NeuroNerd86

Chances for acceptance after interview are usually pretty high from what I've been told by my friends and labmates - that is, if they like you in person. PhD interviews are fortunately not like the ones for med school - they don't test us much, but rather see what we are.

Maybe that file also included all your GradCafe forum posts and blogs

Since I just defended my dissertation recently, I felt compelled to offer some advice to new biomed PhD program applicants and students. Although many of you may already be aware of the following, I hope it'll be useful for at least some of you:

1. Acceptance is more dependent on NIH funding than the strength of your application. In past years, generous NIH funding allowed the acceptance of a lot of students. Because biomed PhDs in the US are usually fully funded (tuition, insurance, and stipend), a dept will only accept as many students as the # of PIs who can support them for the whole duration. Here (which shall remain unnamed), we went from taking 100+ students a year (total of all biomed PhD programs plus MSTP) to 60.

2. Your minority and citizen status matter a lot in terms of acceptance. Foreign students have the hardest time getting in, since they do not qualify for funding such as F31. Minority ethnicity students are favored in terms of NIH funding, and they used to (if not still) get automatic funding via minority supplement if the PI already has a R01. Depts and PIs often will accept a minority applicant for no other reason than that it's free labor, even if the student is boneheaded.

3. Your life does not hinge on getting into grad school. For some of you, not getting into grad school may very well lead to another career path which turn out to be very rewarding and successful. Plenty of PhD students soon find out it's not the life for them, and they quit to go on to other pursuits in life, be it med school or what not.

4. Finding a lab will be a challenge. As a follow-up to #1 and #2, just because a dept accepted you does not mean you get to work with any faculty member in the dept. The current funding situation caused a lot of labs here to not take new students. This may mean that you'll end up studying something you didn't plan on studying. Don't worry - it happened to me too, and it worked out for me in the end.

5. Apply to places that you normally wouldn't consider. For those of you living on the East and West coast, consider applying to schools in the Midwest and the South. There are a lot of great research being conducted at many institutions, and competition isn't as fierce. If your app isn't top 5 or 10%, I would strongly recommend it. I used to be a West coast guy and ended up in the South.

6. Your advisor's mentoring ability is more important than fame. Talk to former or current students, and ensure that the lab you join is not a factory where one conducts the same assay over and over for 4 years. While you may end up with a lot of papers, those papers will also be full of co-authors, and none of them can explain clearly the original rationale for the study.

Many high-powered labs have PIs who dictates which experiment to do next, which honestly is a crappy way to train a grad student, resulting in the latter having a poor grasp of the big picture. For a PhD, you'll want someone who can help you grow as a researcher, and someone who can take you through the whole process, from study design (most important), implementation, data analysis, and manuscript writing. Now there are plenty of high-powered famous PIs who are also good mentors, and a more junior faculty is not guaranteed to have more time to mentor you. In short, investigate each PI thoroughly before you commit to joining his/her lab.

7. Balance life and research. Don't do what I did - spend all your time in the lab and go home only to sleep. You'll eventually burn out and may even end up depressed, which will end up killing your creativity and productivity. Maintain a good balance of productivity and hobbies outside school. Make friends with fellow grad students so you can commiserate over your shared miseries. Curb drinking - there's better ways to spend your hard-earned stipend. Note this does not mean you should only put in 40 hours a week. I recommend 9-10 hours a day, with a mandatory lunch period to clear your head. Work half day on Saturday on most weekends, and keep Sunday free to relax.

8. Try to match your work day with your boss. Just like out in the corporate world, no matter how productive you are, it's easier for your boss to find you and see you being productive if you're in when he/she's in. Try to sync your work day schedule with your boss. This means if he/she has a family, he/she will likely come in early and leave early to pick up the kids. You should try to wake up early too. In my case, my boss tends to come into the lab to chitchat and also brainstorm on ideas for follow-up experiments, because he's often in meetings or busy once the day starts. It may very well be the best time to catch him/her.

9. Don't compare yourself with other students. Work on self-improvement and don't compare yourself with other students. Just as other students get accepted despite having a poorer application, other students will finish their PhD despite having done less work. Life is not fair; know it and get over it as quickly as possible. Some fields (protein structure, crystallography, animal models) take a long time to get enough quality data to publish, while other fields can crank out papers all day (non-primary cell culture, doing a gazillion MAP kinase immunoblots). Focus on your own work and be happy for other students as you attend their public defense because you are required to. Remember Yoda's words: Hate leads to suffering.

That's about it for now. Good luck to everyone here.

I'd recommend rejecting both and re-applying next year to a little-known but exciting school but with tremendous potential in your field: the University of Phoenix.

Joking aside, I'd say Stanford. I think even by describing it in your thread name as an "elite, jaw-dropping" school your decision is already made.

It's a good one, so enjoy it!

That's definitely a tough one. I think the most important thing to consider is whether your top choice is indeed your top choice by a big enough margin to go through this whole process again. Not only will you have to commit time to the applications and deal with the stress all over again, but are you willing to wait another year?

Also, very importantly, have you really give thought to an honest assessment of whether or not you'll get in to your top choice next year? Have you visited the schools? How recent were you given the waitlist news? I ask because for me personally, given time to think about things, I often change my mind without even trying to.

For example, last fall I visited one of the schools I applied to this January. While I was there, it was my number one choice. I thought, "this is where I'm going if they'll have me!" Since then, it has fallen out of my favor so much that I'm not even considering it anymore. Maybe if you visit all three (if you haven't), you will find that your are less intent on your #1 choice, and you might really fall in love with another one.

These are never easy decisions, good luck!

on behalf of all the people out there who are in Wait Listlandia: please please pretty please, if you know for sure you wont be accepting an offer, tell the school. being in limbo sucks


thank you. that is all.

After dealing with candidates (n=15) these past two weeks here are some helpful hints of things not to say or do:

1. Do not ask me where you can buy drugs. I'm am not shitting you. I am here to get you from point A to point B and take you dinner, not here to help you find your next weed supplier.
2. Slag off on PI's that you have not yet met. Especially when their trainees are sitting across the table from you. As their trainee was fuming about your lack of brain to mouth filter, I will egg you on to say more and more dumb stuff that is going to bite you in the butt later.
3. Tell a graduate student that there research is boring and contributes nothing to field of science. This pisses the student off especially when she has a fellowship, multiple papers in C/N/S (the top dog journals), and some crazy groundbreaking research going on.
4. Get drunk at dinner. It sucks to have to make a pit stop and drop the lush off at the hotel when taking the rest of the candidates out on the town.
5. Lie to us about your GPA/accomplishments. Some of us do sit on the admissions committee and do actually look at you apps.
6. Oversleep on interview day. I will/did leave you at the hotel after waiting an extra half hour.
7. Update your Twitter while a professor is talking to you.
8. #7 also commits the heinous act of telling professor his hypothesis is wrong and that someone from her institution is doing it the right way. The professors that she speaks of works on a completely different project and have nowhere near similar research interests and do completely different things. Candidate then look strangely when the professor tells her to sit outside the door and wait for the next person to fetch her for the following interview after only interviewing with them for fifteen minutes of the hour.

Just some helpful hints folks. Watch your actions and more importantly your words.

You really need to lay off. Your personal attacks are unfounded and uncalled for. I'm not diagnosing or insinuating anything about anyone. I was merely acknowledging that there could potentially be underlying conditions that you absolutely refuse to acknowledge could even be a possibility for anyone to have. Your attitude sucks, and your responses are a pathetic attempt to make everyone else look bad, foolish, or not credible. Furthermore, even if I were insinuating something about another person (I never did) you outright call people unfounded and horrific names. You lash out with absolutely no regard for anyone but yourself and what you think and how you feel. You are not the only person in the world with the answers, or even with an answer, to all of the problems associated with the GRE. You really just need to get over yourself, little troll.

Also, can you please tell all of us what schools you have applied to or what schools you have been accepted to, so we can be sure not to go there for fear of ever meeting someone as narrow minded and trivial as you in real life?

And before you lash back at me telling me I'm the one insinuating things and saying offensive things about you without thinking first - don't bother. I have veeeeery carefully considered what I have to say in this post prior to posting - but frankly, I'm fed up with your Holier-Than-Thou tone, your condescending and borderline manic responses to all and sundry, and your overall attitude about the GRE and everything related to this board.

I'm sorry, but really - I think you suck. At least in cyberland. Maybe in real life I'd think you were a great person, but I sure don't feel like finding out.

It's altogether possible that the person in question does have an actual underlying psychological problem with test taking in high-anxiety situations. This is a documented medical condition - at present, it can either fall under a long-term ADD diagnosis OR a shorter-term test anxiety disorder. People with mild to moderate ADD often go undiagnosed because they have learned coping skills or don't outwardly manifest their disorder, but in high-stress situations or times of prolonged stress their condition is exacerbated and things that they think are not going to be problematic become much more difficult, especially concentrating or focusing on a single task. There is also (much rarer, but it DOES happen) adult-onset ADD, which can be triggered by sustained bouts of stress and anxiety. Finally, there is test anxiety, and many more people than you would think are awarded extra time on ETS exams because somehow, psychologically, that helps to ease their anxiety to a point at which they can focus and take the test.

My sister was a National Honor Society student in the top 10 of her class, as well as a scholar athlete and just an all-around respected scholar. She never got less than a B on anything in any of her classes. Her PSAT score (back in the good old days of 1600 as a perfect score) was a 560 - no joke. She took it again: 560. She came home shaking and in tears after both exams. My parents had her evaluated. The doctor got the testing folks to grant her extended time. Her PSAT score: 1200. Her subsequent SAT score, also with extended time: 1470. Obviously, she was then blowing everybody else away the way everyone knew she could...the difference was in the time allotted; with the pressure off she could do the work. She ended up early decision full scholarship to W&M and is now a highly respected Math teacher.

Of course, from the sound of things, it is harder to be granted this extended time without a full bout of psychological work ups - which is unfortunate. It truly was the deciding factor for my sister.

i recently had a UNC BBSP interview and I AM SO NERVOUS regarding the outcome. If anyone here has heard from there post interview, do they contact you via phone or e-mail?

You continuously post inappropriate and intentionally hurtful comments here. Perhaps this is simply a manifestation of your application-related stress, but if you continue to behave this way in a social capacity you will find yourself alienated very quickly. I am not familiar with the news story you and MM were discussing, but it appears that you are simply using the apparently inappropriate nature of his comment to advance your own argument and prove him wrong. If you were indeed personally offended by what he said, the appropriate way to deal with the situation is to simply say that he crossed a line and that you were offended, not to call him "disgusting." Your attitude is extremely juvenile and unprofessional, and if you do not attempt to remedy that problem of yours, then I cannot see how you will ever be successful in any professional capacity. Making rash and unnecessary insults may hurt their recipients a little bit, but doing so will hurt you much more in the long run.

Considering that ETS sends the scores of many of its customers at one time to these departments, I really do not believe that the service costs so much. Let's take Yale for example, since I know from my rejection letter that their graduate school received over 10400 applications this year. Assuming all these people sent GRE scores, that means that ETS was paid $208,000 just to send score reports to Yale. Granted, I am sure that some of the applicants applied to only 4 departments, but I doubt that a majority of the score reports were free. Besides, I doubt the score reports are really "free," rather they are included in the price of the test. Now, considering that ETS apparently sends out score reports every two weeks, and the application period lasts between September and December (a 3.5 month period), that means that they sent scores to Yale 7 times. Taking into account that each score report costs $20 to send, that means that each time ETS sent a disc to Yale with a batch of scores on it, it cost $29,714. Sounds like a person's salary to me! I don't know how much ETS employees are paid, but judging from these basic calculations it seems that the simple act of sending one disc to a university can cover one employee's entire salary for a year (or 2 graduate student stipends). If it truly costs them that much to send scores out, how many employees do they have working for them? Now let's keep in mind that this $20 fee is simply for having one score sent. The costs of creating and administering the actual standardized test should be covered in the actual test fee.

Concerning whether the GRE tests anything applicable to my field, I suppose you're right in that it kind of does. It tests my ability to study for a pointless test and to select the "best" answer from the 4 (or was it 5?) provided. I would assume that highly intelligent people are more likely to score well, and that extremely stupid people are more likely to score abominably. I also assume that most people of average to quite strong intelligence score somewhere in between. However, considering all the other supporting information we are required to include in our applications, I don't think it can really be all that useful in comparing applicants. In order to ascertain that I know how to write, admissions committees should be evaluating my writing sample and personal statement, not the AW score. And in order to confirm that I am a hard-working student, they should consult my GPA and letters of recommendation. Perhaps that requires a bit more work than just looking at a collection of 3 scores, but I'm sure that it's a much more effective method, not to mention that the $100+ application fee should cover them at least reading my application. My understanding of the way it works in history departments (according to the departments themselves no less!) is that GRE scores are generally ignored in favor of these other components, which is why it irks me that I still had to take the test.

And seadub, you'll have to excuse me for not noticing the gender of someone I've never met in person. I didn't read Liszt's profile so I wasn't aware that he is a man. I have actually read every single point you have made, and have also responded to those points. I'm not repeating my argument mindlessly; I am re-stating it in slightly different, increasingly simpler ways so that it can be understood by one apparently mindless person.

Posted from my blog.

This post is in response to several emails that I have gotten lately. This decision is one of the biggest things you do in grad school, it basically primes your career and sets you up (hopefully) for a good postdoc position. So lets run through some factors when helping to determine a lab.

1. Size of the lab. Do you want to work in the megalab where you get no personal face time with the PI except for at lab meeting. You will likely be overseen by a postdoc or research scientist in the lab. This type of lab requires you to be able to work with limited supervisor and really be a self-starter. Medium size labs maybe have around 6-12 folks in them, so you get a little more face time with the boss but you are required to be independent. Small labs are usually around 6 and below. Hell you might even see the PI in the lab working with you. This could be due to personal choice of PI (maybe they are a micromanager), money issues, or a new lab. Folks that need a lot of hand-holding tend to gravitate to these labs as I have seen on numerous occasions.

2. Career stage of your PI. Do you want to get in on the ground floor with a new PI? Things may go slow but you gain immense knowledge on starting up a lab and are pretty much guaranteed a fair amount of personal attention. This can be a boon or bane based on your personal opinion but there is much to say about learning how to setup and trouble shoot equipment to get the lab off of the ground. Labs of mid-career PI's are what most of my grad student cadre fell into as did I, but I had the added benefit of helping get the lab off of the ground since my PI was recruited to the institution about the same time as I was. Older established PI's, these guys and girls are great for letters of rec and have the publications and grants to back up the swagger. They can probably get you placed into a great postdoc thanks to their clout and hopefully your hard work. Soon to retire/forgotten driftwood profs can be good if they have the money for you to finish up your project and are focused on mentoring and not the completion of that lakehouse that they are going to retire in. The driftwood folks are the worst, they are doing old science if any science at all, run a barebones research program if they are running one at all, and its probably just for vanity.
3. Money. I don't have much experience with NSF funding so I'll leave that for someone else to discuss and focus on NIH money. I work in a well funded lab, as my PI was recruited with tenure to my institution we have the beaucoup start up money, an R01, a P01, and an R01 application about to head out the door this summer. Money is a big thing, it determines the limitations of experiments that you can do. Remember everything from the thermocycler to FBS costs money and lots of it. Living hand to mouth is okay for the grad student stipend but not for the lab, and the PI's with limited funds tend to function like accordians expanding and contracting rapidly. Also look to make sure that your PI has consistent funding, you can search on the NIH Reporter. Now I know new PI's may not have lots of funds so this is mainly directed at folks looking for mid-career and later stage PI's.
4. Personality. Is your putative boss an ass? You need someone who will mentor you, not be your drinking buddy. You boss should have more interest in your work than your personal life, but they also should not be aloof to your personal situation. Make sure to ask current graduate students in their lab and more importantly grad students outside of their lab what the PI's reputation is. You are going to get worked like a rented mule regardless but its best to have a slavedriver who has a sunnier disposition when they crack the whip on your ass.
5. Techniques. Make sure you get into a lab that does some cool techniques and has the opportunities to learn others. I have other grad students that are envious of me because I am learning and doing a variety of techniques while some of them will little do nothing but genotype and run westerns until the day they graduate.
6. TTD. This is huge. Time to degree is a big thing. You don't want to be stuck in some lab for 8 years or more doing shit science left to toil while your other friends have moved on to postdoc positions. Find a PI who graduates good folks and fast. Now some labs have a slightly longer TTD but that may be because their students are doing harder projects. Remember folks innovation takes time, especially when you are producing antibodies and knockout mice. The latter is of course a royal pain in the tookus, and can yield nothing (i.e. the mice you spent nearly a year on have no discernable phenotype).
7. Facilities and Equipment. Do you want to spend the next 5 years pipeting with some beater pipets or be forced to share a tissue culture hood with 18 other folks. Hell no. Get a good look at the lab and what you have to work with.
8. Lab Personnel. Last but not least these will be the folks that you will be stuck in the trenches with for a long long damn time. You will interact with these folks in hospitable and sometimes not so hospitable situations. It is best that you get along with your lab mates and especially the lab manager. Do not run afoul of the lab manager, this person will be ordering your stuff, taking care of all the paperwork, and unlike a priest or lawyer is not obliged to keep confidential anything you say, especially if you occasionally bitch about the PI. Oh yeah, and don't piss off the postdocs, these folks are more knowledgeable and better trained than you, they turn out better science and much faster than a lowly grad student. They are not so far removed from being a graduate student and remember what is was like to be in your shoes. Having a good working relationship with these folks are key, they are immediately available sources of technical information, can teach you new and exotic techniques, and can give you guidance and mentoring while the PI is busy or away.

Hope this helps

Cost effective my ass. It simply does not cost them anywhere near that much to send test scores. The most obvious example of the company ripping people off is the way that they deliberately send out scores as late as they possibly can, in order to get people to pay to hear their results over the phone for $12. Any fee for that is slightly ridiculous, but $12 to hear the score of a test you have paid to take, and whose results are available but not yet sent, is ridiculous and is clearly done solely for profit. I wouldn't really mind the test being monopoly controlled if they weren't getting away with ripping off thousands of people every year for the sake of a test that most admissions committees seem to consider almost useless.

If scores from different standardized tests that test English language/reading skills and aptitude can't be compared, that's because they don't really do a very good job of measuring those skills in the first place.

I took a GRE prep class this summer and the guy who owns it use to work for ETS. A whole 'nother set of probs if you ask me, but I digress.

He says that since the AW is still relatively new there has not been enough time to plot it's correlation to grad school persistence, degree completion, attainment, etc. As such most schools are still wary about it. The only time it seems to help if, like me, you're a bit low on one of the sections (quant) and the school has a GRE guideline that says something about being above the 50th percentile on 2 of the 3 sections. I want to say Utah has that. Then it can be used to compensate for your weakness. But, even then if you have a killer sample and SOP what I've gotten from my faculty interviews is that it doesn't matter. Nice if its high, a non issue if it's not.

Plus, I'd LOVE to talk to the people supposedly grading these things. I got a 5 and I still feel cheated. I pulled out an Audre Lourde reference for goodness sakes! I use to write for a friggin' living! I'm published! A 5? Crazy. Probably for something like a spelling thing or typo, too. I think its insane to test writing ability on a computerized test and not have any of the tools we use in a digital writing world. I can craft new ideas and explain them, so what if I always have to spell check for "consciousness"? Especially in a timed environment. But that's my personal beef.

Tsujiru, I was actually wondering if you know - can the students admitted at SUNY Stony Brook do their research at Watson? I'm asking because on Stony Brook faculty page some PIs are listed under Cold Spring Harbor lab. Thanks!

Will you PM the numbers for this? If you have them handy. You have proven yourself quite reliable with your evidence, so I'm going to trust you on this one but I'm curious. Last I remember reading there was still a gap, but it had to do more with childcare/childbirth etc. than any real starting salary discrimination (it also had to with things like women being less willing to ask for a raise/promotion).

And SEADUB, it's more how you say it than what you say. You're not "speaking truth to power", you're just being a bit unpleasant to talk with. If you had said, "Competition in graduate school is higher than ever, and more and more people are applying for the same positions at top schools. When these schools want to narrow down their search criteria, the first thing they are going to use is some combination of GRE and GPA. While no one likes to talk about it, it is still a numbers game. While your 4.0 in a masters degree is obviously good and the rest of your app might be equally strong, unfortunately I simply don't think it is enough to get over your low GRE scores. Since the whole application process is so much based on perception, GRE scores are very important at elite schools. This process is inherently unfair, as are many other things: witness the glass ceiling, legacy admits at elite schools, etc. While you can of course apply to the top schools, I would guess you have a slight chance of admittance. I would make sure to apply to a range of schools. If going to a top school is your dream, I'd recommend studying hard and retaking the exam. No matter how holistically a school claims to look at an application, GRE scores still matter. The fact of it is, GRE scores act as an equalizer. In this day and age of grade inflation, no one knows what a 4.0 means. Universities use the GRE to see how a student does on a universal, objective standard. In a way, it is a good measure of grad performance because if you're motivated to study hard for the test it indicates you'll be motivated to study hard during grad school. The mathematics section is middle school [sic] math, so any candidate who does poorly on that section would raise a serious red flag for me if I were on a grad committee. Assuming you're a native English speaker, you should do well on the verbal section too, as many of those types of words show up in the readings you will be expected to do as well. I know a lot of people are going to tell you that scores don't matter, but I absolutely believe those GRE scores are going to look out of place on an application at a top school and my impression is that they may well cause your app to be discarded before it is even read."

Did I miss any points you wanted to make? If I missed any of your points, please excuse me. I think I said pretty much everything you said in your three posts on this board, but I just said it in a much more collegial way. To make it clear, I don't necessarily agree with what was written above. But seriously SEADUB, no one is upset by what you say, it's how you say it. Was any one bothered by what i wrote above? I hope not. However, many people were bothered by HOW you wrote what you wrote. The medium is the message.

Seadub, you would've had an interesting discussion with one of my recommenders who turns white with rage the second somebody brings up the importance of grades and score in graduate school admission.

Seadub, you would've had an interesting discussion with one of my recommenders who turns white with rage the second somebody brings up the importance of grades and score in graduate school admission.

For those that didn't get interviews, I've found that calling or e-mailing in and asking about weaknesses in your application to be extremely helpful. Not to hound about admissions, but to inquire about how a future application might be improved. Things I have learned:

- Be careful about listing potential advisors in your SoP. At one school, it looks like listing faculty with only secondary appointments in neuroscience (despite those faculty being listed on the Neuroscience website) hurt my application.

- Unexpressive letter writers can be misconstrued as being lukewarm. A lot of applicants have recommenders that will write effusive praise that is very clearly gushing. One of my letter writers sent me a copy (unsolicited, I waived). It was positive and used words like "impressed" and "highly recommend," but I was told in post-game analysis that the customary dryness of the recommender's writing style was unideal. Apparently, ebullience rather than clinicalness works in your favor. If you think one of your letter writers is dry, finding a fourth recommender is not a bad idea.

- Contacting potential advisors gets you out of the stack, but when the app hits adcom, everyone on the committee gets a say. If your potential advisor has a lot of heft in the department, it might get you further, but for the most part, it only does you good regarding the initial step.

- This year was a very difficult year for applying. While departments might normally take excellent students that don't exactly "fit"the department's major interests on potential alone, this year, things like fit were weighted more heavily than usual because of economic circumstances. This would also lead me to believe that a lot of programs plan to admit fewer students.

I have pretty good stats and am 0/6 this year. It's disappointing, but being stubborn and masochistic, I'm going to reapply next year. This was for Neuroscience programs so YMMV, but hope it helps.

Good luck to all!

Maybe that file also included all your GradCafe forum posts and blogs

I've heard the same thing about programs with high numbers of applicants. One typo, grammar error, misspelling, etc. and your app is trashed and they spend the fee.

From what I've been told many times, you shouldn't really flaunt your skills anywhere else but CV. You don't want them to see you as a technician - you want them to think of you as a scientist. Therefore, the best decision would be to state the hypothesis of your project briefly and say what you did (and not too specific - you don't want to bore them with the details of how many Westerns you can run in a day) to obtain results, hat results you ended up getting and what you learned from this exp. Hope this helps!

You didn't say anything about your analytical writing score. Is it under 6? Then you definitely won't get in.

People in academia have pretty big egos. This is just the beginning

I myself have a 1590 GRE, 3.98 GPA, 9 years research experience, and only 4 first author publications. I'm really worried, especially about my GRE score, do you think I'll get in?