Ask HN: Physics PhD at Stanford or Berkeley What should one consider while signing up for a Physics PhD program, with an focus on experimental Quantum/Molecular optics, program at either university if both of them offer? I understand there are many factors to take into account when choosing a school for research (advisor, research fit and funding to name a few), but these are on the individual. Any Physicists on HN? |
Definitely elated at the offers, but the offers are for climbing the tallest peaks there exists.
I fully agree with what everyone else is saying here, it's really great advice. On the science aspect, their advice has you well-covered. From myself, I emphasise: the most important part of ingredient of your PhD, other than you, will be your prospective advisor. The choice of school is secondary to that.
My two cents: consider how well you will get on with your supervisor. Meet them, their students (past and present), their departmental colleagues and friends if possible. Get a feel for them, a vibe. Even the people who don't love them very much will give you an idea for what this person is like in just a few hours. Imagine: if this is what your supervisor will be like for one day, can you imagine being with them for several years? In this respect, it's like a long-term relationship, with one massive difference: if a (romantic) relationship goes south after a few years, you can break up, but for a PhD if you quit halfway you could end up without a piece of paper to show for it. You will then have to weigh up that possibility with the effort needed to continue, which drains from and adds a hefty cost to all parts of your life. I've seen this 'crossroads' occur for many people who left halfway.
To drive home the last point: my personal experience is such that I literally cannot think of anyone who's had a tougher PhD journey than myself and still managed to complete it---I'll concede that I'm biased, naturally. Backing up that statement: statistically speaking, across my department I don't think anyone in the whole Oxford Physics department fell in the same hole that I did for at least 20 years. I need not go into details, but if pressed, you could ask me directly (this is my first post on HN, I would have to figure out how to respond). Be cautious about the life aspect of the PhD, not just the science itself, is my point.
Also be aware of the life outside of your work. This is the point you highlight in your original question: it's great that you do. Specifically, the location matters since it defines your environment. For your PhD to work out, you need not just a support network but an environment in which you can succeed with as little effort as possible. Your hard work then compounds from there. You want to be able to get home/go out on the weekends and recover energy after your work, not drain it. If your PhD work takes your energy and you can't get back your energy or recover it, that's bad. Same goes for the work itself though, meaning your work should motivate you and give you energy too. Imagine, what will your evenings and weekends be like if you were in exactly the same place but didn't have any PhD work at all. Would you still enjoy it? Ultimately this decision is a personal one, and you have to use and trust your judgement. If you don't feel 100% confident to answer that, talk with others about this point before moving forward. It's difficult to get a feeling for this experience, so you need to be armed with quality advice.
Note that a PhD is a hard journey and a life-changing experience. Of course, it's about your life. There's lots of negative things to say about the experience, but I'll end positively: my PhD has completely opened my world to experiences that I wouldn't have been able to dream of otherwise. I simply wouldn't have known such things exist. It's broadened my horizons in a similar way to like someone moving from the island of Nauru in Oceania to Bay Area SF would experience. So, do what makes you happy :)
Good luck!
Footnote: Actually, it's late in Europe at the moment, so to save time I tried to dictate this post using ChatGPT Plus for the first time. It spoke out what I said for 7 minutes uninterrupted and absolutely flawlessly! Then ended with 'Transcript unavailable', and I lost the text. Perhaps this is like 'The house always wins", except there is no house, or winning. So, from now on, whenever I think of AI going forward, I will think: 'The always". Even if it doesn't make sense to anyone, I'm sticking with that thought, it has personality!
Let's talk. I think I have some notes for you.
How?
The advisor is the most crucial factor in deciding a PhD/postdoc program (you're not an undergrad anymore!). When people talk about the prestige factor at this level, they are talking about the top 20 vs. the university of nowhere, and even in those cases, it comes down to the advisor and their reputation in the field (for your case, all the other factors are the same). At the end of the day, as a PhD student, you rarely need the "school" resources as opposed to the care/advice/networking you get from your supervisor and the facilities in their labs (that's also true at the department level; why would you care if the department has access to a remote telescope if your research is in quantum optics?) So, pay no attention to the side details (weather, location, rankings, etc.) and focus solely on the best advisor you can find wherever they may be.
Also, keep in mind that all the top schools produce a much larger volume of grad/postdocs than will there ever be faculty positions in ANY STEM field (so most grads end up in non-related positions, and many qualified applicants are turned down). That implies that you definitely need people to recognize your name when applying for jobs, and one way to achieve that is to put your name on an article with a reputable person in the field or have their recommendation (or be smart enough to make a name for yourself). Even in that case, deciding based on reputation is not merely sufficient. You want to invest 6-7 best yrs of your life, so do you like how the advisor treats their grads/postdocs and runs the lab? Do you want them to be hands-on, or would you rather be independent (very important to consider this)? Do you even like your research project/topic?
I always say that choosing a PhD advisor is like "virtually" marrying someone. You have to check all the qualifications to see if you're a "perfect match" before committing to anything (also, you would use your advisor's networking post-graduate, so you will always have them in your academic life to some extent). If you do not believe me, you can check the profiles of the newly hired physics assistant professors or associate professors across all the US schools, and you will see that there's no pattern in the academic background (some have PhDs from European/Asian universities that you probably never heard of and some even have PhDs in another discipline like chem or bio); nevertheless, their advisors were famous in the field + their research directions were promising enough to get them hired/promoted + the faculty of that school think they can collaborate with them at any level. Also, when it comes to hiring a new faculty (which I believe is the most illustrious job in physics), there is a ton of politics you need to do (connections to the faculty of the said school, presenting the best case for future research directions based on your past research, getting your teaching profile ready, etc.), and at that point, no one cares where you got your PhD from. So, visit any lab you have in mind, talk to people, and check the overall environment of the lab before committing (in summary, would you be happy for the next 6-7 years of your life doing what you always loved to do?)
Remember that if you do not choose the "right" advisor, you will regret it to the extent that you may even grow to hate your research (it happened to me and indeed to a lot of my friends), and it takes a long time to get back on track even if you're in the best institution (some of my friends at top institutions end up doing TA for many years because of this).
For disclosure, I'm a physics PhD student at one of the so-called top physics institutions. I happen to be involved in a lot of politics behind the scenes (e.g., faculty hiring) and try so hard for faculty positions!
One other consideration though is that Berkeley is the safety school for people who don't get into Stanford. If all else is similar, I would go to Stanford, as it will provide a lot more opportunities down the line than Berkeley.
This is true for some undergrads, although there were plenty of people who got into both and chose Berkeley.
But it's definitely not true at the Graduate level. It just depends on the program. Some programs at Cal are better than at Stanford, and vice versa. But in make cases the two schools collaborate quite a bit. It's not unheard of for someone at Stanford to have a Cal professor as an advisor for example, or the other way around.
I think people in the Bay Area forget this, but as you move further from the bay Berkeley is regarded more and more like another public school. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it is just another public school, where Stanford is a globally recognized school.
As someone who lives far from the Bay Area: This is ridiculously wrong - especially when applied to PhD.
It all depends on the discipline you're in. And when it comes to engineering, most of these top public schools outrank most of the Ivy's. Almost no one cares if you got your EE PhD from Princeton or Yale. They definitely will care if you got it from Berkeley. Or Ann Arbor. Or Illinois, And so on.
Reminds me of a coworker who went to Princeton for his Mechanical Engineering PhD who deeply regretted it. He was coming from abroad, and naturally assumed an Ivy would be better. He really wishes he had gone to one of the Midwest public schools instead. He hadn't heard of any of them before coming to the US (and clearly hadn't bothered doing his research before applying).
https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/06/15/berkeley-ranks-among-wo...
EDIT: I'd also personally would want to stay as far away as possible from people who would see a PhD from Berkeley as a lesser one (based on general "prestige").
As others have pointed out, your prospective advisor(s) are the most important thing to consider. You can't go wrong with either school.
That said, when choosing an advisor:
* Pay attention to where the advisor's former students ended up. The former students are a natural "network" for you when you graduate. If you can, ask relatively recent grads about their experience.
* Meet the prospective advisor's current students and post-docs - are they happy? Will you fit in with them? Do they graduate in a reasonable amount of time? Ask other grad students about the professor as well. Trust me, each professor is going to have a reputation.
* If you want to stay in academia, mid-career advisors are the "safest" - an assistant prof may be working on something exciting, but the research will probably be more risky, and the professor might even have to leave mid-way through your thesis work if they don't get tenure. A late-career advisor may presently sit on a lot of committees and be more well-known, but by the time you need their recommendation for jobs/tenure they may have considerably less influence (that happened to me, although it was fine in the end.)
Read Feibelman's "A PhD is not enough" - still lots of good advice even though written 30+ years ago.
The opposite, postdocs that never publish and get stuck or leave academia one after the other tends to signal dysfunctionality and is a big red flag. If you dig deeper, those groups are usually broken in a number of different ways and it's critical to stay away. A bad supervisor can ruin the prospects of a great student.
Actually I gave a talk a couple months ago that was well received where I refused to use slides and only used the chalkboard. Tbh that was way more fun imo.
I think everyone should make an excuse to grab the chalk at least for part of every lecture. Part of being the instructor is doing the presentation.
This is a huge difference IMO. If you want insulation from the world, go to Stanford. If you want to be immersed in it, good bad and ugly, go to Berkeley.
I completely agree with this- your advisor will be the most influential factor of your phd years, for better or worse.
Also, some programs have a reputation of enrolling a lot more students than there is actually room for, with purposeful high attrition during the first couple of years. I am not sure if Stanford or Cal have this reputation or not, but might be something to look into.
Real question: How do you know? Example: Did you partner get a PhD in Physics at Stanford and you at UCB? Or, did you get masters at Stanford, but PhD at UCB?
The question you have to answer first is: why do you want a PhD? Is it to do science for as long as possible? Is it to contribute to the frontier of human knowledge? Is it to participate in an global research community? Is it to land a tenure track job? Or do you not know the questions and their answers (which is fine!)?
I'll offer myself as a case study. I knew I wanted to make something tangible (hence device physics / photonics), I knew I wanted to explore the possibility of continuing in academia, and I knew that I would enjoy working in industry. I structured my PhD to go for a high risk/high reward research topic (with the thinking that if it pans out, academia would be viable without having to go through an extended PhD and multiple postdocs, which was off the table for me). I also set up to consult on industry projects, and started poking around the local startup incubators and B-school entrepreneurial offerings. My school (and PI) choice was motivated really by these factors: how I judged the impact of potential research being done by the team, how plugged-in and amenable was the environment to extracurricular work, and how supported I would be to a transition to start-ups/industry.
Figure out what you want, and treat your PhD itself as an experiment w/ testable hypotheses. If you're not sure about something, how can you build into the experience a way to find out? Is it a class, a side-project, the local community that can help? There are many factors to take into account when choosing a school because we all weigh those factors differently - once you decide what's really important to you you'll get better-tuned advice.
The thing I would say though is that 1) the supervisor or supervisors you end up working with are incredibly important and are really the make or break decision for the whole programme of study; 2) you are in a surprisingly powerful position if you are a good undergrad student (the world is your oyster! You can go anywhere and do almost anything!); and 3) think beyond the PhD: it is little more than an apprenticeship. Where are you going later – do you want to work broadly in the area of $PHD_SUBJECT for the next few years? Will you learn the skills you want to let that happen?
If you don't enjoy your subject of study, you may well come to resent being cheap labour for a rich institution, at a point in your life when you can do almost anything and go almost anywhere – and see your friends earn real money and get on with life (marriage, children, houses, etc).
Full disclaimer: just today I have advertised a PhD place for a bright mathematical scientist, at Aarhus University in Denmark [1]. I am biased, but I would encourage you to go elsewhere. There are many great institutions in europe (switzerland and the UK included) and the other thing is that you do a PhD in 3-4 years on a real salary in most places – e.g. the starting point for total compensation for a student in Aarhus is ~428500 dkk per year (~$60k/year, ~€57k/year, ~£47k/year, from which tax & compulsory pension contributions are deducted, but no health insurance) and it is expected that this is enough to live on. This is a very reasonable salary, comparable to many graduate jobs. If anyone would like to talk to me about it, I'd love to chat (see profile).
[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/dynamic-nuclear-polarization-how-... [2] https://phd.health.au.dk/application/opencalls/multimodal-me...
If you are interested in Academia after graduation, then your primary advisor is going to have a lot of influence on where you end up and the trajectory of your career. Their reputation and their network will have a lot of influence since you will be seen as a protégée of Prof X. The school tends to be a bit less important. If you're interested in industry and startups then Stanford is probably closer to that culture.
Who you work with really matters (obviously) and different PIs and labs can have very different cultures which you may or may not feel comfortable with. That alone can make your decision if you are very sure about what you want to do and who you want to work with.
Outside of that, I would say Stanford is a really great place to do graduate work, especially if you're not entirely sure what you want to do.
All of this is with the obvious caveat that my experience is from quite some time ago.
My knowledge is about a decade out of date now, though, so things could have improved. I'm also not sure if that was also happening in other fields of physics or if it was just limited to astro. But it would be worth looking at the average time to graduation for the departments and schools you're interested in.
Anyway, if you don’t have a specific advisor in mind (well you wouldn’t be asking if you do), my advice is go to the open house in both departments and talk to the actual profs and grad students.
Edit: Oh and another thing, I recall getting admitted into Berkeley too but the offer didn’t even guarantee funding beyond the first year? Which was a big turnoff. Definitely check how you’ll get funding and for how long. That said I’m a theorist, I suppose if an experimentalist can’t find funding they’re in much bigger trouble than not having money.
Both were excellent. Stanford is more isolated, meaning it has more community, but it’s also harder to get to the city. Stanford also has more budget. I’d give the slight edge to Stanford. I don’t know the quality of their quantum optics faculty and research, though.
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/05/dont-become-scientist-...
2. Years ago Greenspun graphed level of education vs pay scale. Salaries maxed out at a masters but plunged to high-school levels beyond that. See the graph below "Not So Very Serious Stuff" at:
https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
In summary, best get a master's and pass on the Ph.D. Bonus: you'll gain an extra 3-7 years of your young life (doing what you want).
Also look at "Grad school versus prison, quantified".
Wish I'd known all this when I was younger.
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/12/09/grad-school-ver...
Outside of the physics community, there may indeed be some differences in reputation, though I'd expect them to be small, since anybody hiring physics PhD's will have a rough knowledge of Berkeley's excellent reputation in physics. Sure, in other fields (or for undergrad), the reputations may not be equivalent. NB: I'm Stanford undergrad, MIT physics PhD, so I have no personal reason to hype up Berkeley (the opposite bias, in fact...).
Some data: Last I knew, Times Higher Education surveyed published tenured professors worldwide about the best schools in their field. I think it's probably the best and mabye only good data.
Every year, six schools have been head and shoulders above the rest overall (in random order): Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, and Berkeley.
I am very interested on this as well, feel free to reach out, email in profile.
I am actually advocating against abuse and corruption in academia, that's a swamp that really needs to be drained.
Stanford students are generally happier than Berkeley students (talking about PhD/Postdocs in particular)
I don't know much about your field of focus, so I can't speak about potential advisors too much.
Everyone says it's about five years. That's BS. It varies widely. At a university with which I was familiar, physics was one of the worst, with average time around 10 years. My department wasn't so high, but the success rate was in the single digits. The longer it takes, the greater the chance of life events derailing you.
As far as I know, there's no place to get this information.
And an incomplete ABD from Stanford or Berkeley is likely to have some value.
- Most physics departments allow for 'rotations' during your 1st or 2nd year (while you are taking classes and studying for the qual). Check if the 2-3 plausible advisors will take you as a rotation student
- Check if the grad students are (relatively) happy, especially the 4th-5th years during your open house. Ask them how much help the are getting in career search (good departments take care of their senior grad students)
- I personally didn't care to optimize for locale very much. Don't regret it. PhD is a grind, you won't have too much time to yourself... and with what you have, I think you can have a vibrant social life at almost any university
- There is some funding anxiety right now (NIH, but surely NSF is not far behind). I would make sure that the labs you are in are well funded. Stanford is better in this regard.
- I would max out your applications to GRFP, NDSEG or whatever the in-vogue PhD fellowships are. It increases your chances of getting into a competitive lab
- You didn't say theory or experiment? If experiment, find out if you are going to spend time in the fab, and make sure you check out the fab. Berkeley nanolab was a shockingly functional shithole (at least when i visited, and i know it caused misery to many friends)
TL;DR - Stanford if research fit is there.
Associated or nearby labs (LBNL, SLAC, ...) might be a factor for some specializations.
Another consideration could be where you want to live.
Something like: Location, Grad funding or financing available, degree type desired, field and project of study, background or education desired.
And a high reputation school will help in grant applications and so on, where you don't get to include your advisers name.
I think OP should go with the better PI, however suggestion Stanford and Berkeley have the same level of prestige seems wrong to me