Ask HN: Physics PhD at Stanford or Berkeley

Another Ph.D. physicist here (Ivy, not Stanford/Berkeley)

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.

They are both fine. Your real question is whether or not you can better leverage LBNL or SLAC (ALS vs LCLS/SSRL). I think LBNL would be a bit better for optics specifically. If you need more compute access LBNL/Berkeley might be a bit better because of NERSC but it’s not a huge deal because you’d probably use NERSC anyway. Of course, it’s quite likely you could be be working with PIs from either university as well.

Stanford students are generally happier than Berkeley students (talking about PhD/Postdocs in particular)

Both programs are very good, the specific PI is going to be much much more important than any generic advice you glean from this thread. Separately, the environs are very different. Stanford is pristine, quiet, safe, boring, isolated, VC-oriented. Berkeley is urban, gritty, dense, exciting, outgoing, academic. For most people it doesn’t really matter but if it does for you this could be important.

I received my PhD in applied physics and had colleagues, collaborators, and some published work in this (very broad) field. Although I'm familiar with the programs, my advice is not specific.

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.

I have a PhD [DPhil] in physics from the university of Oxford in the UK. I signed up for a course in interdisciplinary science, and ended up working on something I never new existed –– a technique (called dynamic nuclear polarisation [1]) that uses low-temperature nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and condensed matter physics of the variety you learn at university, but ultimately ends up being applied for medical imaging. People are alive because of the work I did, and I find this deeply meaningful. I loved learning about lots of new things that were genuinely very different, and applying them through the lens of physics, for very real applications – and liked being in a supportive environment that gave you the ability to choose what you were interested in and follow it through.

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...

They're both excellent programs. The schools have different vibes: Berkeley is much more urban and closer to SF in culture while Stanford is more of a bubble.

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.

I don't know much about what it's like to do a PhD in physics at Berkeley, but many years ago I did a PhD in physics at Stanford starting out working in experimental quantum optics. I wound up doing something completely different, and felt supported in changing what I worked on. Stanford felt small in a good way, the grad student admin staff was wonderful. Stanford definitely has a different more suburban isolated vibe. Summers felt like you worked at a country club or something.

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.

Meet with Dan Stamper-Kurn, Jon Simon, and whoever else at length, go get coffee with their grad students without any postdocs or the PI present and ask them to tell you the shitty bits, and make your pick. Don't worry about the school -- it's not important. The advisor is. Also, pick by what you won't put up with. The bad bits add up differently than the good bits.

At least in astrophysics Berkeley had a reputation for grad students taking a very long time to finish. At most schools grad students would get a PhD within 5--6 years. At Berkeley it was regularly taking students 10+ years to finish, which is pretty unheard of at most other institutions.

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.

I went to Princeton for my PhD, but I was at Stanford for my undergrad, and knowing a few experimentalist grad students, it seems for whatever reason the completion time was usually 7 years (or more), longer than usual. Might be something to consider.

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.

After being accepted to both for my PhD, I started at Berkeley but then finished at Stanford after my professor moved.

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.

Both schools have excellent reputations, so the PI is going to be the most important thing (and, perhaps, variety of PI's if you're not sure you want to stick with a specific one). After that you would consider things like course requirements, likelihood of having to TA, etc. And if you want to live in a city, Berkeley is much easier (yes, it's possible to commute to Stanford from SF, but it's a slog).