charlie12

april fools...?

Not that it matters really which group he was in (I mean this merely with respect to the sadness of the loss), but the fact is that he was a joint Fu/Peters student

Are the Boston schools still closed because of the weather?

For the kinds of institutions that you applied to, 10-12 hours for 6-7 days a week is probably on the lower side in terms of average workdays in "wet" chemistry labs from my experience and observation (having worked in a synthetic inorganic lab at one of the institutions you applied to as well as doing my undergrad research in a synthetic inorganic/catalysis lab at east coast university). In organic chemistry at these top institutions, the average is probably closer to 14-16 hrs. For synthetic inorganic, the average might be slightly less, but that varies with group and advisor. I would counsel against choosing a sub-discipline based upon the work week; do what you love and then it wont matter. But my bias is for inorganic! For me, its just more fun-I love synthesizing metal complexes and working with inorganic spectroscopic techniques, I love doing detailed mechanistic studies, etc....

I had one on the 31st-two PIs on the phone (I assume the two PIs on the adcom for my sub-discipline), was about 10 minutes with questions seemingly preprepared and fairly standard-my work, why grad school, stuff like that, all in all not too bad

When does Caltech starting sending out their earliest acceptances? From the past couple of years, I didn't see anything in the results before mid-January but I didn't know if anyone knew differently from contacts...