ESS 717: Tips from faculty for transfer students

Laura Vogt:
Hello, and welcome to (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’m your host Laura Vogt. I’m associate Director for Marketing Communications for College of Engineering, and our second episode this week is focusing on tips for transfer students. Their journey and transition to Berkeley engineering looks different from the first-year’s experiences, and I’m excited that I got to interview Matt Sherburne, a transfer student himself about tips from a faculty with that transfer perspective.
Hi Matt. Thank you so much for being a guest today. Can you tell us about yourself and your roles at UC Berkeley?

Matthew Sherburne:
Absolutely. First, it’s my pleasure to be here. So I’m in the Material Science and Engineering Department, so that’s where my teaching and research is done. In addition to just being teaching and research, I’m director for our master’s programs. I’ve been on the PhD admissions committee for nine years, co-chair for three. So I do lots of departmental service including holding career fairs, so our students see that there are opportunities there. In addition to that, I am director for international partnerships for the College of Engineering, which I’ve been doing since January 2020. And so that’s student exchange programs, whether it’s undergrad or grad students that is visiting scholars, research programs, starting research programs with international partners. And so that has led me to last month being named CEO of BEARS, which stands for Berkeley Educational Alliance for Research in Singapore.
And so right now I’m in Singapore as CEO and Director of BEARS attempting to get several, large international research centers funded. And these centers allow students at Berkeley and faculty to come spend time in Singapore and collaborate with Singaporean researchers along with researchers from Cambridge or MIT, ETH Zurich, Technical University of Munich. These are all universities that are here. So it’s a nice way to interact with a lot of the top universities in one location.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, that’s awesome. That sounds like a really exciting experience that you’re getting to do that.

Matthew Sherburne:
Yeah, it’s ridiculously cool.

Laura Vogt:
Well, again, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here today, and I’m excited to interview about tips for undergraduate students, especially because in your background you were an undergraduate transfer student. I know you have a lot of passion for making sure that transfer students are successful. With that in mind, we know that transfer students have a different experience at Berkeley than our first-year undergraduates. And so I wanted to pick your brain about tips with that transfer student focus. So my first question for you is what do you think is the most important thing for the Berkeley Engineering Transfer students to do in their first semester?

Matthew Sherburne:
Yeah, so as you pointed out, I was a transfer student. I went to American River College in Sacramento, and then I was admitted to Berkeley where I double majored, which transfer students can’t do anymore, but there are ways to effectively do this, but I did Material Science and Mechanical Engineering. American River College was a spectacular experience for me. I did not start out as an engineering student there, I transitioned into engineering and it gave me a wonderful foundation. What I found when I got to Berkeley was the pace of the classes and the depth of knowledge I was expected to know for exams and homework and what have you, was deeper than was expected at the community college, which this makes sense, right?
And so what I found my first semester was that I didn’t try and get research. I did some social things, but I really focused on settling in to the coursework, settling into understanding how fast the content was coming at me, and really learned how to learn at an accelerated pace that first semester. The other thing I will point out is the students then and now are more than happy to help and study with the transfer students. And so there was no problem, and there’s still no problem neither in my, I teach classes where it’s the first or second semester for transfer students and they never have problems finding study groups and people to work with. So I think that first semester settle in, make sure that you are grounded in the academics and you’re going to do well. The nice thing is the college a few years ago voted to allow a natural fifth semester for transfer students.
And so having that fifth semester extends the time I think enough that… When I was a transfer student, it was four semesters, and I actually had to petition to get a fifth semester, which I did successfully. But now naturally having that fifth semester, you can come in and settle in that first semester, then find, research or really get involved in things you’re interested in that second semester and have enough time that you will get meaningful experiences. If you end up like me wanting to go to grad school, I ended up having significant research experience by the time I applied to grad school that I had letters of recommendation from faculty that were meaningful and spoke highly enough of me that I could get into a PhD program.
So yeah, that first semester, I think don’t run around trying to get involved in everything and anything out there. Settle into the classes, make it through the first round of midterm, see where you’re sitting, see how comfortable you are, then go figure out what to join, what to do.

Laura Vogt:
I like that idea that you don’t have to go in and overstimulate yourself or overpromise things. In some ways find ways to enjoy being at Berkeley.

Matthew Sherburne:
Yes. Yeah.

Laura Vogt:
So what suggestions would you have for students to form those study groups or start meeting new people?

Matthew Sherburne:
Say hi to the people next to you in the class and just introduce yourself and say, “Oh yeah, it’s my first semester here, I transferred in.” The other thing, well, there’s several other things. One is most departments have student organizations, at least in the College of Engineering, I think every department does. So in MSE, we have MSEA, and that’s our undergraduate student group. These are folks that hold dinners with faculty, and they hold a whole host of programs for our undergrads. And our students get involved as early as their freshman year. So there will be students in there that are in the transfer classes that have been involved in MSEA or whatever department you’re in, there are student group for multiple years and will help and guide you through the department, because often students know things and how to approach things that we in the department don’t realize.
The other thing is out of the Engineering Student Services Center, there’s the Transfer to Excellence program, and there are wonderful people in ESS that are there for the transfer students. And so I think just being a little bit sociable in the classes goes a long way, but go and find the student group for your department, and if it’s not obvious to you what the student group is, just stop by the main office for the department and ask them, “Hey, I’m a transfer student. I would like to find the student group for ME or Civil.” Or what have you, and they’ll be able to direct you to the student group.

Laura Vogt:
The Engineering Student Services has the transfer student ambassadors that I have, I think a couple days a week of study time and a study group where you can get snacks and things like that, which is pretty awesome.

Matthew Sherburne:
Right. And if you wanted something more on a campus level, I know it still exists. I don’t know much about it now, but when I transferred to Berkeley, well, when I transferred to Berkeley, it was long enough ago that we didn’t have ESS, and the College of Engineering didn’t have a transfer program. There was a campus transfer program where I didn’t meet many engineers, but I met a lot of transfer students, and so at least it gave me people to talk to that were in roughly the same boat. The other thing I found very useful was when I transferred to Berkeley, there were several students that had transferred the year before, and so I ended up just sending them an email and tracking them down and had lunch with them, and they’re like, “Okay, yeah, let me explain to you how some of this stuff works.”
And because we were all from American River College, there was some familiarity there. So that’s also [inaudible] if you happen to know that students from your community college transferred in prior to you, that’s a great resource just because they know exactly where you’re coming from and they tended to have some good advice.

Laura Vogt:
It’s always nice to talk to somebody that knows your hometown.

Matthew Sherburne:
Yeah, exactly.

Laura Vogt:
So as a faculty member, how do you want students to use your office hours? And is there anything they should do to prepare for them?

Matthew Sherburne:
To be honest however they want. I mean, I want students to use the office hours. I want students to come to office hours. Obviously, the office hours tend to be set up and focused on a class. So say you have an office hour and the first 30 minutes of it may be answering specific homework questions or whatnot, but once the homework questions die down, students will ask about research, we’ll ask about job opportunities, we’ll ask about anything, right? And I’m happy to entertain any and all of those types of questions. My biggest concern is students not using office hours.
So if you’re interested in getting a research position, you may not know what I do for research, but you come talk to me and you can figure out whether it’s interesting or not, and we can help narrow down what research you might be interested in, or what group you might be interested in, or through the conversation we might find out that you’re really interested in entrepreneurship. Well, then I can direct you to SET, the College Entrepreneurship Center. You’re really interested in design, so I can direct you to Jacobs.
To me, I think, sure, I can answer homework questions, test questions, and course content questions. But office hours are a time where effectively you as a student have a captive audience, and you’ve got somebody that has spent a fair bit of time doing something at Berkeley and probably knows a bit about the campus and opportunities. And so you coming and picking somebody’s brain that has been in the campus a significant amount of time is a worthwhile thing.

Laura Vogt:
And do you have any tips for transfer students that are looking for that research opportunity when they first get in? We know we talked about trying to get comfortable that first semester, and so you can start building those bridges.

Matthew Sherburne:
You can send emails. That’s always the first thing I do. I recommend students to look at the website, send an email, and then don’t be surprised when you don’t get [inaudible] response. And I’m not exaggerating, I will respond to daily, probably about 130 to 150 emails a day.

Laura Vogt:
Oh my gosh.

Matthew Sherburne:
That I respond to.

Laura Vogt:
That’s not the ones that you’re not able to look at.

Matthew Sherburne:
And so when I was a student, undergrad or grad student doing research in various research groups, I always made fun of my advisors sometimes to their face, sometimes on their back, about effectively managing their life by crisis. It’s like, “Oh, shoot. I’ve got to get this done in the next three hours. Okay, leave me alone. I got to do this.”

Laura Vogt:
Right.

Matthew Sherburne:
It turns out, while I’m not completely crisis driven, my life is often driven by crisis because there is just so much flowing in and happening and it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got to get this done now.” And so don’t be surprised if you send an email and don’t get a response. It’s not because the faculty member doesn’t want to respond, it’s just recruiting a new undergrad student to the group will probably not rise to the level of a crisis like submitting a proposal or submitting a funding report or preparing to teach that class.
Or the dean has called you in to a meeting and it’s like, “Oh, I got to prepare for this meeting with the dean.” Or whoever it is. And so don’t take that personally. You use that as an opportunity to then go knock on the door. Go see the professor during their office hour or just stop by randomly and go, “Hi, I know it’s not your office hour. Would you have a minute to discuss? I’m interested in research opportunities in your group. I sent you an email.” And the professor will then go, “Oh, yes, I read your email. I’m sorry I didn’t respond. I can’t meet right now.” But then they’ll likely go back to their computer, open up their calendar and say, “Okay, I’ve got 30 minutes Wednesday at this time or this time.” And you can find a time and they’ll set up a time to meet with you and talk to you. Right?
Sometimes I respond to emails, and I try to respond to the undergraduate research emails, I make every effort to, but sometimes unfortunately I don’t. But then the students come by and knock on my door and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I meant to respond to you. I’m really sorry. Come sit down or I’ll be free in an hour. Are you free in an hour?” Right? Because every faculty member I know of views having undergraduates in the lab as being part of the core educational mission.
And so we all want undergrads in the lab. There are limits, right? There are on average, you can have one undergrad in the lab for every PhD student or postdoc that you have. So if you run a group of 10 PhDs and postdocs, the maximum generally you could have is 10 undergrads.

Laura Vogt:
Okay, that makes sense.

Matthew Sherburne:
Right? Because you want to pair them up so they get a personal experience. And so you may go talk to somebody, a faculty member about a research opportunity, and they may not have the bandwidth to take you. That’s fine. There’s lots of faculty members. We have Lawrence Berkeley National Lab behind us on the hill. I just signed off on, she’s a transfer student, it’s her first semester, well, it will be her first semester. She found a summer research position at LBL, and she’s there working on 2D materials now. And so she’s going to take my MSE 199, I think it’s either 199, 198. Anyway, it’s the undergraduate course that allows students to take research for credit.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Matthew Sherburne:
So just because the first professor says no, that’s not a big deal. And I’ve said no to students before just because I was at a point where I literally had three PhD students and I had five undergrads, and it was fine, because I was personally advising two of them, but I couldn’t put another undergrad with another PhD student. They have to finish their research and get their PhD and move on with their life, so it’s not fair to them. And then I just didn’t have the bandwidth personally to take a third student.

Laura Vogt:
Well, this kind of goes into the idea of the resilience that you’re going to not get a job that you applied for. You might not get the research position that you applied for. It’s just a matter of continuing on. It’s not personal.

Matthew Sherburne:
Yeah, no, and you just have to keep trying. And I would say in terms of research and opportunities for students, there are so many opportunities and the college has made real efforts, if you’re interested in design and making, right. We’ve built a maker space, the Jacobs Hall, if you’re interested in entrepreneurship, we’ve got an entrepreneurship center that does things all over the world. If you’re interested in research, we have 230-ish faculty members that do research and are engaged in research. But we also have Lawrence Berkeley National Lab right behind campus that offers research opportunities and will advertise research opportunities. It’s not infrequent where I will get a flyer from somebody at LBL, a group or a center looking for undergraduates that I’ll make the announcements at the start of my lectures for my classes. So there are lots of opportunities. It’s not uncommon for a student to hear no about a research opportunity two or three times before they find a research opportunity. And this is not through any fault of the student. This is everybody has only so much capacity.
I’ve had students reach out to me that wanted to do research with me starting this fall as undergrads, and I had to tell them no, I’m going to be in Singapore. There’s not a reasonable way for me to advise you on research from Singapore starting out. Now, if the undergrad works for me for a year, I go to Singapore. There’s enough of a working relationship. They understand what the problem is that they can keep working for me, that’s not a problem. So yeah, before I left for Singapore, I sat there, I talked to a student, I was like, “Yeah, I don’t think I’m the best option for you to do research with. I don’t think you want a remote adviser for your first research experience.”
So we sat there and I came up with a list of about eight faculty members and general areas that he was interested in. I think I came up with four experimentalists and four computational people, and we walked through the list and really thought about what was most interesting to him, and we ranked them. And so I was like, “There you go. Start with that list, and if that doesn’t work out, let me know. ”

Laura Vogt:
That’s awesome. It’s so great to hear that you were able to take that time to help a student explore, because one of the things I was going to talk to you about is, if students could go in and talk to you about their career path or their graduate school path, and you said to use the office hours for that. So it’s really great to hear that you’re able to do that for so many different things that it doesn’t just have to be a homework problem

Matthew Sherburne:
And it doesn’t have to be office hours. So I’ve had students show up and want to discuss their career, but they didn’t want to discuss it in front of five or six other students. And that’s fine. I end up making a separate appointment for them and meet with them separately to discuss things that they may not want to discuss in front of other students. And that happens regularly, and that’s fine. But yeah, certainly during office hours we’ll get students, we’ll just say, “Hey, there’s this opportunity at LBL, there’s this opportunity at Baker Biosciences.”
“What do you know about this? Do you know anything?”
I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, here’s what I know.” And I can walk them through at least what I know about the center or opportunity that they’re looking at or the professor that oversees the opportunity that they’re looking at. And then everybody else is just sitting there and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even know that [inaudible] existed. I didn’t know about that.” So everybody learns a little something. So, yeah.

Laura Vogt:
And so how do you find that to help students or what advice do you give to students if they’re struggling with their academics and the resilience of having to come back from a bad test or just from feeling like that imposter syndrome that they might get?

Matthew Sherburne:
Yeah. Well, the first thing is I think, I know even Nobel Prize winners that get the imposter syndrome. And if you talk to most of the faculty, I mean, it’s not uncommon for me to feel the imposter syndrome. I’ll sit in a room or I’ll sit at the table and there’ll be a Nobel Prize winner, and there’ll be a Fields medal winner, and there’ll be people that won this prize in that prize. I’m like, “What am I doing at this table?” And faculty will feel this way, and I know incredibly well decorated, awarded faculty who at time to time will go, “Why am I here?”
So one, I think for at least a large segment of the population, imposter syndrome is a built-in feature. While that may not help solve the problem, it should at least help that lots of people feel this way that are very, very accomplished. So when I transferred to Berkeley, the way I likened it, when I was a little kid, we’d run around the summer, play outside, get all hot and sweaty, come over, turn on the hose that sets outside the house, and we’d just drink from the hose. Well, that was junior college. When I transferred to Berkeley, I equated it to trying to drink from a fire hose. Everything was just coming so fast.
And so it really was finding study groups. And so I can tell you I am still good friends with Steve and Natalie and Perna and all these people that when I transferred in kind of took me under their wing and were happy to study with me. My first semester was a little rocky, but after that first semester, I was doing fine. It was a lot of work, but I learned how to learn. And I will tell you the best thing that Berkeley will ever teach you is how to learn. My ability to learn has allowed me to change research areas very effectively. So my PhD and my undergrad research was all on mechanical properties, understanding limits of strength and how strong we can make a material.
All of my research now is on materials for photovoltaics, materials for catalysts, biofuels and pharmaceuticals, and most recently materials and trying to design quantum wells. And none of this was at all similar to my work on mechanical properties, but because I took quantum mechanics and solid-state physics and the related materials courses, I had a really solid foundation on which to build. And from a computational point of view, I was applying quantum mechanical based techniques to mechanical properties. While now, because I have a strong enough background, I shifted and I was applying these same quantum mechanical based techniques to solar materials, to catalysts, to quantum wells.
But the only reason I can make this transition was I settled in after that first semester and I really sucked every bit of knowledge I possibly could out of the undergraduate classes I took, because it turns out who knew that electrochemistry class I took was going to play such a major role in my future research. I just thought it was an annoying class I had to take.

Laura Vogt:
That’s awesome. That just is amazing that one thing that you don’t think is going to change everything else actually ends up making such a huge impact.

Matthew Sherburne:
Well, for example, particularly for transfer students, I know at Berkeley it’s Physics 7A, this is where you learn about F equals MA, right? Force equals mass times acceleration. We have grad students and postdocs that are essentially applying F equals MA, and solving this for millions of atoms to understand material properties. So the stuff you learn, and that’s where earlier I said American River College gave me such a strong foundation, I left there with a real understanding of F equals MA. Then at Berkeley, I realized how through doing a generic, if you will, definition of how atoms interact, I can actually get forces between atoms, then I know the mass of the atom, and then I can work with the acceleration and how the material evolves with time. But that all fundamentally comes out of my knowledge that I got at American River College, and then I built on it at Berkeley.

Laura Vogt:
That’s awesome. I think about that often in times of things in my life of where I’m at and what I do, and it’s because I took an English class where somebody in the English class really liked the audio, and so now I can do podcasts. So it’s the same idea that you’re building on all these things of you didn’t necessarily understand what it was going to mean later, but now this is what it means.

Matthew Sherburne:
Yeah, exactly.

Laura Vogt:
Is there anything that we haven’t talked about today that you want to add?

Matthew Sherburne:
No. I guess I would just say settle in at least through the first round of midterms. And if you find the coursework not overly demanding, then get involved with what you want to be involved with, whether it’s entrepreneurship, whether it’s design, whether it’s research. And I forget the exact number, but there are over 100 student groups and student clubs in the College of Engineering alone. And this could be from the solar car to the Formula 1, to the bioengineering clubs, civils clubs. So some are generic, “We’re the material science student organization.” And some are specific to “We’re working on a solar-powered car.”
One of the advantages of coming to Berkeley is the fact that you have so many opportunities to do so many interesting things. There’s not a lot of places that have a large entrepreneurship center, a large design center, and a national lab right next door. So for the undergraduate student, we have an embarrassment of riches in comparison to what most universities and colleges have. And so once you have settled in, and this is whether you’re a freshman or a transfer student, once you have settled in, go try something. And it doesn’t even matter. You could be looking at three different things, not knowing which to do.
Try one of them. At this point in your career, you really don’t know what’s out there. And even if you try something and it ends up you not liking it, that is still a good outcome. Because you’ve just narrowed down what you’re likely to be interested in. And I tried computational research because I knew nothing about it, and I thought I was an experimentalist, and I was like, “Well, I should try computational research just so I understand what it is, what’s going on.” And lo and behold, 20 years later, I’m still doing computational research. So I say, don’t just try anything, but if you think you’re interested in it, try it. And if it turns out you don’t like that area of research, which I had an experience like that, I talked to the faculty member, I said, “Hey, this wasn’t really what I want to do the rest of my life. How do I get this project to a point such that it is useful for you and that maybe another undergrad can take it over?”
And so he and I sat there and made a plan, and so I worked on it for the next semester to get it to a point where it was useful for him and somebody else could step in and take it over, and then I ended up going, “Okay, well, I thought composites was what I really wanted to do. It turns out composites wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I’ll go try computation now.” And turned out that worked out for me.

Laura Vogt:
Yeah, you’re in college, this is when you get to try different things and find out if you like research, find out if you don’t like research, which we know some people have found out.

Matthew Sherburne:
And this is one of the things I tell students, try research, but then get a summer internship at a company and see what a company’s like, and see if you’ve done research on campus and you’re now doing a company experience that will help narrow it down to like, “Oh yeah, I actually like really this specific goal oriented driven company type approach.” Or, “Gee, I really like the research.” If it turns out you’re thinking, I like the company, well then you’re probably not going to be interested in getting a PhD. And so even that experience helps shape what path you’re going to go down. And it’s only by trying these different things, you realize what path is going to be the best for you as an individual.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate your insight and tips and things that you have for the students.

Matthew Sherburne:
It’s my pleasure. Absolutely. And they’re more than welcome to come and knock on my door since I gave that advice once I’m back on campus.

Laura Vogt:
It might be a bit of a trip right now.

Matthew Sherburne:
Right now, yeah. It’s a 16-hour flight over to Singapore. I’m guessing there, I won’t find many of them knocking on my door here.

Laura Vogt:
So I just want to reiterate a couple of the things, especially for the first semester, is to use those transfer resources that are there. So the Transfer Success Ambassadors, the transfer center that’s on campus, and use the faculty office hours.

Matthew Sherburne:
Yes. Yeah. I have had faculty office hours that are completely empty, which just meant I wasn’t making the homework hard enough, so I had to get harder.

Laura Vogt:
Yeah, you need to have the FaceTime with the students. Well, thank you so much for being here today and I really appreciate it. And thank you to everyone for tuning into The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer. I’ll be back next week with more resources for Berkeley Engineering students.