AGradStudentHasNoName

Did they email you or respond to an email you sent them?

I got Cornell Tri institutional program as well. But no Harvard :(. I guess my years of industry experience aren't being weighted that highly?

Sorry. Feels bad. I hope something good works out for you.

No. I didn't mention this in my sop or anywhere else in my application. I didn't highlight my wet lab work because its not what I expect to be doing in grad school. I'm not sure why it is entitled. There are many public data sources upon which we can create new computational methods and publish research. It is easier if the data is private as fewer people have had the chance to analyze that data. If the methods used to analyze the data constitute novel research then great, that is a paper. This is dealt with in many labs. It depends on whether the novel aspect is the biology/hypothesis or the computational methods used. If the answer is one or the other, the first authorship is easy to figure out. If it is both, sometimes there are dual first authors (increasingly common) and sometimes there are 2 papers one focusing on the method and one focusing on the results.

I don't plan on collecting any data if at all possible. I have selected my programs and labs such that they have excellent data generation resources, people generating that data, and loads of existing data that they own. This has been a primary concern of mine. I've done wet lab work in the distant past. No thanks! (no offense to the many wet lab researchers here, please collab with me lol)

Thanks for the sentiment. I still expect we will cross paths eventually.

The numbers may have been inflated. Comp bio vs bio vs cs are all a bit different. The basic reasoning remains. Like I said, I don't want your advice. I have talked to people who are knowledgeable and whom I trust in order to make my decisions. I don't know what you are attempting to prove here. I admitted that you are an excellent candidate and the interview invites are showing that. Move on.

Wow. Thanks for the info. I never knew!! Nor did I set down this path with any better info than an internet forum poster could give me. I did not solicit advice.

I have been over this before on these forums. And I have talked to multiple professors about this. And there is some disagreement among the professors. I think I might have a hard time getting a post doc at a top lab while I think I should have a shot at a top PhD program. And I think taking the extra time to build a strong publication history will be beneficial in the long term. If I did a post doc for 2-3 years and got 2-3 papers and then applied for faculty positions, it would be a tough sell. If I do a PhD and get 3-4 papers then a 1-2 year post doc and get another 1-2 papers and the labs I was working in were better thought of so those papers would probably be in better journals etc. It is a reasonable thing to do. I don't need a Phd to go into industry... I'm already in industry and the people with my title at my company have phds from mit and stanford.

There is a uw genome sciences report in thegradcafe survey now for an interview....

Congrats. Now I wish I had applied lol. I even emailed pevsner but all I got in response was "please apply to the program and we can talk more at interviews". But it eventually fell off my list. Now watching archer and drinking :/ lol

It sounds like they would have to be stupid to not accept you so just try to stay calm lol. With those things and the broad connection it's gonna be easy for you.

I'm glad I got this pot stirred. *gets popcorn* It matters so much guys.

Let's hope so. But I also have a heavy CS background. And I agree with @Epigenetics. These programs aren't that big. It doesn't take many excellent candidates to get shouldered out. WashU is excellent in computational biology/genetics as well. I mostly didn't apply because I didn't want to live in St Louis.

I'm convinced that gradcafe is terrible for me, but I am powerless against it.

The silence from Seattle continues... They have sent out invites on December 17th for most years so they are behind schedule. They had a Faculty meeting on the 12th before their holiday party according to their calendar... I really have a hard time believing that nobody here is going to get an invite from them. @Epigenetics working at the Broad/HMS, I'm at 10x genomics, @Oddich55 seemingly getting every interview invite under the sun... I don't buy it. Someone here is getting an invite. I know several students there and my background is better (not trying to brag, it's just my honest opinion). Some years the rejections went out on December 18th lol. They had to be running late THIS year.

I didn't apply to BBS, but BIG. But one of the professors I contacted who had posts in statistics and molecular biology (both fields for which I am not a great candidate for, but our research interests aligned pretty well) said that he could take students from pretty much any scientific harvard program and potentially even from some MIT programs with approval. He said it was it was very open. He did say that for interviews if you want to talk to a given professor outside of the department, you would have to ask and they would have to be available/want to meet. While I know that many here are more knowledgeable about this than I am, I would say don't make your decisions based on things mentioned in this forum. Ask the program, and ask the program if exceptions can be made with approval. Ask them about specific professors because even that could change the answer.

Don't expect anything from stanford biomedical informatics until january 5th or 6th. To our knowledge nobody has heard from Harvard BIG but I'm hoping it will be in the coming few days.

The silence... Anything to report guys? Still nothing here. The struggle is real lol.

I think we should expect Harvard BIG this week. In the past they have sent between Dec 17th and 21st. Tho a few years they have sent in january... I hope not.

I have been in new haven a few times. I dunno. I didn't like it. Seems like an in-between place. It's not NYC. It's not in the country. It doesn't have the culture of Boston. There are some really bad parts to it as well. It's probably great but for whatever reason I am biased against it. Coursera stanford algos courses (2 of them) are great. MIT open courseware algos class is also great (has a bit more depth but less breadth). I find its good to group algorithmic ideas into a few paradigms (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, graph algorithms, machine learning, search methods, etc) and then when you have a new problem ask yourself if any of those might work. Not sure about the comp bio/bioinformatics open courseware. Presumably the one by Pevsner is good, but it was too basic for me and i lost interest. CS is a fast moving culturally driven thing. Honestly just being friends with people who do serious CS and/or serious comp bio is a big part of learning and keeping up. The other thing is being okay with not knowing what you are doing. Doing a new project? Write it in a new language or framework. Having a decent project is the hardest part to learning a new language. The rest is google, trial and error, and learning. Ask questions if you dont understand something! Also stats. Take more stats. Take more math in general. Take optimization, combinatorial optimization, numerical optimization, numerical methods, statistical mechanics. Take anything graph algorithms, probabalistic/randomized algorithms, probabilistic inference, machine learning, graphical models, anything with the name Markov in it lol. Caltech I also didn't much look into. I am aware that Lior Pachtor just moved there and he is very good. I just had too many schools already on the list at that point. Also I am not a big LA fan either lol. UCSD is the other major program that I didn't apply to. I couldnt really find anyone besides Pevsner who I would want to work with.

I honestly didn't know Yale CBB was any good and it is in New Haven... didn't have any professors I was already aware of at Yale and I just didn't look into it. Right, Harvard BIG is the only program for which I do not know the interview date. Hopefully we will both find out next week! Here is hoping. Obviously so many good labs at harvard but I particularly like Steve Mccarroll, Isaac Kohane, Dan MacArthur, and Sean Eddy. But really there are just tons. And affiliation with the Broad Institute opens up many more as well as tons of data generation / support / collaborators / compute infrastructure. Damn. Waiting is tough.

Probably they would. But that is one of the programs for which I would make no compromises. For me it looks like one of their weekends doesn't conflict with anything else so I don't have to make that decision luckily. Some programs like Stanford biomedical informatics straight up says something like "we expect all candidates to attend from 5pm wednesday to 5pm saturday" or whatever the exact dates are. And that conflicts with Harvard/MIT HST interviews! Well I just hope that I am forced to make that decision lol.

Most of my programs don't send invites until January. Only 3 of them even send in December.

I'm dying here. You are getting so many interviews. At least its just that none of my programs have sent any yet. Now it won't be until Monday at the earliest. Well, I'm going backpacking this weekend to get off the grid and away from email... Sad for all of you who got disappointments today. It's tough. Have some comfort whiskey... lol Congrats to everyone with invites!