Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

"One of the things I do is run a Minority Access to Research Careers program, funded by the federal government, which requires undergraduates to go away for a summer before their senior year," Silber said. "And when these students go to major institutions, such as the top Ph.D.-granting institutions in the country, the National Institutes of Health, they find that most of the other students at these places - from Harvard, Berkeley and Yale, et cetera - what sets us apart from the other research institutions is that our undergraduates do hands-on undergraduate research."

Silber added that SJSU will let its undergraduates use its "expensive instruments," where other schools will not.

Sean Gehlke, a second-year graduate student in geology, attested to the college's hands-on approach to teaching.

"The nice thing about the classes in our department is they're very practical," he said. "In terms of what you do, it's very applied."

Gehlke, who is interested in hydrogeology, said that he was in a class last semester where they were discussing dam construction and engineering. His professor decided to take the class on an impromptu field trip.

"We went out to Alum Rock Park to build a hypothetical dam, to see if we could find a good spot to actually build a dam that would be free of landslides and faults and things like that." he said.

Michael Sneary, an associate professor of biological sciences and a pre-med adviser, said that statistics indicating how well the College of Science's undergraduates fare when applying to medical schools are difficult to obtain.

According to the College of Science, SJSU graduates who apply to medical schools only number 30 to 40 each year, compared to the hundreds who apply from UC Berkeley or UC Davis. Complicating matters even further, Sneary said, is that some of those applying are post-baccalaureates who are changing careers, and some are graduates from departments other than the College of Science.

Mitra Hosseini, a graduate student in chemistry, said that when she entered SJSU in 1998 as a freshman, she didn't believe the College of Science had a good reputation. Now, as a graduate student, she has changed her mind.

"When I worked for Alza, a biotech company, a part of Johnson & Johnson, there were Ph.D. students from other universities out of state, and when I brought them to the research lab, they were really surprised to see that we have access to different kinds of instruments - any major instrument that you use in biotech," she said.

Hosseini added that it is not just the hardware that distinguishes SJSU's science program.

"The faculty are very approachable, and they go beyond their responsibility to teach us," she said. "They spend time with us and supervise us, and the biotech companies are starting to see it."

Sneary said he believes the upper division laboratory program at SJSU is stronger than Stanford University's or UC Berkeley's.

"Research universities like Berkeley, they cut back a lot on their upper division labs, and if a student is going to get research or lab experience, they have to get into somebody's research lab rather than the classroom, where here, the hands-on experience is built into the curriculum and the lab experiences here are very impressive," he said.

Sneary said that students write back to tell him their first year of medical school was relatively easy.

"Our strong students get in, they're very competitive, and boy, once they get in, they shine," he said.

Sneary believed the reason SJSU wasn't getting the publicity it deserved was because it was overshadowed by schools like Berkeley and Stanford.

"That's OK," he said. "We do our job."