<p>Thanks @MYOS1634. Just got home from long talk with a senior prof in the dept. He repeated that they prefer their students to do grad elsewhere or go away for a masters and come back for PhD. But what was really interesting – and clinched my son’s decision to attend Cal – was that he said that UCLA’s dept was so weak that he would not have sufficiently good training and would be unlikely to get into a Cal for grad school.</p>