<p>Yeah I’m going to echo krypton, UCSF has increased graduate stipends by $2000 this year. Financial crisis be damned!</p>
<p>I will also say that researchers at UCSF have barely felt an impact from the CA budget crisis. The vast majority of funding comes from the federal level, NIH, NSF, etc, so research funding is unaffected by the shenanigans in Sacramento. I can personally attest to the negligible impact on research operations during this past year. The budget cuts mostly affected administrative/janitorial/service positions in the form of furloughs. UCSF’s research capacity was undiminished throughout this time. The worst effect was that our IT guy would be absent a few days a month…hardly anything to abandon ship over.</p>
<p>UCSF is unique among the UC’s in that the vast majority of its operational funding (not research grants) is funded by money from the hospital. I think it’s somewhere around 90%. A small portion of funding is from the state; in contrast, other UC campuses are much more dependent on state money.</p>
<p>From a student perspective, I’d have to say you are blissfully unaware of a budget crisis. As I mentioned, stipends are up and research funding keeps rolling in. CA’s huge stem cell initiative, the largest in the country, has millions of dollars already secured by prop 71 so that funding will not be threatened. Faculty are not getting laid off, hiring committees are still active and looking, all those new buildings are going up at Parnassus and Mission Bay, so the research side of things is doing fine!</p>
<p>I won’t go into rankings because that’s a lost cause when it comes to graduate programs - too many personal factors and preferences to consider. I will say that UCSF is a regarded among peers (PIs I met during interviews) as a top school. There are many top schools, which others have already mentioned here. No use ranking them - perhaps consider them in tiers. Even within a top school, you can end up with a mediocre PI…in which case your graduate education will not be as great as someone at a lower tier school with a great PI, lots of publications, etc. The general thinking is that a top school should have more uniformly great PIs, but there are of course hidden jewels (sorry, couldn’t help it :o) at lower tier schools. I wouldn’t apply to a school just to go jewel mining though - you may find that some big name jewel PI at these schools is a real jerk, or that you find out that you prefer a different colored gem, or that the jewels are lured away to another research mine. I’ll stop before I take this metaphor too far.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think you should still consider MIT. They have exceptional jewe–uh, faculty and even though you might not be working in whatever specific interest you have right now, you will get a great foundation, connections, etc to enable you to postdoc in a lab more precisely aligned with your interest. And I will warn you that your interests will most likely change very drastically once you rotate, take classes, talk to PIs, really dive into the field (even during your intervews!). You’ll find that many PIs have deviated quite a bit from what they’ve worked on as graduate students. So keep an open mind!</p>