rhymespit

Yup, got my reimbursement from JHU BME about a couple of weeks ago. I used the travel agent that they recommended using.

Yup! I'm heading there in the Fall to pursue a PhD in Systems Biology. I'm not doing on campus housing since I'm sharing an apartment with a buddy of mine who's got a 2 year gig at MIT (plus maybe one or two other people). I think we're shooting for a place in Central. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

I notified Rice Bioengineering and JHU BME (focus on Comp. Bio.) of my decision to decline the offer yesterday. I wish you both the best of luck!

If you're applying to graduate schools during your senior year, then programs definitely will not care about your Spring grades and very, very few (Harvard and MIT were the only ones for me) that even allowed you to enter your Fall Semester grades once you received them. With that said, I got an interview invite to Harvard before I had even submitted my Fall semester grades, so they probably didn't make too much of an impact in my admission. You do have to pass your classes and get your degree in order to accept any offers that you get for the following year but I wouldn't stress out too much about getting straight A's. Also important to note that most deadlines occur by mid-December...before most peoples semester's have ended (plus a time lag to request transcript with updated grades on it) Go for the Stats classes!

So I'm just another applicant, so take this with a grain of salt. I would contact MEMP and ask if they can get back to you by the 15th, most likely they'll say probably not. So the 14th rolls around and you still haven't heard back from MEMP, then I'd go ahead and accept the other offer you have on the table. You're right, if you end up getting into MEMP, it'll be a tad unprofessional to then back out of the commitment you made, but as long as its by the end of April, it shouldn't be too big of a deal. It becomes a hassle for the other program if you back out in say, May or the summer. But that's just me, you should probably get some other feedback. Asking the program for an extension might be a bit weird, especially cause you don't know exactly when you'll hear back from MEMP and it could be a rejection anyway.

I'm a dude and wore khakis and a plaid button-down shirt which I thought was totally fine. A few students dressed up and wore suits, I noticed a good number of the faculty were also dressed very nicely (though I couldn't tell if that was their normal attire or if it was for visits). I think what I wore was pretty much on par with what most other students wore. I wouldn't stress out about it, if you wear what you mentioned I'm sure you'll be set on the attire-side of things. There's also a tour of campus on the day of interviews, so flats are recommended.

Yup, was just there and it was probably my favourite visit so far. All of the faculty were over-the-top friendly and it seemed like everyone was doing really cool stuff. I really enjoyed all of my interviews and talking to the faculty/students. Overall I enjoyed the visit and was impressed with what the department had to offer; I heard the same from some of the other prospective students. For the faculty that I interviewed with (I think everyone gets like 6?), the interviews were pretty laid-back. Some faculty asked me about my previous research projects but no tough questions or anything like that. Enjoy!

Super late to the game here, but here's my profile: Undergrad Institution: Top LACMajor(s): Mathematics & Economics GRE: (164 Q, 157 V, 5.5 AWA) Domestic/International (TOEFL/IELTS): Domestic (US citizen) UG GPA: 3.51, 3.53 (Major) Research experience: 1 Solar Physics REU, 1 Graph Theory (Bio. related) REU, 1 year of Applied Dynamical Systems (Ecological modeling) research, Senior Thesis in Abstract Dynamical Systems Type of Student: Male, URM Research publications, patents, conferences: 1 publication, a few others have been submitted. PHD intended specialization: Haven't really figured it out yet, would like to concentrate more on the computational/dry-lab side of things. University list: 1) Johns Hopkins BME 2) Duke BME 3) Rice BioE 4) UCSD BioE 5) UPenn BioE 6) UVa BME 7) Carnegie Mellon BME 8) Tri-I Cornell Computational Biology & Medicine 9) MIT Computational and Systems Biology 10) Harvard Systems Biology 11) Georgia Tech Quantitative Biosciences 12) Harvard SEAS 13) and...Applied Math Programs as well but not really relevant to this post.