Harvard is bustling with activity. It is the prototypical, traditional, picturesque, Ivey-league school. Beautiful historic buildings surround small grass fields and water fountains. Tiny trails, lined with park benches and flowers, lead all over campus. Tour guides are leading around groups of shy, prospective students, each surrounded by their slightly-more-than apprehensive parents. J.D. and I follow a tour for a little while.
“Can you live in residence for all 4 years?” a mommy asks the tour guide.
“Yes, people tend not to, but yo-”
“You hear that, honey? You can live here all 4 years!” mother hen speaks to her daughter like she’s 6-years-old.
“What about the food plan? Can you get that all 4 years too?” asks another.
“Y-You could, bu-”
“That’s great!” yet another parent interrupts.
The students don’t ask a single question.
J.D. and I look at each other. Were we ever this young?
We leave the tour and head towards the cafeteria for a bite. We sit next to a couple of Harvard undergrads. They spend the lunch discussing Jessica Simpson and the Dukes of Hazzard. J.D. and I whisper to each other, “Are these students really that much smarter than we were?”
A bit later, J.D. leaves to go do her exam, while I head towards the labs. I’m lucky enough to have interviews with several of the biggest labs on the main campus, although I don’t have any at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Longwood. Entering one of the buildings, I notice in the building directory that pretty much the whole building is devoted to one of my potential bosses.
Many new Universities are paying big bucks to renovate their buildings, keeping a traditional exterior, but with a highly modern interior. This building, however, is old on the outside and old on the inside. There is no air-conditioning, which is a severe problem for many chemistry labs. Many chemicals begin to evaporate in warmer weather, and I can smell some of them here.
In the lab, the students have moved many of the evaporating chemicals into the fume hoods. Everybody in the lab is sweating because of the heat. I ask how they work in this weather. “You get used to it,” a postdoc shrugs. The lab rooms are old, with old, creaky, hardwood floors, wooden benches and wooden cupboards. There’s old equipment everywhere. Chemicals line the hallways, in old, rusted drums. Like many labs, they’ve framed and hung all the journal cover-art that they have published. The interview is nice, as are all the lab members. I go through my list of questions, asking specifics about their supervisor, the work environment, ex-postdocs, etc. The whole process is harmless, but the heat has gotten to everybody. We all speak slowly and sluggishly.
Outside of the building, I notice an honorary plaque stating that “Charles Dickens was here”. I guess this building was state-of-the-art when he was here, but it’s 2006 now.
At the end of my lab interviews and tours, I notice the same theme. On the main campus, the big supervisors are typically in the old buildings with the old equipment. Nothing impressive, in terms of state-of-the-art equipment and facilities, really jumps out at you. Many don’t have more funding (at least per person) than a typical lab, but they do better because they are smart, and work smarter. Most importantly, supervisors have extremely smart people working for them. They have an advantage in that they have an extremely smart pool of undergrads to draft into grad school. As usual, labs are understaffed and postdocs work about 70 h a week (these two points are not related). All-in-all, the labs are very typical. It’s just the intellectual work – the published papers – that stand out from your average lab.
One principle investigator offers to pay for my plane tickets, but I decline. Cambridge and Boston are nice, but I don’t think they're for me. There is no metropolitan feel, and the multiculturalism is pretty poor (although since I’m from Toronto, I may be asking for too much). J.D. was miserable, and for us, the city wasn’t “fun”. Harvard is Harvard, and I would have loved this place in undergrad... but I guess I’m older now, and looking for a “special” postdoc – big lab, interesting work, fun people, a beautiful city for the rare hours a postdoc gets to relax.... someplace with that certain je ne sais quoi (air-conditioning!?!). Anyways, I didn’t want to let the potential boss know that I’m not flying back home. I’m off to tour the West-coast labs... California!
Next Up: California Love
