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bioquant

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  • Gender
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  • Location
    United States
  • Application Season
    2016 Fall
  • Program
    Systems Biology

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  1. Looks like you have a solid application - good work! It's recommended to have the GRE scores in the 160's, but not having that won't keep you from being considered. As for schools, I'd suggest checking out UT Austin to see if there are labs there that might interest you. While I ended up choosing a computational biology program, I interviewed at UT's BCMB and it was one of my favorites. Plus, there's plenty of CA transplants out in Austin to commiserate with!
  2. Can't speak about the programs, but as a side note: I also visited Weill Cornell for a different program and a current student said she had a car and used street parking all the time (no meters). Maybe having a car there isn't entirely impractical (at least for Upper East Side), but there is still some inconvenience with street sweeping rules. I have a friend attending Penn who lives in Rittenhouse Square area, which is ~15 min walk. He doesn't own a car, so can't speak to the practicality there. Good luck on the decision! I haven't decided yet either - perhaps I'll see you at Cornell.
  3. Going through applications and I'm noticing many have a section like, "Please list other graduate schools to which you are applying." It has been optional on all applications, but I'm wondering how that info is actually used. Anyone have any insider knowledge? In the worst case, I imagine scenarios where admissions committees might elect to not make an offer because they anticipate the applicant might get (and take) a better offer from somewhere else. Not sure what a best case scenario might be. Perhaps it is merely for internal stats, to estimate what other competing schools their programs are being clustered with. Also, if anyone wants to share their reasoning why they did or did not fill out this section, or even provided a partial list, that would be interesting to hear.
  4. I can offer a GRE score suggestion, but that's about it. A simple approach would be to aim for meeting the average percentiles from the admission stats at one of the programs you are interested in. I found some for the UPenn MCB program: GPA: 3.7 | V: 85% | Q: 82% | AW: 4.4 Then use the Score Interpretation data that ETS publishes to figure out what that corresponds to as a score. That translates to: V: 160 | Q: 162 | AW: 4.5 Another thing you might want to check out are the Intended Major Score Distributions from ETS. A quick calculation using the stats for those declaring Cell Biology as intended field gives 656 students scoring 160+ on Verbal, 730 students scoring 160+ on Quantitative, and 867 students scoring 4.5+ on Analytic Writing. Hope some of that is helpful.
  5. The following were taken over a two week period prior to the exam, in the order specified: Barron's 1 - 164 V | 164 Q Barron's 2 - 157 V | 170 Q Barron's 3 - 158 V | 169 Q Practiced problems from ETS's "Official GRE Verbal Reasoning Practice Questions - Volume I" (sorry, no scores) ~ 6 hours Power Prep II Test I (timed) - 168 V | 170 Q Actual Exam - 167 V | 170 Q | ?.? AW --------------------- Thoughts I used the Barron's tests mainly for establishing a sense of pace, and for that purpose I think they were effective. At the same time, the Barron's book had rather poor explanations to the answers provided. Specifically, Barron's only offers a reason for why an answer is correct, but provides no explanation as to why the other answers are incorrect. Language is subtle and nuanced, and I found it frustrating to try to understand why the answers I marked were not equally - or at least partially - correct. The ETS practice book seemed to analyze all possible choices for most questions, which is why I picked it up. Subjectively, I felt that book gave me better insight into how I was thinking incorrectly when my answers deviated from the accepted ones.
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