aldoushuxley

Love love love chapel hill. You will become familiar with this bookstore! 

Love love love chapel hill. You will become familiar with this bookstore! 

Love love love chapel hill. You will become familiar with this bookstore! 

Also, he showed me the letter after it was submitted, so obviously not expecting feedback other than a thank you.

He's not famous, just well known. lol. I used to be interested in veterinary medicine but realized that I worked better in a lab rather than a client based setting because I am introverted. The letter was shown to me. I would feel like a twat asking him to redo it. I think you are right in regards to the context of the letter, though, so maybe I will just ride with it and hope that my SOP and other LOR's reveal enough regarding my work ethic. 

Love love love chapel hill. You will become familiar with this bookstore! 

I've been lurking this thread for a while, but thank you pstar for a great anxiety-reducing post. I finished my last couple of apps yesterday and have been suffering the subsequent "Did I remember my GRE/transcript/correct SOP/remind a recommender?" It's a great reminder to calm down and let the bureaucracy sort itself out, as we literally have no control. *channels his inner Chris Traeger*
 
Hope to hear good news from everyone soon!

I think it would help if everyone who is obsessively refreshing (including myself) realized a few things:
 
1. A very, VERY small subset of people who apply to bioscience programs post their stats and results on this thing, and they tend to be people confident enough with their numbers to post. Therefore your sample is skewed and there is no way to know if you'll get in anywhere based on the stats listed. Perspective: Many programs receive 500-1000 apps, and there are a great number of programs out there. So there are at least 10,000 people applying to US grad programs. We're not seeing that many posters within the bioscience results, more like a couple hundred at most every year.
 
2. It's not all about numbers anyway, they take people they like based on research experiences and fit and that magical x factor. Basically, they accept people who they think they can work with and who will be good at research.
 
3. Schools do whatever they want when it comes to notifying, and it varies year to year. They email people when they feel like it. I know people who have been admitted months after others heard back from interviews
 
4. If you submitted an app and haven't heard back in five days, it DOESN'T mean they hate you. People on admissions committees have other jobs and many apps to go through. Don't you want them to take their time reading apps carefully anyway?
 
In summary: Chill. Stop refreshing. Read a book. Watch some tv.
 
Sources: The many Ph.Ds I work with, faculty I have spoken to, grad students, and students who have applied and gotten into grad school.

Love love love chapel hill. You will become familiar with this bookstore! 

Gmail - Inbox (2,579). Still. "Dammit."

"You'll get in! Why don't you think you'll get in?!"
 
(said in a sympathetic voice as if I just have low self esteem or something)

But it would list all the scores and GPA's and everything that everyone keeps asking "Is this good enough?" wouldn't it? We see admits, but rejections are obscured and not well represented. As a data point it seems like something worth persuing.
 
And wouldnt the community make the forum more about "Plan B" scenarios, keeping spirits up, and helping people get past being depressed?
 
Since more people get rejected than accepted.. wouldn't that be for the greater good?

I know the stress that a low GPA causes when applying to Ph.D. programs. It feels like a millstone around your neck, forever putting paid to your dreams of graduate study, and ultimately a research career. My undergraduate GPA is just above 3,0, and even worse, is below 3.0 across my junior and senior years. However, I have received an offer of admission from my first choice program and am in the midst of interviewing at several other prominent institutions. I just wanted to share my experiences in striving for a biomedical sciences Ph.D. seat to encourage my fellow applicants with low GPAs not to give up hope.
 
I am an intelligent person, but I became incorrigibly lazy in high school. There, I had quickly discovered that I could cruise along at the top of my class with minimal effort, and unfortunately for me, I carried the same work ethic into college, with rather disastrous consequences. As you would have observed, my undergraduate GPA is rather poor, and most unfortunately for me, exhibited a downward trend. Although I had a strong general GRE score, my low GPA, in conjunction with my lack of research experience, caused me to apply mostly to master's programs, as I thought that getting into a quality Ph.D. program would be too much of a long shot. I saw the master's program as an opportunity for a fresh start, and to prove to admissions committees that I was indeed capable of handling graduate-level coursework and research. The few Ph.D. programs I did apply to rejected me. but to my relief, I was able to get admission into an elite master's program (it must have helped that my transcripts had not been updated with my senior year grades).
 
Within a few weeks of matriculating, I meticulously planned out my course schedule for the two years that I would be in the program and joined a lab where I would end up pursuing my thesis research. Perhaps you can guess the remainder of my narrative – I excelled as a master's student, getting a 4.0 GPA and a couple of first author Nature papers, and forced my way into a Ph.D. program. Wrong. The same malaise that afflicted me as an undergraduate was almost my undoing as a master's student. Again I was apathetic towards my coursework, and my first year was littered with C's, culminating in a 2.76 GPA, atrocious by any standards. It wasn't until my DGS threatened to expel me that I started to take things a little more seriously. Over the course of my last year, I performed very strongly in the courses that I took, ultimately raising my cumulative GPA to above 3.0. As you can imagine, a 3.26 GPA is still far from stellar, and I feared that all the C's that I received in my first year would be unpardonable in the eyes of the Ph.D. admissions committees, even though I had done well in most of my biological sciences courses. However, throughout all the up and downs of my coursework, I had worked assiduously on my thesis research – often I would skip classes or postpone exam preparation to work in the lab (though certainly not at the insistence of my PI, who had advised me not to sacrifice my grades at the altar of research). Despite a year of frustration due to negative results, during my second year I made a very interesting observation regarding the regulation of the gene which I had been studying. Finally I had an intriguing story to share and a thesis I could be satisfied with. In the summer of 2012, I successfully defended my thesis and graduated with my master of science.
 
At this point, the application deadlines for Fall 2012 entry into Ph.D. programs had passed months ago. At the time of the deadlines, I had not yet rescued my GPA back to above 3.0, and was unsure if my thesis research would end up being anything of interest, or if I would even finish my degree (the specter of dismissal still loomed over me). As a result, I decided to apply for Fall 2013 entry. Following my graduation, rather than sitting idly, I joined a lab at another university as a research technician and am continuing to build my research credentials. I also took the subject GRE test in Biology and did well (96th percentile). I received strong letters of recommendation from both of my PIs and a former professor, and decided to apply again.
 
It seems that the strength of my recommendations and my research experience was sufficient to overcome my low GPA in the eyes of the admission committees. Well, not all of them. I did get rejected from half of the fourteen schools to which I applied, but seven interview invitations is seven more than I would have anticipated just one year ago. As I said at the beginning of this post, I have gotten admission into my first-choice program, so regardless of how my remaining interviews go, I am secure in the knowledge that I will have somewhere to go this fall, somewhere where I will be glad to be at.
 
My intent in relating my experience is to encourage those who wish to get into a Ph.D. program, but are despondent over a low GPA, not to despair. Yes, a low GPA hurts your chances of admission, and you might have to apply to more programs than most to compensate (as I did), but it is not the end of the world. There are steps that you can take, such as doing a master's degree (don't screw up like I did), or working as a research assistant or research technician following your undergraduate degree, to show your fitness for graduate-level coursework and research. Make sure to have strong letters of recommendation, because those will make all the difference in the world. I hope that reading my account helps; I tried to provide concrete numbers wherever I could, as far as GPA and GRE scores, to give you a standard to compare to. Good luck with your applications.

Personally, I come from a family where (i) both my parents were educated to a PhD level (ii) they didn't even meet in grad school, but a number of years later. Me and my brother came a good few years after that, too. My mother would have been in her mid 30s when she had her first child (me).
 
So...from my perspective it is slightly weird to hear somebody aged 22 freaking about the condition of her eggs. Or putting the idea of a family before education. Your upbringing and life perspective is clearly different. That's fine. Just accept that everyone has their own views.
 
I am also deeply cynical of the (commonly-held) belief that giving birth is somehow the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence, and that a woman who decides to find happiness & purpose in her life without raising children is somehow "defective", "selfish" or a pitiable failure. The problem is that woman seem to believe this all-or-nothing binary, too...

Yes. Definitely.  Schools will def. want an updated CV from you with this information.  And congrats!

Forward your letter writers the email so that they understand the importance of getting them in asap.

It's so hard to tell a person, "yes, you have a chance, apply," or "no, you have no chance." So much depends on how well your research interests match a department, how many PhD students they can fund that year...factors no one else has any control over. Only the admissions committee can really tell you if you have a chance and, sadly, none of us are the admissions committees (if only we were!) If this is what you want to do with your life, then apply, because the worst that happens is that you lose your application fees. It sounds like you're being realistic and planning for back-up options, so as long as you have those, go for what you want. You never know what "reach" school might actually think you're a perfect fit for one of their faculty members. 

LMAO!!  Did not expect that at all.
 

"The programs you're applying to are all a year long? And why are they so far away, you won't be able to come back for the holidays next year!"
 
Maybe they don't think I considered that when I was looking at schools? Who knows...

"So you pay money to apply and can't just enroll?  Then what are you paying for?"

"So, wait... you want to be a doctor, but you're not going to med school? How does that work?"
 
Sigh.

and being bombarded with questions about what you are/will be doing. 
"Oh you'll get in somewhere"
"Immunology? What is that?"
"You're studying evolutionary biology? I thought you were christian" [not kidding. I am not religious either FTR]
 
Awkward dinner conversation thread...Begin!

Thanks OP, that's the most frustrating line ever. Especially if you hate it being just "somewhere" ore you are 80% sure you are getting into nowhere.


"Think about a backup plan"

"You're studying again? You'll end up being a librarian"
-This is wrong in so many levels.

You can't do anything about it now, just relax.