biotechie

Even if you plan on marrying them, my advice would be to go where YOU feel that YOU will do best as a med and graduate student. Everyone that I know who moved to a place for their significant other and started a grad program there is not happy with their choice. While my situation is a little different (my fiance stayed back for an awesome job rather than grad school), we are prioritizing our careers now so that we are better suited to end up in the same city one day. We've been long distance nearly 5 years. You can do it, and by saving well, we see each other several times a year for at least a week. This will be harder for your during med classes, but during the PhD portion, so long as you put in hard work, you can get away with some 3-day weekends. For things that you can do to help cope with the distance, check out my post on this thread, and feel free to message me as well:

Since this thread popped up on my feed, I feel I should add my two cents. Backstory: I'm a 4th year PhD student in the biomedical sciences, and my fiance and I have lived apart since the second year of my masters. That's almost 5 years of our 7 year relationship. When I was applying to schools, we had lots of conversations about where I was going to go and what he was going to do as he had just finished undergrad. I was willing to stay near him for PhD if I could get into a school, but we decided that my education and career were important and that I needed to go to the best place for me to get on track. Then I got into a program that I fell in love with. Still, he had to convince me to go without him, citing that I would hate myself if I didn't go (which was true). Shortly after, he got a stellar job, and we decided that it would be best if he stayed where he was, 1000 miles away, to get the experience he would need to score a similar job when it is time for me to postdoc. Now the goal is for us to get married later this year, then graduate in the 6 months after, and he will move with me for my postdoc. This should put both of us on track for our careers and have us set up well after I graduate. It seems hard, and it definitely is, but it is worth it. When I interviewed, I actually got asked if I had any ties that would keep me from coming, and I responded that, while my boyfriend was staying back home, I was serious about my education. If they don't ask, I wouldn't bring it up unless that's the reason you're rejecting their admissions offer. Even then, I probably wouldn't say anything about it. Here are some ways we've been able to stay strong though 5 years of long distance relationship: 1. Video chat: Every. Single. Night. Unless one of us has a conference or other engagement. We turn on the chat and keep it on while we make dinner, while I read papers, etc. It is the closest we've found to mimic hanging out in the evenings like we used to during undergrad. Recently, we've been using https://www.rabb.it/ to chat. We like this because we can lock the room, and watch netflix or youtube videos together. Right now the service is free because it is in Beta. I don't know if it will always be like that. Previously, we used Google Hangouts, but they're taking out the YouTube shared player. 2. Virtual dates: Along with the video chat, we try to make the same meals a couple of times a month and eat them together over video chat. Sometimes this ends badly for him as I'm the better cook. But this is a fun thing we can do together. We will also sometimes go to a restaurant and have what we call snap chat dates. 3. Send each other random things for no reason: My fiance always sends me little care packages when I've got a deadline coming up. Sometimes there's a local soda I love from home, and other times there are puzzles or a new book. Yesterday I came home to find a dozen chocolate covered strawberries waiting on my step. I send him new ties, random nerdy shoelaces and socks, or weird candies I find around here. It is really fun to send him something just because, and it helps him remember I'm thinking of him. 4. Play together: We play video games together. He totally kicks my ass, every time (because he has more time to play), but we have a blast, and we can do it long distance. We started playing through the original Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. Since we can't play those online, we trade pokemon and battle when we see each other. I know other couples who always have WordsWithFriends, etc. going. In addition, I include him in game nights I have here. You can stream games like the JackBox games on twitch, which he can tune into and play with us. 5. Play apart: Despite doing at least a short video chat each night, we make sure that we also hang out with friends where we're at. These friends become a very important support system. They're the group you can turn to when you have a grad school freakout and you know your significant other is at work (or who help you get plane tickets when said significant other has appendicitis and gets hospitalized or who call your fiance for you when you break your leg). It helps to not rely on one person for all of your emotional support, and it is far less stressful on them when you do this as well. Making sure you have this support system is vital to surviving grad school. 6. Make stress management a priority. Your significant other will thank you: This goes along with #5, but you also can't dump all of your stress on them. For me, this meant joining a concert band. I relieve most of my stress through music as it allows me to emote in a way that science does not. I also volunteer teaching little kids about science. Sometimes I just color or paint. Have a couple of things you do consistently and a couple of things that you do sometimes. 6. Visit as often as possible: For us, this means we see each other at least every 2 months. That doesn't seem like very often, but he will take a 4 day weekend, and I will shorten my normally 60-hour week and also take the weekend. This year, we're going to get to see each other almost once a month due to wedding planning, and so far, we're loving it. You'll want to make sure your credit cards get you good airline miles points, because other wise those plane tickets get expensive! 7. Save some fun things to do with them: I moved to Houston, which is a HUGE city with lots to do. There's broadway shows, NASA, tons of museums, and it is a Foodie's dream. Every time I know he has a trip planned to see me, I find something new and fun that we haven't done yet. That might mean I miss out on doing it with friends, but in the past 4 year's, I've gotten to see him take in his first broadway musical, his first food truck treat, and he's pushed me through some firsts, too. This makes each visit a little more special, and I think we'll keep doing similar things for date nights when we finally move together. 8. The little things matter, and somewhere along the line, these became habits that make us feel cared for: We don't forget to remind each other that we care every day. We say goodnight each night, and good morning each morning. He makes sure I'm safely home each night. I make sure he buys groceries that include vegetables. etc. If I think of more, I will add them.

If you're applying to a program that places students based on rotation, make sure there are other professors that you would be happy to work with before accepting an offer. It isn't worth going to a school where there's only one professor that you like, and they may not even take students next year. And, as I keep saying again and again, it is far more important to choose a lab based on your fit with the mentor, lab environment, and funding than to choose your "dream project." Save the dream projects for your eventual career (which will be longer than your PhD anyway), and focus on getting the training so you have the right skills to kick some ass in your desired career path. Choose your schools for the learning environment and how you think you fit there.

I know it feels like forever, but that's actually pretty fast. It may be a couple of weeks or more before you hear, depending on when the AdComm meets! Some schools also make their applicants wait until all interview weekends are done.

You should avoid doing this post-interview unless it has been a very long time, but you SHOULD send thank you notes to the people and students that you talked to, maybe asking questions about the program, too. This shows interest without sounding desperate, and helps them remember you. You also have to remember that sometimes it takes the admissions committees 2-3 weeks to get together to meet after interviews. Even if the committee meets, some schools wait until after ALL interviews are complete to do acceptances/ waitlist/ reject. They also are only allowed to have so many acceptance offers out at a time, so they may wait to let higher ranked students know they're on the wait list if there's a chance they can offer them acceptance instead of wait list. If you interviewed near mid-January, and you don't hear anything by the end of February, it might be worth checking with the admissions coordinator on the status of your application. I wouldn't bother the director unless you can't get through to the coordinator. Most schools know when the committee will be meeting to discuss applications and what the timeline is for notification. It is okay to ask about this at your interview so you don't have to stress yourself out waiting for news; we had students asking at ours.

Sure, no problem. Sorry for the delayed response; the lab prep to be gone for Thanksgiving was insane!

Right now I don't TA, but I do usually have a rotations student or a high school student doing an internship working under me. I'm in a molecular biology lab, so I normally spend well over 40 hours per week doing bench work, reading, writing up data, etc, sometimes 60+ hours. I tend to work more than some other students as my experiments happen in bursts that require long time points, but I also want to stay in academia, so it is important that I be as productive as possible. Recently, my wet lab experiments have slowed (because I have to wait for my mice to get old and fat), so I'm doing something similar to you are doing and what Takeruk has done; I'm teaching myself how to code in python so I can understand and process my sequencing data. I've been splitting my time, spending about 20-30 hours a week on lab-related tasks and about 20-30 hours a week on my online python classes, downloading and troubleshooting the new scripts I need for my new project, and writing up my data for a paper we're submitting. However, the difference here is that I'm a little further along in my studies; I've already progressed to candidacy and am preparing to graduate in the next year or so. I know where to look to get the information and help that I need, and in this case, help that my PI doesn't have the knowledge to give me. I'm doing these things on my own, but my PI still checks in with me to see what I'm up to almost daily. This is a little uncommon, but you really need to be able to talk to your PI at least once a week to set goals and make sure you're making adequate progress. You need to make sure that you have everything you need to learn and do these things so that you can start becoming more independent as you progress through your studies. I was working independently from the end of my rotation onward; we simply discussed goals, and I went for them; by over a year into your studies, the majority of what you do should be something you can tackle independently after a short planning session with your boss. To me, that truly is one of the biggest goals for my PhD: Learn to think independently to create my own hypotheses, test them, and then take those ideas and be able to write grants, mentor others to test the hypotheses, and share that knowledge with others. You just need to set a strong base for yourself with the help of your PI, and you should be able to reach those goals.

I agree with biochemgirl. Unless I was told in the application essay prompt to mention specific PIs, I did not. I simply said what research areas I was interested in, careful to keep it from being too specific in case the PIs I was interested in now weren't taking students next year. I was totally prepared to have to pick new PIs for rotations. I also have something else to add: Unless the prompt says specifically not to, I think it is also important to state somewhere WHY you want to do science and where you want to end up if you achieve a PhD (such as industry, a faculty position running a lab, public science outreach, etc)... what makes you tick and what motivates you to pursue the long journey of science? This was by far one of the biggest things I got asked about from my essays, and that was something we looked for when I was part of an adcom. Believe it or not, you can actually get a good guess at fit for the program from something like this because this is where people usually let their personality out a little!

Many PIs have secondary appointments in other departments. It may also be possible for PIs you're interested in from Neuroscience to join your program as a secondary appointment so you don't have to switch. Then you get to join a lab you like, and your program stays happy, PLUS you still get to learn the interdisciplinary stuff the rest of your cohort is doing. Neuroscience has a lot of very important field-specific techniques, such as patch/clamp and other methods that are difficult to learn and sometimes take years to master; if neuroscience is really where they want to be, I second Abberant's sentiment. I like my new field for my PhD, but I've focused on making my PhD studies broad in the new techniques I'm learning so I have options when I go to postdoc. This would be much harder if I wanted to do neuroscience.

I was definitely more concerned with the total amount of research experience. I'm only assuming it is not a research based MS as we weren't given that information, but I would say with a MS, a single short internship is not enough. Had it been 2 years of solid experience and a 3.6, I could definitely see them getting an interview. One short summer internship and a 3.6 is a little hard to call. We also really weren't given enough information, which is why I referred the original poster to the 2017 thread. I can say from experience serving on an adcom that research experience plays a HUGE role these days. In particular, if you're coming in with a MS, they expect you to have tons of experience at the bench because more and more of these are research based. I remember being asked to talk about my projects in interviews, but others in my cohort that came in with just their BS didn't have to do that. I've echoed elsewhere on the site that research experience is one of the most important things for getting into grad school, especially in the biomedical sciences. My research experience is what got me into graduate school, not my GPA. Last I checked, the Tetrad program also required you to take the subject GRE, so be aware of that.

My interviews were all mid-January through February, though I did get an invite for mid-March that I declined.

This is not specific to neuroscience, but still hopefully helpful! Programming and data mining is becoming a highly sought after skill no matter what aspect of research you end up in. Being able to take huge data sets and find useful data is going to help you in the long run. I highly recommend taking some coding classes and if possible classes specific to data mining and organizing biological data like sequencing. In addition, if you get the chance to play with CRISPR, do it. That's a question a lot of my friends that are applying for jobs are getting, right now. Everyone wants their new hires to be experienced in the hot, new, tool!

I did have one school that had a single essay. I still focused on the "why," but I did discuss my research projects.

I did not talk about any specific projects in my SOP. I talked about what makes me want to be a scientist. WHY I want to do research rather than what I've done. This is very very important, and I didn't realize how important it was until I was on the adcom myself. It can spell the difference between interviewing someone or not because this is a way to gauge how serious and committed they are to science independently of their actual research experience. My schools had separate sections for me to discuss my research, and they'll also get a lot of that from your letters.

We actually talked extensively about things in my SOP, as well as in my research statement (most of my schools required two essays). I was asked about why I chose to do a masters instead of going straight to PhD, but I mentioned it in my research statement. The fact that they don't read thoroughly is why you need to spend a good amount of time making it really tell your story and show your passion for science. That way, even if they skim, they get what is important. I've also served on the adcom. If they don't ask you about the gap year, it may still get discussed by a committee. If it is a problem, they'll make sure to ask you about it.

You're not really giving us a lot to go off of, here. There are a lot more factors that matter. Given that a research internship is generally not a large period of time and that your GPA is a little low, my guess is that you would not be a strong candidate for UCSF. I was not, and I had a higher GPA with six years of research experience. You should plant to apply to at least 5 schools, and pick schools that you're truly interested in with several scientists that seem interesting. I highly recommend looking over this thread to see where others are applying and what their profiles look like. You can post your updated profile there, too:

I can have a look as well. Also PM me if you would like, though be warned I am a very harsh critic.

On the big thing, we agree, which is that fit is most important. This is something that every applicant needs to know and needs to focus on. When I talk about this, I don't mean fit with a PI. I mean how you feel and how you fit with the institution and program you're choosing. For me, this is what made my decision. I felt completely comfortable at one place in a way I didn't at any other. We also agree that prestige plays a big role future success in academia. However what part of your career matters most for that prestige is I think where we will have to agree to disagree. I'm going to maintain that post doc is where being in a big-name lab or at a well-known institution is what matters most. It is fine to disagree, but my advice is going to mirror what I've learned from experience (nearly 3 degrees and 10 years in academia) and from what every advisor has told me from day 1 in a lab. Working hard, getting publications, and presenting at conferences is going to do you a world of good no matter where you do to school. Good post docs will be within reach. @ITISRED whether you need a postdoc or not for government jobs, it depends on what you're doing. Some NIH positions require a short post doc, and I think some CDC positions also require it. In general, if you want to run a research team, a short post doc, even an industry post doc is going to be a good idea to get you a little more experience running projects with a minion or two under you. Other things, like being part of a large research team or being a consultant, might not require it. Lots of these want experience in the field, though, which is hard to get during the PhD. However, if that's the route you think you want to go, you should be able to do some additional career development during your PhD including policy or short internships to help you in that direction.

I think too much emphasis is placed on getting into a "top program." It really doesn't matter for grad school, but it DOES seem to matter for post doc. The PIs I know did their graduate work at a variety of different institutions, but they all post-doc'd either somewhere well known or with someone well known. Students graduating from my program are placed into post doc just as well as the ones others view as ranked higher, and I think this says a great deal. I'm not at one of those top programs, but I'm definitely having no problem building collaborations or networking. Besides, there are so many great research institutions that excel in different areas that to me it makes no sense to rank them 1 to 100+ like we do. I would much rather see them ranked by research area and that would give it more weight. Anyway, it is most important to join a program where you will truly get what you need to be successful. I urge people to not think about the name or prestige when they interview, but rather the fit they have, there. If you feel comfortable, you should be there. Of my friends here, the ones that are happiest actually turned down offers from schools that others would have drooled over. You would be surprised how many students work their way through graduate school, defend the PhD and realize they've actually just done the bare minimum to graduate, not what actually needed to be done to survive in their field doing what they aimed to do. I see this happen all the time, especially in people who think they want to stay in academia. That "big name" school on your degree isn't going to get you a faculty interview if you've done nothing productive over your post doc when someone from a "no name" school has published often. The one place where school name or assumed prestige might come in handy is if you plan not to remain in academia when the PhD is over. Much more emphasis will be placed on where you did your studies when you don't have post doc(s) lined up as well.

Actually, I would counter to say that's not always the case. Where you POST DOC is most important for doing well in academia. You need to be productive and publish lots to be successful, but you should focus on getting a good education to be a good postdoc. My PI is not yet well known as I am his first student, though I think he will be in a few more years. However, I'm getting a killer education, and it's going to help me kick ass and get a good post doc, hopefully in a big name lab. Once there, the goal will be to put my skills to the test and do as much of the best science that I can. @ITISRED, if your programs do rotations, you should pick a school that has several PIs you're interested in. Not just one.

From experience, we actually just get a PDF of whatever you submit, so we don't even have access to track changes, just comment bubbles. I also can't stand reading double-spaced.

Unfortunately, I don't. I know a few PIs, but I don't think I know enough at any institution to make it worth applying for that reason, only. You should also not be afraid of moving outside of your comfort zone or what you think you want to do. I liked epigenetics, cancer, and immunology, but now I do metabolism. I still like epigenetics, but I would have never figured out I liked metabolism if I didn't join an interdisciplinary program with lots of options. There are several really good interdisciplinary programs in the US.

Mine were all single spaced, which is easier for me to read, anyway. Besides, if you turned something in double-spaced, I would assume you didn't have ENOUGH to say. A single spaced statement that doesn't fill the whole space is fine, but double spaced and filling the space would make me read more critically.

University of Utah has a good group of epigenetics labs. I was invited to interview there, but I had already accepted the offer at my top choice. They seemed like they would be a really good place to study.

Actually, I would venture that neither of those are super important for your PhD so long as you pick a good program. What you're talking about seems to be more what you should consider for your PostDoc, not your PhD. Well established PIs that have all of those things also are extremely limited on time to mentor their graduate students. Those are the types of PIs, at least in biomedical sciences, that offer the best place to do a post-doc. They have money to spend on productive postdocs, giving you the opportunity to gain independence and make the projects that will get both of you more papers and move you on to the next step. Some of my peers in more established labs are not doing well, and some still have no data at the beginning of our 4th year. I chose a brand new PI with lots of projects who I knew would be a good mentor from my rotation. I might even get to graduate early. Thus, I very highly recommend newer PIs. Often new PIs have the most time to devote to their students, and the earliest students are the generally ones that become the most successful, which makes sense given the extra time that they get from the PI. In addition, younger PIs tend to really be trying to push out papers, which means you'll have multiple projects and have to work hard, but it also means there are lots of options for presentations and papers for you. In addition, you also tend to get more experience in writing. You have to be the one to choose if the PI is going to be the right one to mentor you as you need, but I haven't met very many young ones that are not good mentors where I'm at. I have, however, had students who started after me come back and tell me they regretted choosing a big, gigantic lab where they don't get a lot of guidance. Definitely take those things into account when you're deciding. In short, you should choose a newer PI that is known in the field, but still working their way up with a small to medium lab for your PhD. This gives you all kinds of necessary exposure, especially if you want to stay in academia. I think rankings systems are crap, but you should be choosing departments that you feel comfortable with and are graduating students at or below the national average (currently over 6 years) and that are able to place their graduates in good postdocs or jobs. Then for postdoc, you should aim for the best place you can get, the highest experts in the field. The postdoc will propel you to where you want to go... if you work hard.