling online scientific collaboration that Casey Stark and I built and demoed at OSS 2010), this means creating a rich set of tools that is useful for managing the workflow of individual scientists or groups.

Doing so is essential to convincing those that are on the fence about open science to give it a try. The goal is to draw scientists in with slick project management tools for their closed group activities, expose them to the lively discussion and new collaborations being formed over the open projects on the site, and gradually convince them that openness makes science more efficient and fun.

(Thanks to Jason Hoyt at Mendeley for pointing this out.)

4. New Vision for CoLab – Enable Scienctific Debate Around Any Piece of Scientific Content
CoLab was inspired by PolyMath, Quantiki, and a few other experiments in open science from the theoretical physics & mathematics communities and was built by a pair of physics and math majors. Not surprisingly, the site is currently optimized for collaborating over projects that focus on discussion and equations. But Casey and I are aiming to make it stupid easy for all scientists to collaborate openly online, not just physicists and mathematicians. After a series of long discussions with Jean-Claude Bradley, Lee Worden, and other experimentalists who want to share more than equations, I think we’ve got a better idea of how to do so.

Our new vision for CoLab is to enable scientific debate around any piece of scientific content. We want to make it stupid easy to center a discussion around protocols, data, plots, published papers, papers in progress, simulations, code, or any other component of scientific research. As an experimentalist, I should be able to import a lab protocol, raw data, or manipulable plots based on a live feed from that raw data and discuss it online with collaborators across the globe. As a computational scientist, I should be able to import code or live simulations and troubleshoot online with anyone in the world who might be able to help. As a member of a journal club, I should be able to import a published paper and collaboratively highlight and annotate in-line with colleagues, from those in the lab next door to those in another country. As a researcher ready to publish, I should be able to host a working version of my paper online, collaboratively edit with any of my colleagues, and submit a link directly to a journal, without being forced to download the paper and make finishing touches offline. In short, as a scientist, I should be able to easily and openly discuss any piece of my science with my entire scientific community.

That’s no small task, but its what science needs and what we will continue to build.

*Update (August 4, 2010): After a fruitful discussion with Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) and Seb Paquet (@sebpaquet) on Twitter, I should clarify that certain fields, such as astronomy, have fundamental barriers to reproducibility. As much as they might love to, physicists cannot summon supernovas on command. Thus, in observation-based fields, we should stress that data analysis be reproducible but not necessarily data collection. The key point is that information exchange between researchers should not be a barrier to reproducibility.

**Update (August 7, 2010): As pointed out by Greg Wilson in the comments below and Lisa Green of Creative Commons over lunch today, there have been plenty of open science conferences over the past decade. This sentence should really read: “…first major conference devoted to open science that this baby scientist & web dev noob had ever seen.”

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