pv1993

Thank you for your input everybody!

Let me begin within a short preface: I'm going to be a senior this fall at Texas A&M and will be applying to grad schools this fall. Here's my profile as it stands now: GPA: 4.0 GRE: V:169, Q:170 One paper (second author) that has been submitted and hopefully will be published before I apply. Here's the problem: I started doing research my sophomore year, and have been in four different research groups all dealing with different problems. I started working in a biological chemistry lab my sophomore year, and being a sophomore hadn't really put a lot of thought into the kind of lab I wanted to work in. One semester in, half the grad students and post-doc left leaving the lab with only two grad students and 5 undergrads. Moreover, I was simply performing the same reactions to churn out starting materials for my grad student to use in actual biological studies. So, I decided to leave the lab at the end of my sophomore year. I joined a materials group that summer and worked there for half a year. In that time, I basically did all the experimental work for the post-doc that I worked with and the entire project was completed in that time frame (that's the one that's been submitted for publication). They were starting a new project but it entailed almost exactly the same kinds of things I was doing and so I decided to switch labs again as I felt I wouldn't gain anything by staying on. I currently work in a physical organic lab on two projects simultaneously on my own (i.e) without a graduate/ post-doc mentor. I intend to stay on here till I graduate as I really like the work and think I'll learn a lot. Meanwhile I also worked with a computational professor the past two years on some protein modelling. I'm worried that this might look like a lack of dedication or like I might be very indecisive in grad school as well. I realize there's no quantitative method to decide if someone gets in, but is this something that might effectively sink my application? I guess I ought to mention that I'm looking to work with groups at relatively highly ranked schools (Stanford, Caltech, UW-Madison, etc.). Is this something I could maybe address in my SOP, so they understand my position? Or am I just being paranoid? P.S: This is my first official post and I apologize if I have rambled on a bit. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read through it!