<p>I am at Berkeley and recently spoke to a professor in office hours about the department accepting their own grads.</p>
<p>I was told they simply do not do it. He can only remember two they accepted and the faculty actually talked BOTH of the them out of attending.</p>
<p>They do not want their own grads in the department for reasons of "academic cross-pollination."</p>
<p>I know this is not the case for Law and B-school. However, those are not academic educations, they are trade schools; like Devry only they cost more.</p>
<p>I am speaking specifically about the academic majors.</p>
<p>So, from the experience of the college confidential community: Is this true? I know it is true for this one department. </p>
<p>If I had know this I would have taken my free ride at UT Austin, and tried to get into Berkeley for grad school.</p>
<p>“I know this is not the case for Law and B-school. However, those are not academic educations, they are trade schools; like Devry only they cost more.”</p>
<p>When you remove your head from your butt I’ll answer your question.</p>
<p>yeah, it’s been generally true for a LONG time – each UC campus prefer you go somewhere for grad school. But there are many colleges with a similar philosophy. Sorry.</p>
<p>"When you remove your head from your butt I’ll answer your question. "</p>
<p>Too funny. My characterization was certainly unfair to top tier schools. However, law school is a trade school, as is B-school. They are not evaluating applicants on their ability to contribute as scholars in a field. </p>
<p>I can get into a debate with you on what a scam law school is after the first few tiers, however; that is for another thread.</p>
<p>My distinction is simply that trade schools are not concerned about accepting their own applicants because they are not interested in scholarly research or academic “cross pollination”. They are in the business of teaching someone to practice a trade and charging them for the privilege.</p>
<p>Top trade schools pursue the best students because they tend to graduate, have stellar careers, rise in major firms, and make the school look good. Denying their own top undergrads is bad business.</p>
<p>I think it’s true everywhere that the presumption is against accepting graduates into the same university’s PhD program, and I think it’s true everywhere that it’s only a presumption that can be and is overcome. Certainly if the faculty believes that an undergraduate is really hot stuff, there is little reason not to accept him or her as a PhD student. It may help if one is not applying to go straight from being an undergraduate to being a grad student, but has done something else for a couple of years in the interim. That’s been the pattern for most of the BA (or BS)/PhDs from the same university I know.</p>
<p>Note that telling students that there is a “rule” against doing this can be a good way to avoid conflict with and disappointment for students whom the faculty likes but isn’t prepared to accept into a PhD program.</p>
<p>But maybe it is more than a presumption at Berkeley, or some departments there. I don’t have any institution-specific knowledge, and I have heard similar things about specific departments at other universities (e.g. MIT Physics).</p>
<p>lysdexic- You are only partially right that so called “trade schools” dont create graduates who can advance the academic interests of their fields. A Masters degree (I’ll lump JD in as well) in general is a professional degree, not one that leads to trailblazing academic research and field advancement. That’s what PhD’s are for. And yes, you can get a PhD in law or business just like anything else.</p>
<p>To call any sort of graduate education or educated profession a scam is arrogant. Have you been to law school or business school or any sort of graduate school? No. Have you had a real 9-5 job and a career in any field? No. Have you even graduated from college yourself? No. I wish whatever beam of wisdom that hit you at the ripe age of your late teens/early 20’s couldve hit me at that age so I wouldn’t have to learn from my mistakes and life experience.</p>
<p>Generally the policy on accepting undergrads into the same school for a PhD is determined on a departmental basis. I know my undergrad department was fine with it (one professor told me if I ever changed my mind about going elsewhere for grad school I could show up whenever and they’d find funding for me), as is my current department (my group’s had numerous undergrads go through as grads).</p>
<p>Personally, I’d recommend against doing it because you really need to be exposed to different styles of departments, research ideas, and need to learn how to adapt to new environments. The people I know that have stayed at the same place for undergrad & grad seem to have a more difficult time critically looking at their education and seeing what was good and what was bad about their programs.</p>
<p>It’s more or less completely beside the point, but a JD is the highest degree most legal academics receive. It’s not uncommon these days for lawyers and law professors to have graduate degrees in other fields, including PhDs, but most of the leading law academics don’t. People whose work garners significant respect from non-lawyers – like, off the top of my head, Akhil Amar, Lawrence Lessig, Richard Posner, Bruce Ackerman, Cass Sunstein, Alex Kozinski – do not have meaningful advanced degrees other than their law degrees.</p>
<p>Berkeley’s College of Chemistry (chemistry and chemical engineering majors) says they will not admit Berkeley undergrads to a Berkeley PhD program…I remember reading that policy directly off the website.</p>
<p>The other issue you have to remember is that Cal is a world class research Uni. As such, it wants to select from the top grad applicants in the world. Not only does Cal want to attract top stduents from that Junior University in Palo Alto, but also UCLA/UCSD, Caltech, MIT, HYP, Oxford, IIT, and the like. Obviously, Cal would have a hard time doing so if he accepted a bunch of its undergrads into its grad school. </p>
<p>The same is true for Boalt (but they probably don’t receive many apps from Caltech or MIT!). Haas is in a different situation bcos job experience is more important for top MBA programs.</p>
<p>But you received a top-notch education, right? And if you did well at Berkeley, other top programs are going to be impressed.</p>
<p>Although I don’t know your field, I’m certain that there must be at least a handful of graduate programs that are as good as Berkeley. You’ll be fine – and I’m sure in the long run you’ll be glad that you went elsewhere, if not for the experience then for the different environment and new contacts.</p>
<p>I was interested in this – it seems perverse – so I looked it up. I think the correct statement is that the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering will not admit Berkeley undergraduates to its PhD program unless they have an intermediate degree from another institution or substantial work experience elsewhere. (It still seems weird to me to have such an absolute policy, but they apparently have it.) The Department of Chemistry doesn’t say anything similar.</p>
<p>In academia, diversity in education and experience is valued highly, so it makes sense that programs would prefer that their undergraduates have at least some advanced education elsewhere. If a researcher only knows, say, Berkeley, their world is much more closed than a researcher who knows Berkeley and MIT. </p>
<p>Likewise, top programs generally do not like to hire their own newly minted PhDs. Again, it seems perverse, especially given that the top students of a top program are among the best of the best, but that’s the (usually unwritten) rule of academia. </p>
<p>Mollie tells me that MIT is the exception in all this, since it accepts its own undergraduates to its PhD programs and hires its own PhDs, but most institutions do not like to do this.</p>
Yes, this matches an experience I’ve seen. A family friend’s daughter went to MIT for undergrad physics…she was accepted and encouraged by her MIT mentor/prof to attend for the PhD program. But ultimately, she decided she wanted to come back to California and is now at Stanford.</p>
<p>Everyone, in every field, says that it’s a good idea for people to switch institutions for graduate school, and that departments shouldn’t hire their own PhDs. I know jack about Chemical Engineering, but in the fields I know both rules get broken often enough that they clearly can’t qualify as rules. I’ve never seen something where a faculty ties itself to the mast like the Berkeley Chemical Engineers do.</p>