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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Do you really want a PhD? If you believe so, then read "Don't become a scientist! Philip Greenspun edition" at

https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/05/dont-become-scientist-...

2. Years ago Greenspun graphed level of education vs pay scale. Salaries maxed out at a masters but plunged to high-school levels beyond that. See the graph below "Not So Very Serious Stuff" at:

https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

In summary, best get a master's and pass on the Ph.D. Bonus: you'll gain an extra 3-7 years of your young life (doing what you want).

Also look at "Grad school versus prison, quantified".

Wish I'd known all this when I was younger.

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/12/09/grad-school-ver...

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).

Physics PhD from Berkeley. If things are more or less equal, choose the private institution. Berkeley is still the most corrupt organization I’ve ever been associated with.

How reliable will funding be going forward? If the program is supported by government grants I wouldn't feel very confident that they will continue to be paid.

Postdoc here at Stanford (Did my phd in Ivy). I agree with everyone that the advisor is the most important thing, but it's very hard to judge his/her character before joining the group, no matter how much you talk to people. Sometimes the advisor is very nice and his/her working style just doesn't match with yours. Also you kinda have to like your lab partner to have a good phd experience (I was extremely lucky with that). I like the Stanford's rotation system as you can try out different labs before joining (don't know if Berkeley does the same thing)

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)

I got my PhD at Stanford. There were a few things that made me choose it over others. First, there are effectively 3 physics departments, between physics, SLAC, and applied physics (which is a different program, but still the resources are there. This gives you more choices in what to do. And the rotation system is good for trying labs and fields out before you make a decision.

I don't know much about your field of focus, so I can't speak about potential advisors too much.

One more thing to check would be to see the ease of getting an advisor from adjacent fields like EE/EECS or Materials Science.

Whichever program you like more? Especially, whichever one has your best choices for an advisor? Picking your advisor is the only actual consequential choice you make in grad school. The school itself does not really matter.

Perhaps the first things to consider are the expected time to complete the PhD., and the success rate.

Everyone says it's about five years. That's BS. It varies widely. At a university with which I was familiar, physics was one of the worst, with average time around 10 years. My department wasn't so high, but the success rate was in the single digits. The longer it takes, the greater the chance of life events derailing you.

As far as I know, there's no place to get this information.

And an incomplete ABD from Stanford or Berkeley is likely to have some value.

Both are very good schools. You should look into the quals process as well since it would be unfortunate to go to a school and then get kicked out. Stanford EE PhD quals were notoriously hard but they have gotten easier from what I have heard. If you are going to be doing nanofabrication as part of your research, check to see how the shared facilities are and how flexible they are for facilitating the kind of research you are planning on doing.

Between these two, the school doesn't matter. Choose it based on your advisor and your desired living situation.

- Number 1 thing is having ~2-3 plausible advisors that you can see yourself working with (by all means fall in love with just one, but keep some optionality)

- Most physics departments allow for 'rotations' during your 1st or 2nd year (while you are taking classes and studying for the qual). Check if the 2-3 plausible advisors will take you as a rotation student

- Check if the grad students are (relatively) happy, especially the 4th-5th years during your open house. Ask them how much help the are getting in career search (good departments take care of their senior grad students)

- I personally didn't care to optimize for locale very much. Don't regret it. PhD is a grind, you won't have too much time to yourself... and with what you have, I think you can have a vibrant social life at almost any university

- There is some funding anxiety right now (NIH, but surely NSF is not far behind). I would make sure that the labs you are in are well funded. Stanford is better in this regard.

- I would max out your applications to GRFP, NDSEG or whatever the in-vogue PhD fellowships are. It increases your chances of getting into a competitive lab

- You didn't say theory or experiment? If experiment, find out if you are going to spend time in the fab, and make sure you check out the fab. Berkeley nanolab was a shockingly functional shithole (at least when i visited, and i know it caused misery to many friends)

TL;DR - Stanford if research fit is there.

Just throwing my vote in for Stanford. Tbh, on the basis of nothing but what I hear about the two schools. Ultimately you should choose whichever you feel is best. Gathering feedback is a good idea but everyone will have their opinion/bias.

One factor to consider is that some (many?) schools don't like to hire their own graduates.

Associated or nearby labs (LBNL, SLAC, ...) might be a factor for some specializations.

Another consideration could be where you want to live.

apart from anything else, write to potential advisors and make sure they are taking PhD students this year. when i was in grad school a classmate learnt this one the hard way - there was only one professor working in the area he wanted to do his PhD in, and they had decided they weren't going to be taking new student that year.

SLAC by name and slack by nature

PhD in experimental quantum optics here, but out of the field for 7 years. Message me if you want to discuss specifics about research areas / groups.

Put your career into the right hands.

Berkeley or Caltech

Carnegie Mellon ;)

Ask HN: New car? Lamborghini or Ferrari?

PhD in Quantum Optics and Atomic Physics from Oxford here (they call it 'DPhil in Atomic & Laser Physics' here).

I fully agree with what everyone else is saying here, it's really great advice. On the science aspect, their advice has you well-covered. From myself, I emphasise: the most important part of ingredient of your PhD, other than you, will be your prospective advisor. The choice of school is secondary to that.

My two cents: consider how well you will get on with your supervisor. Meet them, their students (past and present), their departmental colleagues and friends if possible. Get a feel for them, a vibe. Even the people who don't love them very much will give you an idea for what this person is like in just a few hours. Imagine: if this is what your supervisor will be like for one day, can you imagine being with them for several years? In this respect, it's like a long-term relationship, with one massive difference: if a (romantic) relationship goes south after a few years, you can break up, but for a PhD if you quit halfway you could end up without a piece of paper to show for it. You will then have to weigh up that possibility with the effort needed to continue, which drains from and adds a hefty cost to all parts of your life. I've seen this 'crossroads' occur for many people who left halfway.

To drive home the last point: my personal experience is such that I literally cannot think of anyone who's had a tougher PhD journey than myself and still managed to complete it---I'll concede that I'm biased, naturally. Backing up that statement: statistically speaking, across my department I don't think anyone in the whole Oxford Physics department fell in the same hole that I did for at least 20 years. I need not go into details, but if pressed, you could ask me directly (this is my first post on HN, I would have to figure out how to respond). Be cautious about the life aspect of the PhD, not just the science itself, is my point.

Also be aware of the life outside of your work. This is the point you highlight in your original question: it's great that you do. Specifically, the location matters since it defines your environment. For your PhD to work out, you need not just a support network but an environment in which you can succeed with as little effort as possible. Your hard work then compounds from there. You want to be able to get home/go out on the weekends and recover energy after your work, not drain it. If your PhD work takes your energy and you can't get back your energy or recover it, that's bad. Same goes for the work itself though, meaning your work should motivate you and give you energy too. Imagine, what will your evenings and weekends be like if you were in exactly the same place but didn't have any PhD work at all. Would you still enjoy it? Ultimately this decision is a personal one, and you have to use and trust your judgement. If you don't feel 100% confident to answer that, talk with others about this point before moving forward. It's difficult to get a feeling for this experience, so you need to be armed with quality advice.

Note that a PhD is a hard journey and a life-changing experience. Of course, it's about your life. There's lots of negative things to say about the experience, but I'll end positively: my PhD has completely opened my world to experiences that I wouldn't have been able to dream of otherwise. I simply wouldn't have known such things exist. It's broadened my horizons in a similar way to like someone moving from the island of Nauru in Oceania to Bay Area SF would experience. So, do what makes you happy :)

Good luck!

Footnote: Actually, it's late in Europe at the moment, so to save time I tried to dictate this post using ChatGPT Plus for the first time. It spoke out what I said for 7 minutes uninterrupted and absolutely flawlessly! Then ended with 'Transcript unavailable', and I lost the text. Perhaps this is like 'The house always wins", except there is no house, or winning. So, from now on, whenever I think of AI going forward, I will think: 'The always". Even if it doesn't make sense to anyone, I'm sticking with that thought, it has personality!

The schools you mentioned are the main producers of the majority of faculty in the US (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02998-w#::text=On...), so it does not matter which one you choose, to be honest.

The advisor is the most crucial factor in deciding a PhD/postdoc program (you're not an undergrad anymore!). When people talk about the prestige factor at this level, they are talking about the top 20 vs. the university of nowhere, and even in those cases, it comes down to the advisor and their reputation in the field (for your case, all the other factors are the same). At the end of the day, as a PhD student, you rarely need the "school" resources as opposed to the care/advice/networking you get from your supervisor and the facilities in their labs (that's also true at the department level; why would you care if the department has access to a remote telescope if your research is in quantum optics?) So, pay no attention to the side details (weather, location, rankings, etc.) and focus solely on the best advisor you can find wherever they may be.

Also, keep in mind that all the top schools produce a much larger volume of grad/postdocs than will there ever be faculty positions in ANY STEM field (so most grads end up in non-related positions, and many qualified applicants are turned down). That implies that you definitely need people to recognize your name when applying for jobs, and one way to achieve that is to put your name on an article with a reputable person in the field or have their recommendation (or be smart enough to make a name for yourself). Even in that case, deciding based on reputation is not merely sufficient. You want to invest 6-7 best yrs of your life, so do you like how the advisor treats their grads/postdocs and runs the lab? Do you want them to be hands-on, or would you rather be independent (very important to consider this)? Do you even like your research project/topic?

I always say that choosing a PhD advisor is like "virtually" marrying someone. You have to check all the qualifications to see if you're a "perfect match" before committing to anything (also, you would use your advisor's networking post-graduate, so you will always have them in your academic life to some extent). If you do not believe me, you can check the profiles of the newly hired physics assistant professors or associate professors across all the US schools, and you will see that there's no pattern in the academic background (some have PhDs from European/Asian universities that you probably never heard of and some even have PhDs in another discipline like chem or bio); nevertheless, their advisors were famous in the field + their research directions were promising enough to get them hired/promoted + the faculty of that school think they can collaborate with them at any level. Also, when it comes to hiring a new faculty (which I believe is the most illustrious job in physics), there is a ton of politics you need to do (connections to the faculty of the said school, presenting the best case for future research directions based on your past research, getting your teaching profile ready, etc.), and at that point, no one cares where you got your PhD from. So, visit any lab you have in mind, talk to people, and check the overall environment of the lab before committing (in summary, would you be happy for the next 6-7 years of your life doing what you always loved to do?)

Remember that if you do not choose the "right" advisor, you will regret it to the extent that you may even grow to hate your research (it happened to me and indeed to a lot of my friends), and it takes a long time to get back on track even if you're in the best institution (some of my friends at top institutions end up doing TA for many years because of this).

For disclosure, I'm a physics PhD student at one of the so-called top physics institutions. I happen to be involved in a lot of politics behind the scenes (e.g., faculty hiring) and try so hard for faculty positions!

Just do MIT

Both great schools. As others have mentioned, your PI is going to matter a ton, there are really bad PI's who will deliberately keep you a few extra years, and there are good ones who will let help you and progress your career. It's sort of a gamble as to which is which unless you know them personally.

One other consideration though is that Berkeley is the safety school for people who don't get into Stanford. If all else is similar, I would go to Stanford, as it will provide a lot more opportunities down the line than Berkeley.

Stanford! My best friend did his PhD from there and is now a tenured prof. Everyone i know from Berkeley is at best an adjunct.