AxonAxoff

Notice is back up.

There's an orientation for all new Yale grad students August 18th-26th, and the 27th is the first day of classes for the Fall term.

I received something called a Gruber Science Fellowship. From what I understand, it's given to some incoming students in BBS, astrophysics, and cosmology. The fellowship notice was in the same envelope as the admission notice.

Neuroscience track here! Not gonna lie: the dinosaurs were a factor.

Yale BBS's annual stipend is $33k, which is already pretty generous given that New Haven isn't an expensive city. But if you win an external fellowship, like the NSF, you're given a $4k stipend supplement for a grand total of $37k.

ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ... but in all seriousness, you are perfectly justified in asking your Yale POIs about space/funding for a prospective grad student. I did that before I applied, just to be safe, but it's sensible to do so now as well. Fortunately for me, not only are several faculty at Yale ideal mentors for me, but they all also happen to be looking for grad students; once I was certain of that, I was as good as sold. (Doesn't hurt that they're absurdly well-funded, either.) Yale's fancy name might be an important factor if you're not dead-set on a career in academia. Otherwise, you should probably choose the institution that will provide you the opportunity to optimize your publication record. Besides, in academia, the people worth trying to impress know enough about their fields to recognize if you're coming from a cutting-edge, world-renowned lab in an institution with a less-than-fancy name. And if the relative mediocrity of New Haven threatens to seriously impinge upon your happiness and/or productivity, I'd personally consider that sufficient grounds to rule out Yale. At the risk of stating the obvious: you'd be living there for at least five challenging years, so don't present yourself the added challenge of forcing contentedness with a dull, disagreeable city. In my case, I just happen to like New Haven enough. I hope you find some of that useful. Perhaps I'll see you at Yale in the fall. But good luck with your decision regardless!

Did anybody get an admission phone call from Harvard yet? Today was supposed to be the effective notification "deadline."

My two post-interview admissions came 1) one week and 2) two days after the final visiting days. In most cases, departmental admissions committees are permitted to notify applicants of their admission (or, more accurately, their recommendation for admission) to a program before official notice of admission is issued by the graduate school itself. There are, however, a handful of schools that don't permit this, and it's these schools that tend to have the >1 week notification time. But in other instances, it might simply be the case that a professor on the admissions committee can't immediately sit for the post-interview "decision" meeting, usually owing to some prior obligation. For example, this was the case for Harvard's neuroscience Ph.D. admissions committee this year; though they typically render decisions a week after interviews, the unavailability of a single member has delayed notification by at least one additional week.

A user named "galaxstar" was.

Nope, I haven't gotten the email yet either. No worries!

Applicants to MIT's BCS program (particularly the systems track): Be on the lookout for a phone invitation today. I just got mine.

It's a series of action potentials (a spike train), as might be recorded by a microelectrode positioned in the extracellular space immediately adjacent to one or more neurons. Like so:

Yep, except I already know with near-certainty that I'll be rejected. But that was the plan, so no worries.

The professor who invited me to interview at Yale had the coolest string of characters preceding his signature: ~~~|~~|~~~~~|~~~|~|~|~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~ It took me a solid minute to figure out what it was supposed to illustrate. Then I wished I'd thought of it first! Thought you guys might appreciate a bit of levity in the midst of all this tense waiting.

Though I can't be sure, I suspect that they have, unfortunately. Previous years' results suggest that Yale neuro issues only a single wave of phone invitations, never extending later than Jan. 6. While that does technically leave this Monday as a final possible invitation date, the program coordinator already sent out a lengthy group email to interviewees on Friday afternoon. It wouldn't make sense to send this message twice over such a short period, as opposed to sending it only once the final phone invitation has been issued. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, Daisy. Best of luck.

A probably-unreliable estimate of MIT's interviewee admission rate can be obtained from two pieces of info. First, from the BCS FAQ: "We receive over 400 applications per year, and of these, we admit approximately 40 students and enroll between 10 and 20 students. The number of students admitted into the graduate program annually is around five percent of the total number of applications received." Ignore the fact that part of that statement doesn't quite make sense. Second, from the 2007 Spring department newsletter: "Interview Day brought 50 candidates for the graduate program to Cambridge for an intensive schedule of meetings, lab tours, and presentations." If you're willing to make some important assumptions (e.g. the interviewee pool size is independent of the applicant pool size, which has verifiably increased since 2007), then you've got your estimate: an 80% interviewee admission rate for MIT's BCS program. Needless to say, take that with a generous helping of salt.

That's a fair point. Man, I wonder why the BCS department's invitations are so sporadic, or at least seem to be. MIT's now my lone question mark (informally rejected by Rutgers courtesy of my own PI ).

You're very welcome. I'll PM you his email address as soon as I hear back from him, but I'd be very surprised if he weren't enthusiastic to speak with you.

I can't speak from personal experience, but a good friend of mine is currently enrolled in the Cancer Biology program in the Penn CAMB department, and he ultimately turned down Princeton for Penn. I can put you in touch with him if you'd like.

Sounds like a question worth posing to the Harvard PiN fb group. I'm guessing that current students and fellow interviewees have faced and resolved similar, if not identical, trilemmas.

Rudimentary statistics for admission to the Harvard Integrated Life Sciences (HILS; includes Systems Biology) programs can be found near the top of this page: http://www.gsas.harvard.edu/hils/apply.php I'm sure the admission rate varies appreciably from program to program, so I'd suggest you take these figures with a grain of salt. EDIT: I see you inquired specifically about admission rates for interviewees--my apologies. I have no grounds for speculation there.

Same here; I listed systems as my primary interest and computation as my secondary. I feel we can reserve our apprehension for just a bit longer. Also, sorry to hear about the conflicts. There is a great deal of good advice about resolving them on these forums. But I hope to see you in Boston, Princeton, Baltimore, and (possibly!) Cambridge. Good luck!

Glad you like it! I must say, I'm partial to your avatar. I have a sudden hankering to play Super Smash Bros. now...

If I recall correctly, one person here received an invite to interview at MIT and had expressed interest in only the cellular and molecular track. But from previous years' results, I expect that the majority of invitations will be sent out either late this week or next week. The interview seems to be the weekend of 3/7. As a side note, it appears that you and I will bump into each other quite a bit this season.