Chimeric Phoenix

Guys can we all please chill. There are many stereotypes going around on this thread, both about Harvard and about Baltimore. People are apt to be offended by such generalizations, and they have also been used in positive ways as well as negative ones. Wishing you all the best with your waiting games, let's just support each other to get into the best program for each of us!

Hey, I was born and raised in Baltimore. It seems that many here have been deluded by misrepresentations of Baltimore (ie. The Wire, Serial, news). I will just say this, if you write off Hopkins because of Baltimore it is absolutely your loss. Baltimore is vibrant, young, and diverse. It has one of the fastest growing populations of people ages 25-30. It is actually an art hub so almost every day there are various events/festivals to explore. Between the UMD schools, Hopkins, and Maryland School for the Arts there is a lively student community. Baltimore has a beautiful setting on the water and because it was one of the first U.S cities it has beautiful, historical architecture. If you are a sports fan then Baltimore is a great place to be with the Orioles at Camden Yards and the Ravens. Baltimore is a condensed city made up of eclectic neighborhoods so not only it is very accessible, you will never run out of things to do/new places to explore.
Baltimore has a truly diverse population and an incredible sentiment of social justice and activism. Lastly, Baltimore is just 45 minutes from DC, an hour from beaches on the Atlantic coast, an hour to Philadelphia, less than an hour to the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains (ie. tons of stunning natural scenery and parks), and 3-4 hours from New York. I could go on and on about what an amazing place Baltimore is. 
I know people are concerned with crime, but in all of my years living in a working class neighborhood my roommates and I were never victims of crime. Honestly, the people most afflicted by crime in Baltimore are the poor and those marginalized/oppressed by our society...so please check your privilege before you start to complain about crime. 
I am not attending Hopkins as I decided it was time to try out a new state, but the research environment is really phenomenal. And keep in mind that you have access to the NIH (especially the NCI, infectious diseases, and aging institutes), Kennedy Krieger, and UMD. I am not saying Hopkins is better than any other program, but it's a damn shame to see so many people write it off without any precedent/actual experience to go off. 
 

Some PIs can get very prickly about not applying to their school. I wouldn't necessarily say you shouldn't apply to a safety school or just apply to appease that PI. However, you don't have to accept the interview and if you get interviews at any of those other schools you should probably decline. Nobody is looking for 5 publications. I interviewed at UDub Immunology a few years back, and most people had 0 publications. I also know people with interviews at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, and UCSF. Most of them had stats similar to yours.
TL;DR keep the safety school, but decline the interview if you have a bunch of others from schools you like. If you don't have an acceptance offer before UofT interview weekend, it's not rude to still attend and just decline UofT acceptance later. These schools have a wait list for a reason.

Ferroportin, 
I suggest making a positive spin on it. I had subpar grades in my undergrad and I addressed it in my SOP but did not dwell on it. You don't want it to take up more then a small paragraph, and if you can explain what you learned, took away from the negative experience it makes your SOP stronger. Also if you can get one of your LOR writers to address it in a letter that will help a lot as well. My current PI is going to address my low undergrad grades and how I have completely turned that around for my MS. Another faculty members opinion always holds a lot of weight.
Hope this helps!

Going to join the club of willing to take questions from current applicants.
 
You can find all my details in previous posts, but in summary: low undergrad GPA (very low science), decent MS GPA, and good GRE scores.
 
Good Luck!!!

Wait, is this your first semester? Definitely do not drop out yet. You need to find a therapist to talk to if receiving a homework grade is causing a nervous breakdown. I mean that in 100% seriousness. Call the student health center and make an appointment to talk to someone ASAP. Next, talk to the professor about your homework and find out what specifically they think you need to improve upon in order to succeed in the class. And finally, keep in mind that grades are semi-meaningless in grad school, especially at the PhD level. Good luck! Keep us posted on how things are going.

If you have a strong application outside of your undergrad GPA (research experience, publications, presentation, GRE) it might be worth waiting awhile to take some graduate level courses before applying. I don't know your personal situation, but it's worth remembering that a PhD is a 5 year program (or so we're told lol) and the career path is highly competitive. You may not want to settle for a tier 3 program when you could wait a bit and get into a school like U of Chicago.
On the other hand, if you don't have a stellar GRE, a good reason that your UGPA was low, and a plan to make sure your grad GPA is much higher, you might not want to waste your time and money delaying a PhD application.

Gram, your writing score is fine. It is the absolute least important aspect of your application and I'd be surprised if adcoms even so much as glance at it.

I think you're in good shape. You have a good GPA, you have varied research experience, you have a publication in the works. It sounds like you'll be fine on the GRE. As long as your letter writers try to sell you and you write a good SOP you're a competitive applicant. For you, I think the question is less if you can get into graduate school, but where you will be going.

You can take a postdoc right now as an MD. using a phd program as a stopgap sounds like a terrible idea IMO.

Nobody can tell you if you should cut down programs. Just be warned that applying to that many programs will be an expensive endeavor. Make sure that you have at least 3-5 PI's at each institute you're applying. If you don't have at least this minimum, I would advise against applying to the program. Your profile seems decent so you should be able to do well in the application cycle.

This is absolutely true. You have a solid GPA and it seems like you'll be able to get some strong letters of rec. Make sure that you aim for the 85-90+ percentile when you take your GRE. 
 
No matter how impressive one's credentials are it boils down to research fit at the PhD level, especially at top programs that receive ~1000 applications. This will be conveyed in your statement of purpose, followed by your LORs. GPA and GRE scores provide a measure of some standardization but they are not the most important components of your application package. 
 
Keep your grades up, do good research/science and present your work. Apply to a good spread of programs (7-10) where you can realistically see yourself attending and where at least 3-5 PI's are doing research that you find interesting. Make sure to show your PI and other profs your SoP and don't overstress - the application cycle is quite a long process  .

I have accepted my offer to join the immunology training program at the University of Washington-Seattle!

Like Vene said, there must have been some red flags during your interviews. You're shy, but not socially awkward enough to warrant a rejection. That's good. Those professors meet with a lot of people, and if they're not on the adcom, they're probably more concerned with recruitment than with trying to pick apart your application. If you want an answer, you need to speak to someone who has been looking at your profile and your character critically, i.e. someone on the admissions committee.
 
Let's just assume you're reasonably likeable and that you communicate your science well such that you are not being rejected for issues with your resume or personality. The only thing I can imagine that would earn you these rejections is your niche research interest. If it's so specific that there are only a couple faculty that have the expertise to advise you, that might be the problem. In fact, if that's clearly your passion and it's not something you'll be able to work on at the schools you're interviewing with, you will get rejected as a bad fit for the program. Having a narrow or extremely well-defined research interest is a red flag to a lot of professors from what I've been told during my interviews.
 
It's also possible that you make a poor first impression. People who know you well probably think you're fantastic. People you meet for a first time might think something else. My impression is that you're judgmental, entitled and self-centered. Obviously, your friends know you well enough to see beyond that and this probably isn't who you really are with people you like. However, this is the sense I get having read several of your posts. This is my honest feedback that you asked for, albeit with a very limited sample size, so take it with a grain of salt. I hope you can read through your past posts and figure out why I think this (hint: look at how frequently you make yourself out as a victim and how much you shit on other people).
 
My suggestion is that you apply to programs that don't do interviews. Your profile is strong enough to get you in somewhere and your recs were clearly good if they got you six interviews.
 
Edit: For the record, starting research in your junior year is not late. I didn't start until after my sophomore year. Your academic record looks OK for middle of the pack schools; you got interviews so you passed the "written" portion of the application process.

Actually, I know it's a really late point but to offer the opposite viewpoint, my PI actually did the same ranking system and it turned out to be the school that he had less of a gut feeling for (he was deciding between Stanford and UCSF and he wanted to go to UCSF). He actually chose to go to Stanford because it won out on the list, which is a very logical viewpoint and very opposite the emotional response. He hasn't regretted going to Stanford over UCSF but the point of this I feel is that it's very hard to make a wrong decision when you're comparing schools of this caliber essentially. There's a good choice and a better choice but it's a personal decision as to why one school is better, resources or environment or some combination of the two. 

I was "enthusiastically accepted" to Johns Hopkins immunology and also wait listed (hopfully not enthusiastically) at UCLA.

I think now I'm torn between Seattle immunology and Johns Hopkins immunology. Both are excellent programs in immunology so this is going to be a tough decision.

Well I can give my perspective as a first-year grad student. I just finished hosting for the interview weekends. All of the students, or I should say first-years and second-years, were out on all of the extracurricular activities, and the major reason was because all our friends were gonna be there. I don't know about other programs, but my department has 30+ first years and we're all really close with each other and genuinely enjoy spending time together. So if I hear another school only half the students show up to extracurricular stuff, based solely on my experiences which may or may not be representative (I can only attend one graduate school after all), I would think that the department is not extremely close. This may or may not be true, I really can't say and I think you'd have a better idea based on the interactions you saw. If you're a person like me who enjoys interacting with your peers and fellow students, this may not be the perfect environment for you. Again it's hard to say because I'm basing my answer solely on my experiences.
 
On the matter of high postdoc/grad ratio, I feel that your PhD is all about preparation and training. I rotated in one lab that was all graduate students and the mentor would constantly pop into lab to say hi and see if anyone needed any help or anything. I also rotated in a lab with 30 post docs and 1 graduate student. A week or two ago, I told the PI with the 30+ lab that I wanted to join, so that's where I'm doing my thesis. Originally I went into grad school thinking that PI mentorship was irreplaceable, but I realized in my rotation that postdocs can make excellent mentors too. I should mention that the lab atmosphere in the lab I'm in is extraordinarily generous, full of collaborations between members, and overall very friendly, so I know that if I have questions, there will be a postdoc. Additionally, my PI paired me up with a postdoc who's fairly new also, so that we can each help each other and grow together in our time. I'm positive there are many postdoc heavy labs where the postdocs are very self-driven and are looking to publish and don't want to use their time offering training to a grad student. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that postdoc-heavy labs can be great if the postdocs themselves are generous and friendly. Postdocs can be great allies and mentors in your training. But overall, despite how much I love the lab I'm in, I would not have joined it if I didn't think I can get some kind of mentorship and training from the postdocs. If you don't feel grad-mentoring (either from the PI or postdocs) at this school is up to your expectations, I wouldn't go there. Your mentorship and training are the entire reason you're in grad school. 

I know that this phase is often the most stressful time, when we might not have any offers, or we have some offers to some of our lower choices but still waiting to hear back from some of our top choices. But that doesn't mean we have to aggressive towards each other about this! 
 
I suggest these guidelines, which can really just be summarized as "don't be a jerk":
 
1. Don't be a jerk and procrastinate on making your decision. Once you do have enough information to make a decision, go ahead and make it. For example, if you know for a fact that you will go to one of your top 3 choices and you got into all 3, it's a good time to decline/withdraw all your other schools. Or, if there is a safety school that you no longer need, go ahead and decline it. Don't rush yourself though and give yourself time to visit the school and think carefully about how you want to spend your next 5-7 years. It's fine to take time if you need it to make the best decision for yourself, but don't be a jerk and just procrastinate until April before you seriously start thinking about your future. That is, don't treat this like a homework assignment--just because the deadline is April 15 does not mean you should wait until then to decide (unless you need the time).
 
2. Don't be a jerk and rush others into making a decision. They deserve your acceptances and have worked hard to get here, just like you. Every accepted applicant deserves the time necessary to make the right decision for them. And sometimes that means waiting for other offers. For example, there might be a 2-body problem so one partner has to wait until the other hears back from the schools in the same area to decide. Or, other information might be missing, such as waiting for the announcement of national fellowships (I believe these get released in early April). It's also important to realise that just because a waitlist exists doesn't mean that if someone declines, someone from the waitlist will get in. A school that wants 20 new students might make offers to 30 students, knowing that usually only, say, 40% of offers are taken. So they might only fill a few spots from the waitlist even though many people will be declining. Or, they might change their mind and just take a smaller class after all. You also don't know if the waitlist is something like 10 students, or all 200 students that met all minimum qualifications. Don't count on waitlist status meaning anything. Don't be a jerk and blame/guilt those with offers for the decision that the school made. We're all in this together.

Go with research fit. Plus your stipend will go a hell of a lot farther in St. Louis than Manhattan haha. In all honesty though, WashU is on par ( if not better ) than the ivy league schools . You have to remember too, that what Academia considers to be a "big name" is very different than what a layman does. 

Hmm, I've been thinking alot about that since it's been really hard to eliminate schools and decide where I want to go since the science is great at all the schools I've applied to. I will definitely add this to my pros/cons list now. It's a good perspective to have. 
 
Although to follow up, what would you do if you liked the environment at multiple places? 

Short answer: you have violated your ethical responsibilities.
 
Long answer: you have violated your ethical responsibilities--but you can put the brakes on it now and salvage whatever professionalism you can until after the class is done and you two no longer have any professional relationship besides being students at the same school. 
 
If I were you, I would not bring this to your professor. I would simply follow up in a text (read: in writing somewhere; start creating a paper trail in your favor) that considering the professional relationship you two are in as TA--Student, you think it would be best to put a stop to any and all romantic interactions. This, hopefully, should put you in the clear to assess her work again.

DAMN SON. My friend at Vanderbilt got an extra 10K per year for like 3 years, so that certainly helped her decision (38K is luxurious in Nashville!). Would certainly make me look real hard at your fit as UC Irvine!

Accepted into MGG DBBS Program at WashU!! I am soooo excited!!!! This is the best feeling I've had thus far. I'll most likely be attending there. Time to let the other schools know.

If anybody attending the Johns Hopkins Immunology interview weekend has any questions feel free to send me a PM

Graduate school in a nutshell...