Archive for the 'Grad School' Category

This graphic was made in very bad taste.  I’ve posted it here as an example of the kind of poor attempts at humor that will not be condoned on ChemBark.  If you have examples of similarly poor attempts at humor regarding chemistry or life in graduate school, please make me aware of them so I may post them as a public service. Thank you.

Over at The Chem Blog, Kyle has a post on the latest chemistry rankings by the National Science Foundation and US News and World Report. I guess we’re approaching the deadline in the contest to come up with the stupidest way to quantify scientific quality, because the Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. req’d) just reported another “new standard for measuring doctoral programs.”

The company that developed the system calls it completely objective and, for a mere $30,000 per year, will provide the data to university deans interested in keeping tabs on their faculties. The new system bases rankings on “scholarly output,” which accounts for “the number of book and journal articles published by each program’s faculty, as well as journal citations, awards, honors, and grants received.” These numbers are plugged into highly scientific equations to generate highly bogus final rankings. I guess the equations are something like: 1 Nobel Prize = 3 Priestley Medals = 10 ACS Local Section Awards, and 1 Letter to Nature = 3 JACS Comms = 10 Org Letts. Someone should tell them that using math doesn’t equate to being objective.

Anyway, rather than tell you how stupid the new system is, see for yourself. Here are the top 5 chemistry departments using data from 2005:

1. Harvard
2. Yale
3. MIT
4. Northwestern and UCSF (tie)

Interestingly, their system also ranks Jimmy Carter and William Henry Harrison as the best presidents of all time, and Vanilla Ice as the best rapper.

School rankings, impact factors, h-indices, j-factors…they’re all bull. If one thing is clear, it’s that the greatest value of these numbers is in marketing. The annual college rankings sell a lot of US News magazines, and it seems like all the scientific journals are trumpeting their impact factors to attract both subscriptions and submissions.

Don’t take the bait.

The Chemmy Award for the Most Outstanding Chemistry Department of 2006 goes to:

Princeton University

In the comments thread announcing the Chemmy Awards, Excimer noted that “although all these awards are subjective as hell, the Outstanding Academic Department is really out there. How can one honestly be 100% objective about such things?”

He’s absolutely right; there’s no way to definitively peg what department had the best year. This award was made to mimic how various sports leagues recognize a general manager or team executive of the year. We’re just asking, “which department made the best personnel moves or exceeded expectations for the past year?” Of course, this is going to make it harder for the “top flight” departments to win this Chemmy. The bar is higher for them, as we’ve come to expect schools like Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford to do amazing things.

So, why Princeton? They’ve made a number of big strides forward in the recent past. Coming on the heels of Sorensen’s arrival from Scripps in 2003, Princeton was able to attract superstar David MacMillan this year. Princeton also gained a resident chemistry blogger in 2006, Carmen Drahl, who’s noted that the school has vastly improved its instrumentation this year. A new chemistry building is also in the works, with completion scheduled for 2010.

In terms of losses, the sophomore organic class at Princeton might suffer with the impending departure of Maitland Jones. He is closing down research operations in preparation for a move to Greenwich Village to teach orgo at NYU. For those interested, The Chem Blog had a post this summer chronicling the movement of some other professors. Yale had a particularly rough year, which included the loss of Hartwig to Illinois.

So, when I think of up-and-coming schools, Princeton is the first that comes to mind. I’ll stand by it as deserving of the award for 2006, but feel free to post your thoughts on other departments that will soon be surging up the rankings.

Sorry about the slow blogging last week. I had a research presentation to give today and those always take a little bit of time to put together.

Our group does business differently from from most (I think). We each give only one solo group meeting per year, which consists of a formal seminar of 75 minutes, followed by 15-30 minutes of discussion. We also have 2-3 subgroup meetings per year (I think there are 8 subgroups total), where students who have projects in the area give 15-minute updates. That’s it, as far as presentations go. The bulk of communication is all done through paperwork–the “outline system,” which is a construct I wholeheartedly endorse. It deserves a post all for itself.

At the same time, I kind of miss my undergrad days of having more frequent/regular group meetings. First, they do a good job of maintaining momentum in terms of progress. Second, when you only give one talk per year, you definitely feel more pressure to perform at that talk. Having more frequent group meetings would disperse the heat. Finally, we don’t have literature meetings, which I also miss from my undergrad days. While they were useful, I suppose that time is limited and it might not make much sense to have group-wide lit meetings in a group as diverse as ours. A few of the more “organic” students, including me, tried to get a journals club started, but that never panned out. With neither the boss nor some other figure of authority watching over these meetings, people tended to blow them off.

You knew it was bound to happen, and now it finally has: a chemistry professor has made a video advertisement to attract first year graduate students. Check it out (pops).

Aside from her mesmerizing voice, the spokesmodel’s eyes will follow your cursor around the screen. From the looks of her hair, it must be really windy in Professor Grzybowski’s lab. Then again, he is in Chicago.

For the purpose of full disclosure, I should note that Bartosz was a former labmate. We overlapped for under a year, so I never got the chance to get to know him, but he’s a wicked smart guy and his research is really cool. Now, let’s see if anyone follows his lead in making lab ads.