mrmolecularbiology

Anyone interested in learning more information about UTSW or particular PIs here message me and I'll give you an honest answer.

Unless you have already signed the paperwork, I think it is fine to go to other interviews for a few reasons. It gives you a forum to practice talking about science and with interviewing in general. It will also help you make sure you have made the right decision by seeing what else is out there.

Having pubs as an undergrad is incredibly helpful. It certainly helped me stand out.

Yes. A few adcoms looked at my social media sites. Linkedin outed them though.

I brought a notepad. I used it twice over five interview weekends. You could bring notes I suppose, but are you going to look at them while you're talking to an interviewer? Copy of your poster is not a bad idea it will make talking about your research easier.

I no longer interact with "normal people". I go to lab and then I hang out with people in my program. We talk about science 24/7. That in itself is not a problem (I'm having a blast) but I think I have now drastically limited the pool of people I can look for a mate in. Oh well

You don't need to know every detail of the research you have been doing, but you should be able to talk about it intelligently. The structure of most interviews is several (5 or so) one on one interviews, where half the time they talk about their research and half you talk about yours. I don't know why you have a summary from the program website that will not help you in anyway. As for reading papers: skim them so you are able to ask intelligent questions when you are interviewing, but the questions need to be pertinent to what the interviewer has been talking about. Memorizing something and then spouting it randomly is not impressive.

I got my invitation the 13th of december last year. And in case you wanted to know Invite for Hopkins biophysics was received on january 8th.

I meant to check this forum more frequently, so I could offer advise and encouragement to this year's applicant pool, as many grad students did for me last year. If anyone has any questions about UTSW (interviews etc) or grad school in general I'd be glad to answer them. I also interviewed at UCSF IPQB (accepted) Duke SSB (accepted) Cornell biophysics (accepted) and Johns Hopkins Molecular biophysics (rejected post interview). And can comment somewhat on what to do (and not do haha) when interviewing and what it is like.

That's awesome! I bet being persistent in addition to exceeding the cutoff will make you a strong candidate in this cycle. Good luck!

Consider adding University of texas southwestern medical center to your list of schools. 40% of my incoming class is international students.

Is there anything keeping you in San Diego or is that just a preference?

Consider University of Texas southwestern medical center over Texas A&M. I think it's a better program. (although I'm biased because I go there )

Lol your complaining about a two hour drive? All of your own feelings about the programs point to UCSD.

I had to make a decision between similar choices for similar reasons I turned down UCSF to go to UTSW, for one additional reason ( knew I wouldn't be very "mentored" by PI's at UCSF at least in my subfield). The fact that students (as well as faculty) seemed super happy and enthusiastic at UTSW was a super plus for me. The faculty and students were super welcoming, and faculty had projects that they wanted me to come work on. At UCSF it was like, you could rotate/join my lab but I don't personally care if you do kind of vibe.I guess it really depends on what you think you want/need. I did not get the "competitive" vibe from students while I was at UCSF but that was my experience. I just didn't think the large labs were a place I would flourish. Do you think you would do just as well in both places? For me I knew I could survive UCSF, but I would be less productive overall because they seem to demand more independence that I'm just not up for yet.