Yeah, that’s a masters program. That website lumps all graduate degrees together.
The first two are possible. The rest are way the hell away from Pasadena. UCLA would seem the best bet. And it’s just Loma Linda University. It’s a private school, not a UC.
Better bet: the writers of the show and/or that wiki didn’t do their homework.
Yeah, for a show that worked hard on getting the scientific details of what each of the scientist/engineer characters did in their job (including having scientists check the validity and relevance of the equations written on the white boards), the show often made mistakes about how academia worked. Clearly no one bothered to check if Caltech had a microbiology Ph.D. program. They assumed that a university with so many top science programs must have one.
Another similar problem that the show had was explaining what Sheldon did after finishing his Ph.D. in physics when he was 16 and where he got his doctorate. The show made various implications about where he got the doctorate but never explicitly said where. They also said something about him doing something at a German university just after getting the doctorate. It’s not clear what he did there. Sometimes it was claimed that he did a second doctorate there, sometimes it sounds more like he did a post-doc (i.e., a post-doctoral fellowship) there, and sometimes it was implied that he was a visiting professor there.
There are also problems with the supposed work relationships of the characters with the department heads/president/other university officials at Caltech.
Not only does Caltech have a world-renowned microbiology program, they have on faculty four living Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine:
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David Baltimore, 1975, “for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell.”
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Leland Hartwell, 2001, “for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle.”
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Michael Rosbash, 2017, “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.”
and just last year,
- Charles Rice, 2020, “for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus.”
as well as many deceased Nobel laureates and leading figures in microbio including Thomas Hunt Morgan and Max Delbrück, and a number of researchers who are regularly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Caltech runs a joint Medical Scientist Training Program with UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and anyone in the field of microbiology and associated disciplines is well aware of Caltech’s pre-eminence in microbio research.
“Cal” or “University of California” is widely understood to reference the flagship University of California, Berkeley (also a pre-eminent school in microbiology including Nobel co-laureate in Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna, for developing the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool), while University of California, Los Angeles is invariably referred to as “UCLA”, which is also a leading school in various areas of microbio research including immunology and virology. Nobody in the microbiology field would confuse any of these schools for each other. There are several other UC system schools with microbio programs and labs, but they would be explicitly referred by their name (e.g. “UC Irvine”), or acronym (“UCSB”) or perhaps just by location (“Santa Cruz”) if it would not be confused with another non-UC associated school. If someone says they went to “University of California to study microbiology,” they unambiguously mean UC Berkeley.
Stranger
Note that the Wiki linked to upthread says she went to University of California to study microbiology, which might just mean that she did her undergraduate degree there. She could well have gone to Caltech or somewhere else for the PhD program.
They also had a problem with public radio, purporting to show the gang in the university cafeteria listening to Sheldon on “Science Friday” with Ira Flatow. At the time, at least, Science Friday did not air live in the Pasadena market, and instead was aired as a pre-recorded broadcast at 9 p.m. on KPCC.
In grad school, I was talking to my professor one day and happened to say something about “the University of California at Berkeley”. He stopped me and told me that we were the original campus, there was no “at” designation to our name when we were founded, and therefore our university was the only UC entitled to be referred to simply as the University of California.
USC is a private school, not part of the University of California system.
I am aware of this (though I only learned this within the past few years), and my comment was more just a joke about another unflattering nickname for another Los Angeles area school.
Sorry, I should not nitpick funny jokes.
No worries, and I do think it’s common for people to mistakenly think that USC is a public university, and/or part of the UC system.
Other private schools often thought to public schools include the aforementioned University of Pennsylvania, the University of Miami, and the University of Dayton.
Back to the Big Bang Theory: I don’t really watch the show. Bernadette is the character with the high pitched voice, right? I find her more attractive than Penny.
Also, according to the show Bernadette was raised in Loma Linda, which might indicate that she went to undergrad in southern CA rather than Berkeley. Although there’s no reason she could have gone north for her undergrad degree.
I found one post on Reddit that says she went to UCLA but with nothing to back it up. It also doesn’t say if they mean undergrad or grad or both.
Yes, that’s Bernadette:
Yorba Linda. Completely different city and totally different attitude.
My apologies. I thought someone said that Caltech didn’t have a microbiology graduate program. I should have checked things more carefully.
I think it would possible that she got her PhD at Caltech without encountering the guys. She probably spent most of her time in the lab or working on her dissertation. In any case, not in the Physics/Astronomy wing/building. (there was that time she visited Leonard’s lab) .Though Caltech politics would come up in conversation.
The real answer is we are thinking about this way harder than the writers ever did.
Brian
Caltech is a pretty small campus and a tight community that really encourages and fosters professional communication as well as interpersonal exchange between departments and research disciplines. It isn’t so small that you would know every faculty member and PhD candidate by name, but you’d probably recognize them in passing.
You are correct that this is probably more thought and research than the writers and showrunner put into accurately portraying Caltech or research academia in general. The show is your standard three camera sitcom with sight gags and stock relationship conflicts peppered with a trick bag of ostensible “nerd humor” and geek pop culture references. It is not particularly innovative beyond casting the occasional former sci-fi actor or child sitcom star cum neuroscientist or mathematician to wring some metatextual humor out of an otherwise generic setup and structure, and the references to Caltech are basically window dressing. Like most sitcoms, the more talented writing staff probably rotate out on a regular basis (sitcom writing is basically the farm league of screenwriting) and are not as much concerned with continuity and realistic portrayal as they are with punching up the jokes so they can be lead writer on an episode and get the credit.
Steanger