Ph.D Admission Chances and Ideal GRE Score?

[Bioenchilada]

Hey! 

I'm going to be applying for a couple top Ph.D programs and wanted some feedback on my credentials and potentially my "chances" of getting into the programs I want to. Also, knowing what GRE score I should shoot for would also be helpful. 

School: Well-known research institution 
Race/Ethnicity: Hispanic 

GPA: 3.95 

Majors: Cell Biology, Genetics 

Minors: Anthropology, Biotechnology 

Research Experience: 6 semesters of research at home institution,  1 summer at UPenn, 1 summer at Harvard Med, 3 national conferences (LANS twice and SEA-PHAGES National Symposium at Janelia Farm), 1 publication from HHMI-funded national research project. 

Practice GRE score: PowerPrepII Q:163 V:157 

LORs: Expect strong letters from PIs at Harvard, Penn, and home institution professor (2 of which that were confirmed to be strong by Harvard PI) 

Potential grad schools: Harvard Med, UChicago, UPenn, Stanford Med , and Cornell Vet

Thanks for your input!  

(There's a moderate to high chance that I'll take a year off to effectively prep for a joint degree program, but that's a separate issue lol) 

[bioquant]

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.

[Bioenchilada]

Okay, so I have now taken the GRE and got the following

Q: 159

V: 155

W: 4

[ShadowFairy]

I think you're smart enough to already know that your chances are pretty strong and make you a competitive applicant. You can definitely bump up those GRE scores a little higher though, or so long as you score around 80% percentile!