I’m currently a undergraduate student majoring in Computational Biology. I’m am international student, and I go to a branch campus of a well-known US school in the middle east. I’m planning to apply to masters programs in the fields that interest me which involve computational biology, machine learning, computer science, genomics, and bioinformatics. I will apply to MS programs in CS/Bioinformatics. I’m a bit unsure of whether my profile is good enough for my preferred schools and programs. Here are the programs which I’m intending to apply to: MS Computational Biology & Quantitative Genetics at Harvard School of Public Health MS Bioinformatics at Boston University MS Computer science at Columbia MS Biomedical Informatics at Columbia MS Biomedical Informatics at Stanford MS Data science at NYU And here are my stats: GPA: 3.6/4.0 GRE Verbal: 149 on first test, 144 on second test (low , English is not my first language, and I hate the fact that we are being tested on unnecessarily complicated vocabulary) GRE Quant: 158 on first test, 160 on second test (I think its a bit low compared to others, I was hoping for 163 ) IELTS english proficiency test: 8.5/9.0 (maybe this will cover up the low GRE verbal score?) Research: I did two main research projects, one with a postoc at a medical school and another with two researchers in a Computer science research center. I must say that I had good relationships with all of them (so hopefully I’ll ask them for recommendation letters). Both of these projects are in the field of Computational Biology, and I have made poster presentation for the first one, and a summary report for the second one. Awards/other: I won two “best undergraduate research project” awards at our local research symposium. I got second place in the first award (2 years ago) and third place in the second award (1 year ago). One of the award was for an applied CS project that I did on my freshman year, and the second was for the research that I did with the postdoc.
Please let me know what you think about my over all plan, and whether I’m too ambitious in terms of matching my dream schools and my academics/test scores.
