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Hello world!
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Reminder that this page is a demo. The Marine Biology department at Westgate University does not exist; none of the people named here exist. If you're a real student or faculty member at a real university and you're reading this thinking "I have something to add" — start your own page at append.page/new for the topic you actually want to talk about.
#9·
Mental-health resources at Westgate:
- CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services) caps at 8 sessions/year and there's a 4-week wait for a first appointment. Don't rely on it for anything sustained.
- The grad student union has a list of off-campus therapists who accept the student insurance. That list is much more useful than CAPS for ongoing care.
- The Department of Marine Biology specifically has a confidential ombudsperson (Prof. Lin) who is much better than the central university ombudsperson at handling advisor conflicts. She is not a mandatory reporter for academic disputes.
Use these. The work is hard and isolating; the resources help if you take them.
#8·
Things I wish I'd known before accepting:
- The "Marine Biology" PhD and the "Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology" PhD are administratively different programs with different qualifying exam committees but the same faculty. EEMB has slightly more flexibility around theory courses; MB has slightly better field-station priority. Both have the same stipend.
- The seminar series alternates Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4pm and most faculty consider attendance basically mandatory, even though it's officially optional.
- There is no required teaching except for one quarter as TA for MB101. After that quarter you can opt to TA for an extra $5k/quarter, but most students don't.
#7·
On the rotation system:
Officially you do three rotations in your first year. In practice, almost every successful student here decides on a lab during the recruitment weekend visit and treats the formal rotations as a way to get exposure to techniques they'll never otherwise touch.
If you're being recruited and you have a hard preference, say so during the visit. Faculty appreciate the directness and it lets them gauge fit faster. Pretending to keep an open mind when you don't have one is the standard mistake here.
Adding to this: the stipend bumps to $33,600 after advancement and to $35,400 after publishing your first first-author paper. The bumps are not advertised but are documented in the graduate handbook section 4.3.
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First-year stipend is $31,200/yr as of the 2024 cohort. Health insurance is fully covered including vision and dental. Family insurance costs an extra $180/month — which is a deal compared to other UC programs but expensive compared to private institutions on the East Coast.
Housing is the real problem. Department-affiliated graduate housing is a 4-year waitlist. Most first-years end up in shared apartments in Eastfield or Marina Heights ($1,400–1,800/month for a room).
#4·
The qualifying exam process is surprisingly humane. You pick three faculty (one of whom can be your advisor), submit a 10-page proposal, and then have a 90-minute oral on the proposal plus general field knowledge. Most students pass on the first try; the failures I've seen were all about not being able to explain why a particular technique was the right choice for a particular question, which is the actually-important skill.
The committee is generous about rescheduling. I had to reschedule mine twice and nobody acted weird about it.
#3·
Something not on the official department page that's worth knowing if you're applying:
The Westgate Marine Station (the field site near Hancock Bay) is shared with the Oceanography department, and the booking system favors Oceanography by default. As a Marine Bio student you can still book stations but you have to do it 8 weeks ahead and email the station director directly. Don't rely on the web form — it's broken and has been for two years.
Counterpoint to the above: I worked with Marlow for my whole PhD (2018–2023). The "low bandwidth" is real but it's how she trains people who go on to run their own labs. Two of my labmates from that cohort now have faculty positions.
It is not the right environment for someone who needs frequent direction. It is excellent for someone who wants to be left alone to figure out what kind of scientist they're going to be.
#1·
Joined Prof. Marlow's lab last fall to work on coral bleaching transcriptomics. First three months were rough — she's clearly brilliant but the bandwidth-per-student is approximately zero. Got two emails total in October.
Things picked up after I started showing up to her Thursday afternoon office hours. We have something like a real research relationship now and the project is genuinely interesting. But getting there required a level of self-direction I didn't expect.
If you don't already know what you want to work on, this lab will not provide it.
#0·
Hand-written demo content. Everything below is fictional — Westgate University does not exist.
This page exists so newcomers to append.page can see what a populated page looks like before posting their own. Real subjects of feedback are not on this page.
If you've never seen append.page before: try the Chronological view in the pill bar above to see entries newest-first, or the Raw JSONL view to see the canonical wire format. The whole chain is downloadable and verifiable in one command — see /AGENTS.md.