I boarded my flight around 7, and my aunt and uncle picked me up the airport and we drove back to their place in Concord. I ate a slice of cold pizza and fell in bed. About seven years ago, my father, brother, and I stayed with them to visit San Francisco, and I stayed in my cousin’s room. I swear it has not changed a bit. There are still 28 bookshelves (I actually counted this time), a sweet map of Sweden, and a kitty that warms my feet during the night. I woke up to bacon and French toast PLUS a grapefruit off the tree. So good. We talked for awhile in the morning about pretty much everything: cousins, Minnesota, plans, and they made fun of me for applying to the famously-liberal Berkeley. They dropped me off around noon at the Hotel Durant, a hotel right off Telegraph Avenue, a locale still home to many tie-dyed shirts. Myself and one other prospective student then joined three graduate students to hike up Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco. Many others were supposed to join us, but late flights seemed to be a reoccurring problem.
It was fantastic to spend time with graduate students and get to know them better. Eric is a half-French hilarity with a quick wit and gets free room and board as an RA in the International House, a “dorm” for graduate students and upperclassmen at Berkeley. He wants to spend more time abroad, and was an avid supporter for the Bay Area weather. Zach spent five years teaching high school physics (for those of you that know Mr. Fields, he’d be that kind of teacher: enthusiastic, smart, and every single girl would have a crush on him). He’s married to a manager in the Ghirardelli company, and it was courtesy of his wife that we got some chocolate in our visit packet. Lane just had surgery on his knee, so he was having a bit of a rough time with it, but he was a trouper heading to the top. The van ride to Mount Tam was my first taste of the rolling San Francisco streets: there is really nothing quite them…
The day was incredibly clear, and the drive across the Golden Gate Bridge yielded stunning views on both sides of the bay. We stopped at a convenience store for some food before heading up the mountain: I got this fantastic orzo and lemongrass concoction which tasted beyond delicious. We drove the winding roads past Muir Woods, smelling the eucalyptus as we neared the top. We tried our best to avoid the crazy drivers in their manual sports cars on the way: props definitely go to Eric for the excellent driving skills. The hike took about twenty minutes, and we could see everything: Oakland, Berkeley, downtown, the ocean, Alcatraz, the tips of the redwoods and sequoias of Muir Woods...simply beautiful.
I also got to play paparazzo of Lane and Zach eating sushi at the top of the mountain with San Francisco behind them: apparently it’s going to end up on the BEAST website (BEAST = BioEngineering Association of Students). We hiked back down to the van, and drove back across the bridge to the beach. We chilled at a beachside chalet-type thing with the other prospectives that had arrived a bit later in the day before heading on the beach to play Frisbee. I finally got to meet up with Tim (a friend that I met this summer in Boston), and he convinced me to put my feet in the ocean…at which point the Pacific ate my jeans, soaking me to the knees with a huge gush of water. Excellent. Now soaking wet, Tim and I tried to dry while watching the others play Ultimate Frisbee.
We headed back to Berkeley, checked into the hotel, and I washed the sand out of my jeans before heading out to dinner with the group. We ate at Jupiter, a local establishment not too far from the hotel. I got a chance to talk a bit longer with some graduate students, as well as a current Berkeley bioengineering undergraduate who loves the time she has spent in the Bay area. After dinner, Tim got a call from George, another friend we had met over the summer. We agreed to meet at 7 am the next morning (phew…early!) for coffee before all three of us started our day with interviews.
We went to Caffe Strada right across from campus and ate breakfast outside….on March 3rd. This is a big deal. I walked outside without a jacket on. It felt kind of wrong and spoiled to be in such lovely weather. That said, I think I would miss seasons. A lot. Downtown is usually between 50 and 70 degrees, Berkeley is between 40 and 75, and past that (near Concord, where my aunt and uncle live) gets really hot during the summer. I would miss that temporal grounding in how the years pass. One of the students mentioned that I could just follow sports (basketball, baseball, football, hockey), but I would miss snow and raking leaves and lilac bushes and heat waves…for all that I may grip about being cold (whether in the winter or in air conditioning) it’s something I would miss.
Monday was spent at UCSF (as the program I applied for is a joint program between UCSF and Berkeley) and the beginning was an orientation to the program and talks from many of the students. We started at the Mission Bay Campus, a newly-built addition to the UCSF program on the old shipping yards of San Francisco. There were some really cool projects presented on imaging (with a crazy-powerful 7 Tesla MRI machine), but it’s not really something I’m into: it is a lot of programming, as well as a lot of time only working with computers. There were some interesting projects with gene delivery, as well as improving drug delivery models…it’s hard to give an accurate description of all of the problems they are trying to solve given the breadth of the actual program.
We spent lunch with graduate students as well as faculty members, and spent the afternoon touring and interviewing on campus. I went on the tour first, and I must say, the workout center is fantastic. Voted the best in San Francisco this past year, it has free weights, machines, squash, two pools (one on the roof with a gorgeous view). Research labs are research labs, although these reminded me the most of the facilities at Pfizer (probably due to the fact that they were built recently).
From there, I took the grey shuttle to the Parnassus Campus, home of the UCSF Medical School (one of the best in the nation). A fellow prospective and I fumbled our way through hospital corridors to get to our professor, Dr. Frank Szoka, who does work on drug delivery.
Interestingly enough, I was the only biology major out of 50 students called back to interview, as well as the only one from a purely liberal arts institution. I felt somewhat out of place, and Dr. Szoka called me on it. Because he was talking on a conference call, it ended up that he ran late and three prospective students interviewed at once. He immediately called me out, asking, “So…this biology thing…what makes a biologist want to do bioengineering?” Uh…well, the superficial answer is because it is so COOL but the reasoning behind it is that after this summer, I began to see the relevance of bioengineering as a means to improve our understanding of biology, as well as our solutions to biological problems. I almost wish one place would finally stop focusing on my background as far as school size and degree program and ask me flat out “What do you want to do in graduate school? Why?” That would be great.
My next two interviews were phone interviews, and the first was with an anesthesiologist, and it only lasted about five minutes: it seemed like he didn’t know what exactly to ask, which was kind of weird. My second was with Dr. Bernard Herman, but he didn’t answer his phone. However, he did send me an email apologizing, and he and I talked for about a half hour on Friday about the research projects I had done. He said that of the thirteen places he has lived during his life, San Francisco is his favorite (although Madison, Wisconsin would have won if there weren’t so many mosquitos).
Dinner that night was at Gordon Beirsch, a brewery on the bay…I had some wine from Sonoma Valley for dinner, along with some really good French fries and gorgonzola cheese (really…you’d think it’d be gross, but they’re delicious!). The next adventure was driving a 15 person van down Lombard street…whoa. We also visited the Coit Tower, which gave us a really pretty view of the night sky and the city. We stopped for a bit at Ghirardelli Square (which is overrated and expensive but still smells of such lovely chocolate). We headed home for the night, enjoying the lights as we traveled back across the bay.
The next day was a crash course in the Berkeley campus and a few interviews. From the hotel to the science buildings, I passed tennis courts, a stream, walked through a wooded area, saw the Campanile Tower, and was introduced to an intense earthquake-safe building.
My first was with a graduate student and three other prospective candidates in a lab that does work with reconfiguring viruses so they orient neural stem cells in vivo. The second interview was with a graduate student and one other prospective about the Shaffer lab (he worked for MIT earlier in his career and does some cool adenovirus work as well as stem cell projects). My final interview was with Dr. Kevin Healy, another tissue engineer who does some really cool work with hydragels and using them as injectable support for tissues in heart disease.
It was quite odd that I had four interviews in person, and none of them were me alone face-to-face with a professor: I was always with another person. It’s not a bad thing, but it was just very different from every other interview I’ve had so far.
The trip back home was a nightmare. I had to leave Berkeley at 11:30, missing the rest of the interviews, lunch, dinner, a graduate student presentation…the works, which was really disappointing, given that Berkeley had many more interesting professors for me in comparison to UCSF. My aunt and uncle dropped me off at the airport, and my flight was delayed one hour. Delayed 2 and half hours. And….cancelled. The plane they booked us on got into Chicago at 10:40 pm, in comparison to the 7:00 pm original time. Unfortunately, that meant that I would miss the last Peoria Charter out of O’Hare, and the next wouldn’t leave until 10:45 am the following day. I waited in line for an hour and a half to have the ticket agent tell me she could do nothing since Chicago was my terminal destination, so I sat stewing in frustration at the thought of spending a night in O’Hare baggage claim. When the ticket agent called for volunteers to take another flight, I jumped at it…since I won’t be getting home until tomorrow, I might as well get $300 out of the deal. I was transferred to a United flight, and I was able to book a train ticket so I could arrive in Bloomington by 11 am instead of 1:30 pm the following day. My flight on United was delayed for about an hour, but amazingly, the plane was only half full, so I got an entire row to myself. I worked on homework most of the time, eating a pretty bad airport quality salad for dinner, and we arrived in Chicago at 1:00 am. I went to baggage claim, and…surprise, surprise. My obnoxious purple suitcase was not there. I went to United’s baggage service, and realized that I didn’t have the claim check number (it had been on the back of my boarding pass that the American ticket agent had taken away when she rebooked my flight). So, the people at United took the description and flight number, and (since they couldn’t look up American Airlines claim check) sent me to the American terminal. I arrived about 10 minutes after the baggage claim worker left, and trudged up to ticketing to find an employee from American. No dice. I half slept and worked on homework until 5 am, when someone finally showed up, pretty much saving my life and finding my suitcase. I rushed to the blue line, rode an hour to get downtown, walked to Union Station, and finally got on the train back to Bloomington. Just in time to go to class….
1 comment:
Lost luggage is the worst! Ours was lost when returning from Ireland, and I could've killed someone. What an awful travelling experience, but at least it sounds like Berkeley was worth it.
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