As another anecdote. It is common for apartment ads in Netherlands to explicitly say “no foreigners!” in their ads. Which was a shock to me when first seeing them on Facebook by 18-22 year old Dutch university students offering rooms.
Extremely offensive if this ad would show up in usa or other new world countries.
I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. That is, May prominent academics do not have wiki pages, and many academics with wiki pages are not prominent.
Eg Donna Strickland did not have a wiki page until after it was announced that she won the Nobel prize. People who win Nobel prizes are not overnight successes and were prominent long before getting their prize.
As a non Brit but had a permanent position in Oxbridge, my advice was to look beyond the UK.
Even within Europe, there are many institutes that are strictly better than oxbridge. If you’re a scientist, there is no point in being too narrow and confining yourself to UK.
I would agree though that at the undergraduate level oxbridge is excellent. Postgraduate what matters actually is the advisor and grant money.
PhD in the UK is a different level of poverty compared with PhDs in any other “Western” country.
Can you imagine graduating at the top of your class and you living in London or near London on less than 20k pounds a year? You can double or triple that income in other phd programs.
The only advice if one really wants to do a PhD is to sample broadly across different countries and PhD programs and choose one that unlocks future options and also pays living wages.
The thing that is so foreign to me in the UK is their academic culture.
There are people who literally think there are only two universities worth being at: Cambridge and Oxford. They are shocked when they find candidates from abroad turning down offers for permanent positions there or leaving their positions for somewhere else.
The desire to live in NYC is mostly for the hype and story you can tell yourself.
The reality is that the daily commute, expenses, and crowds is worse than other places. Your daily life matters much more than the few weeks of the year that you can take your visitors around the city.
The fuel that drives people to live in NYC is propaganda from TV, films, and books.
It might be fun to live for a few years, but imagine raising a family with multiple kids in a tiny apartment. There are better ways to live than that.
University rankings are mostly bunk because they weigh mostly on perception and lagging indicators. A university can deteriorate for decades while remaining high on ranking.
The only criterion that matters for a student that wants to select a university is the fraction of graduates that go on to do impressive things.
The interesting thing is that knowing these facts has no correlation with whether you are a good biologist.
Real biology involves designing clever wet lab experiments, analysing data to predict new phenomenon, then following up with more experiments.
Nothing in real life biology relies on knowing a huge amount of facts. You just look it up on google.
What makes biology hard to teach is that there are no principles. So teacher can just point to experimental results and ask students to memorise those results. Real biology is about saying the textbooks are all wrong and here is how it really works.
Biology is particularly difficult to learn in school or from any book because one cannot “do” much biology on pen and paper.
Math, physics, and certain parts of chemistry can actually be done on pen and paper (or by computer simulations) because it is based on solid theory with mathematical underpinnings.
The only solid foundation biology has is descriptive theories from Darwin and maybe Mendel. All other biology must be studied through experimental data, which means wet lab and analysis. Just reading about a result (which is how school is done) doesn’t mean you are a good biologist no matter how well you can regurgitate the textbook.
I hear a lot how people find it difficult to slog through anna karenina because of its length and numerous characters.
They cannot see how such a book could be one of the greatest of all time.
I think the analogy to music may be like: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is one of the greatest of all time. But it’s a really long and complex piece lasting over an hour. It can be hard to pay attention to the entire piece.
That said, the recommendation for reading Anna Karenina would be to read it fast or watch a good tv series on it. War and piece 2016 tv series was excellent for example.
Single cell sequencing technology is analogous to taking many radios, and listing all the parts the radios contains. Then clustering radios by similarity in their part abundances.
Useful, but a parts list is still far from figuring out how a radio works.