kida2cva

Iceiceice, As I understand, the offer letter means that you will be admitted as the Master student (normally without funding support from university). Then after the MS, you must find the poi to support funding for your PhD or apply the PhD program in somewhere else. If you have not received any funding decision yet, it is probably that you are admitted to the MS without fund support

When I consider any full funded offer, here is my priority: 1. Research interest 2. Advisor/lab strong in the field 3. Ranking 4. Funding support For your case in NCSU, I am not sure if the poi wants you to do a funded specific project or to completely switch your research interest from environmental to biology. Based on your information, I suppose that your poi only focuses on the biology stuff (such as computational biology, etc), which means you will do the biology topic for not only your PhD dissertation but also your whole projects at NCSU. So you should consider seriously if you may want to change your major/concentration, which is also your topic when you apply for the postdoc. The reason is that you will publish papers in the biology field, which does not relate to the environmental engineering field. But you still have chance to apply for postdoc in environmental engineering if your connection/advisor/lab is strong, and the university will be looking for candidate like you, even though I may say the chance is low. For you case in NEU, I think everything is good (research interest, professor, funding). Your only concern is the ranking, which I think is not a big deal. There is not too much difference between ranking 30 and 55 (even the general ranking of NEU is higher than NCSU, which is an advantage when you apply to postdoc). Moreover, postdoc position requires more publications, LoRs, and research interest. One more personal thing is that I love Boston much more than Raleigh:) You should think carefully what you really want to do and to be in the future before making the final decision, which will affect to your whole career