lucere

I'm in grad school for cog neuro, and this is my take, which may or may not be applicable since you didn't say much of what you actually want to research. It sounds like you're building a case more for biological neuroscience than cognitive neuroscience. While biology is good to have a basic grasp of, for actual research purposes, I think you could be better served by taking cognitive psychology, psychophysiology (ie, a course on cognitive neuroscience methods like EEG/fMRI), some kind of psychology lab (which is actually an explicit requirement on some cog neuro apps), basic neuroanatomy (or, better, "systems neuroscience"). I know "psychology" can feel like a fluffy word for someone applying to cognitive neuroscience, but it's generally the case that cog neuro doesn't require much cell bio unless you're studying animal models (in which case, you'd be better off in an animal lab than the fMRI labs you're working in!). As for computer science courses, I would strongly recommend MATLAB over the more traditional courses like C++. It has a much kinder learning curve, can accomplish the same tasks (occassionally in roundabout ways), and it is used by everyone I know - grad school engineers, psychologists, and neuroscientists alike. Most cog neuro software uses it or is compatible with it. Let me know if you have any Qs!

Those look like competitive/good-enough scores to be admitted, but what really sets applicants apart is their experience/background and match with POI. Schools and professors vary a lot in what they're looking for, so it's not really possible to form a sweeping generalization about your qualifications.

I feel bad for your lack of replies, but am quite uninformed about that program of the school. I actually grew up near Dominican, so I know people who went to it. It's real, but most locals don't think it's particularly impressive...or maybe we're just snobs. One thing to consider is that it's in a VERY expensive location, especially if you are coming from outside California. (Native Californians probably wouldn't think it's that bad...but even by CA standards, Marin County is not a student-friendly location).

There was one school I applied to (Pittsburgh, I believe) that had a statement on each prof's profile about whether or not they were taking students. Wish every school had that...definitely would have saved $$!

As the person above said, your SoP will change as a reflection of what you do during the time off. My thoughts about multiple applications to the same school are that you should definitely do it if your interests/future research closely match people at those particular schools. However, to dip lower on the prestige pool without sacrificing your interests, you can do some detective work by checking up on your current POI's collaborators and former students. Most fields, there are good people at top schools and then similarly good people at mid/lower-tier schools who are just as involved in the line of work, but for whatever reason didn't have as much luck (or even this is sometimes a two-body problem, where they deliberately choose to be at a lesser name school for its location) when they were on the job market.

There are definitely multiple aspects... They are more likely to reply, but less likely to remember you. Also, it so far from when they actually make admissions decisions that they're unlikely to know how many students they're taking. This is also influenced by funding--they might be waiting on a bunch of grant apps, and those decisions (outside of their control) could/would impact their interest/enthusiasm in taking students. I would go for it anyway after doing careful review of their site and their current pubs/CV (might not be listed on their site--look on pubmed or similar sites).

It sounds like you're on a good path. I'm not sure what the major conferences are for your field, but your current advisor would know. It costs $ to register and travel, but you could try seeing which ones exist and submit an abstract. These are usually sent in six months before the actual meeting, but at least it could go on your resume/pubs section as something you submitted & have upcoming. It'll make you look like an active member of the research community (because you are!). Also, you can include the paper you're sending out whereever applicable on apps listed as "(submitted)". They will understand that turnaround is slow, and even tenured profs have "submitted" papers on their CVs. It demonstrates that you've completed serious work. If it has a publication date, even better, but that's out of your power. I'm not sure what your statistics is like, but you could try taking a class as an extension student or at a community college, not for a degree, but to show that you're continuing to grow your skill set.

Orchard Downs is much more of a journey; more like 45 minutes' walk than 15 minutes. Goodwin-Green is undergrad territory still; you'd be right next to "ISR", which is where tons of them live. This is a serious party school...I don't think living near all that is desirable. You seem kind of determined...maybe it's not that bad? Is this because you're trying to go with official housing? Very few people I know of do that because they find cheaper, better accommodation through the private agencies. It sounds like you want to live in Urbana near downtown. If that's the case, you're much better off looking at apartments between Washington St (to the south) and Main St (to the north), critically east of Lincoln and probably west of Vine St. It's very quiet and safe there, although a lot of the apartments are older units and would require some investigation (ie, ask for pics and specifics). Also, the bus system is free and convenient in that area: the Green and Silver lines are extremely reliable in bringing people to campus from Urbana. I lived one street east of Vine last year (on Urbana Ave., amusingly enough for writing my address...) and it was very easy to get to campus. Carless people living near West Side Park in Champaign also have a lot of success in getting to campus; apartments are not too expensive there and it's a pretty cute neighborhood, near nightlife and cafes in downtown Champaign. Grad students frequently go to Royse & Brinkmeyer for renting units in that area...signing with them site-unseen would be a fairly safe bet. A word of warning to anyone who comes by this: Do not trust Green Street Realty. They are NUTS. They promised that my unit would be ready when I arrived, and it was not in livable condition. The wall was crumbling in the bedroom, the ceiling was bulging because of water damage, there was no separation between my unit and my neighbor (!?), the doorknob fell off in my hand, and the toilet leaked mysteriously if you sat on it. AND they took all my security deposit even though they had given it to be in a crazy state to begin with. Just saying: there is a reason they have a lot of listings on craigslist, and that reason is that they are unreliable thieves. I walked to Roland Realty and got a unit from them the same day I arrived to campus, about a week before classes started, and they were very good to me.

Assuming you are going for a pHD, research experience in the topic of interest with someone who is actively publishing in the field (and thus will be able to write you a good rec letter) will be most helpful. It will help you clarify your interests and provide support for your statement of purpose -- "I'm interested in ... To that end, I have been working with..." The type of volunteer work (because I assume social psych labs don't have the budget to pay for lab managers, which is a common route in my field of cognitive neuro psych) would depend on what would be most akin to what you actually want to do in grad school. Most likely, this means you'll want to try to get experience working with participants and running experiments. Ideally you'd aim to get a publication (really strengthens apps), but that's unlikely given your time frame, so even just a poster presentation would be a helpful demonstration of your ability to get things done. Also, with contacting POIs, I'd hold off until closer to the next application cycle just because I don't like coming across like a pest...also, come application season, you'd be a distant memory.

It might be that no one in this thread would know what a BBA even is...and you didn't provide us with much info about your interests (I/O psych, for instance, would not be as much of a stretch as cog neuro). Successful applicants typically have research experience in their relevant subfield...see above comment, which I agree with. What you are proposing is doable, but will require careful research on your part about what your specific aims are. You might be better off trying for a masters first, for instance.

I assumed that was the new scoring system, which is why what looks like a ridiculously low 165 is actually in the mid-90s percentile.

The GPA is going to be a problem for schools that employ a ranking of applicants by a combo score of GPA/GRE. They won't even look at your application if you don't pass an initial hurdle, unfortunately. You can attempt to save yourself from this trap by emailing POIs and asking if they are taking students -- getting yourself on their radar could be critical if you fail to pass an unspecified criterion. Can you take additional courses somewhere and demonstrate that you are capable of getting As? My thought is that for the most competitive schools, your GPA might be prohibitively low (esp. depending on the other applicants). One way of getting around this is to get a masters and demonstrate smarts in that program. (Then nobody cares about undergrad.)

There is a distinction to be made between "on campus" housing and University housing itself (I think Campus Property Management and the University Group are the ones giving the bad reputation) that might not be evident. There are plenty of good places to live that are essentially "on campus" (or a 15 minute walk to campus - IMO, from a big city, this means you are on campus...) but are privately managed. It really has to do with management company, and not necessarily the location (although there is little a company can do to prevent huge amounts of noise from parties- a situation you would definitely encounter closer to central campus). The two that I trust the most are Roland Realty (I got my entire security deposit back on move-out, and got to move into an upgraded unit mid-lease with no rent change, but others don't like them) and Bankier Apartments (the snootiest/highest quality large-scale agency in my opinion--central air/heat, laundry in-unit, lots of nice models if you stalk their site), but a lot rent from Royse & Brinkmeyer, which are cheaper and in quieter locations. I think the highest density grad school pop (other than the Urbana sprawl) lives around/west of West Side park in Champaign, which is itself west of Neil St (a defining barrier between the madness of 'campus life' and sane, private living accommodations). There are also a lot of R&B apartments in that area. The units you're looking at on campus are likely miniscule in size, also. I mean, coming here as an outsider I assumed there were standards about what could and could not be counted as a sane living arrangement...and then I learned. Undergrads, who want to live on campus like you do, have 0 standards on average. Things that you would normally expect an apartment to have will just be entirely absent. One place I went to had a wall caving in and the doorknob came off in my hand (listed as a "charming" place in Urbana with nice pics).

What you described, and what the commenter from Harvard wrote, also fits generally with my understanding of how admissions works at UIUC's psychology department (at least in the divisions I'm famliar with). Like the previous commenter, I don't know how common it is across schools.

Me too. People can be informal and funny in person, but almost all correspondence I have with academic associates is professional-looking (not counting gchat as "correspondence"). Even my friends in engineering/CS write well.

Some top schools accept without interviewing because the science of predicting success in graduate school doesn't find much support for the inclusion of an interview (it really is the combo of GPA/GRE, which I know is not a popular idea here). Likely they already knew how many funded spaces they could offer, had approval from upper levels in the university for your admission, and were just doing a sanity check (also, if the grad students absolutely hated you, this would be their opportunity to say "PLEASE reject them" because otherwise they're typically uninvolved in admissions decisions).

I think this actually varies a lot by school. The approach of dropping a few names of interest and expressing interest in their research is suited for large schools where students are encouraged to collaborate, explore their own interests and perhaps switch advisors after a year. There, they're probably looking for an enthusiastic student who would be a good fit for the general program, and who has primarily one "best" fit advisor, but also has other overlapping interests with other professors. However, there are a lot of smaller privates where the faculty are extremely competitive and do not typically collaborate (even if they claim to, it's usually easy to see if this is true by looking at publication records), and so you're actually doing yourself a disservice by mentioning more than one person: it's a real risk and tricky to know things like this without being on the inside already. At these smaller, "elite" kind of schools, the approach of identifying one advisor and sucking up extensively is more likely to lead to success, IMO.

I second basically everything said about the utility of Matlab. "True" computer scientists tend to loathe it because it's less efficient and gives the user less control than they would like, but for the inexperienced user who just wants something easy that works reliably, Matlab is really the way to go. I think your time would be much better spent learning how to use matlab (this may require some review of linear algebra/matrix math) than trying to learn a more traditional language. Also, from what I can tell at my university, almost everyone has used it at some time or another. (Case in point, in our stats class, out of around 15 people, only three had never used it, and all of them were at least somewhat versed in another language that easily translated.)

I concur with the advice you've been given. The area I suspect you would most like to live is near-ish Downtown Champaign, possibly around West Side Park (tons of grad student types live just south of it). I live in Urbana, but when I go downtown, I actually park in those residential areas because it's free and walkable to the bars/restaurants. As a city-dweller prior to moving here (seven years in San Diego), I've found the best method of coping is to stay within the confines of the town as much as possible (ie, I live in complete denial of the miles ...and miles... of cornfields). Some people do go to Chicago almost every weekend, though. One thing that's a constant source of amusement to me is that relative distance is measured differently: "far away" = 20 minute drive. Also, "traffic" = 4 cars at a stoplight.

Hmm. I think their perspective might be coming from the following logic. Most of the time a professor who's writing you a letter based on coursework alone uses a fluffed-up form letter which adcoms easily recognize: "I teach class x. It is difficult because Y. Student got an excellent grade in this difficult course, during which they also contributed intelligent remarks [if true]. Therefore I conclude they would likely do well in grad school." They're not worthless in that they DO count, but they're not as good as something more personalized and unique.

It sounds like you might be a good fit for Florin Dolcos, who recently joined the Illinois (UIUC) faculty. I assume he will be looking for new students given that he doesn't have any right now... I don't know what's going on with him transferring his site over or whatever, but his work seems to be summarized here: Dolcos Lab . He's into the effects of emotion on cognition, and the neuro correlates thereof.

I applied to 9, and I've found the 10-12 range to be normal among the students in my program. The thing is that for the top level schools, the great majority are really looking for applicants to apply to work with a specific faculty member on a common interest. If you just like the description of the school and think some of the research being done there sounds cool, that will not be sufficient for your statement-- you really need to target your particular faculty member of interest and sell yourself to them. (Or target two, but make it clear that your interests are not all over the map.) It follows that you would benefit from finding out if they are accepting students (funding is of major concern in recent years), so that you do not waste time and money applying to schools where you truly have no chances of acceptance for reasons outside your control. Some faculty members may even be planning a sabbatical and wouldn't be accepting students for that reason. My advice is therefore to apply to programs that provide clear matches between you and a faculty member of interest and that the faculty member of interest is accepting students. (Note that some might saaaaay they're not, but if you provide sufficiently awesome evidence in your statement, they will go out of their way to accept you.) This should significantly reduce your number of schools to apply to, aid in your confidence level, improve your statement of purpose, etc.

Yay! I haven't seen anyone else around who's intending to go, but then I know that they accepted fewer this year than last (confirmed by multiple profs in my department), so that might be part of it. I haven't accepted my offer yet, but I'm going to for sure! Part of my reluctance to accept is my desire to procrastinate dealing with the awkward-ness of getting an ecstatic letter from a program which had accepted me unfunded, and now just secured funding for me. I feel terribly guilty that they were deliberately working on it with the thought that the only reason I was not intending to go was funding, when the reality is they're a weak program comparatively to the other two schools I have admits to -- Pitt-with-fellowship (another awkward rejection I need to deal with) and UIUC, namely. Anyway, I'm in San Diego now and the thought of being surrounded by cornfields with no culture, no Trader Joes (!!@!rage), no awesome weather and no frequent drug-busts with helicopter searches for rapists at 4am has me depressed. I could probably do without the last two, admitedly. I told one of the grad students about the helicopter searches keeping me up and her eyes about fell out of her head from the incomprehension, which was pretty awesome. Cost of living is a total joke from what I can discern on craigslist. It's very amusing to me how all the housing seems to list addresses by street names (as if they're meaningful to me!) because it's such a small place. I am totally clueless except that I want to live in Urbana because of the health food stores and the farmers market. That's all I know, really. ... I only know people in Chicago, which is totally not the same thing as knowing people in Champaign/Urbana. I do know someone who went there for undergrad and someone whose whole clique of friends/family also went there or currently goes there for undergrad, but the grad student scene seems pretty separate from the undergrad. I get the impression that the undergrad pop has no clue that the grad students are selected from a hyper competitive group since it's relatively easy for them to get in (assuming Illinois residency). I'm in for psychology, specifically the "brain and cognition" division, to work on psychophysiological studies of cognition ("language stuff", which 3/4s of the profs in the cognitive/brain&cog sections specialize in). The psych department has seven divisions, and there were about five of us there for visiting weekend from 3 of the divisions combined, but I think there were a lot more admits that couldn't make it... The idea of potentially being *literally* the only admit of my year in my division is kind of alarming, but most classes are combined with students from other divisions and departments. I could go on and on since, as I said, I haven't seen or heard from anyone else who was admitted (and everyone from admit weekend had "choices" to make). What department are you with? Did you go to admit weekend? What made you want to go? I'm really curious!

CMU Psychology (and related fields, it was implied) had at least one huge visit Feb 11-12. I was there for Pitt (which unofficially accepted me yesterday! celebrations.), but there was a lot of student overlap to tour the CNBC program and brain imaging labs at CMU. Everyone involved acted like it was THE visiting weekend. It was a little sad/frustrating to be touring those facilities with the students who were actually getting interviews, but I didn't tell them I'd applied. Awkwaaaard. If anyone is curious about these schools, the cognitive psychology programs at Ohio State and North Carolina (Chapel-Hill) already had their visiting weekends. Also, UW-Madison accepted one of my (new-from-Pittsburgh) friends a couple days ago and invited her to their visiting weekend. Implicit rejections are seriously annoying because there's always the (false?) hope that you're just sitting on the wait-list...

Three of the interviews went well and the fourth was strange. I learned later that the professor really does just like to present his research to people without much expectation for replies, but at the time I was feeling rather like a tool saying, "Wow, how impressive!" all the time. Granted, it really was cool, but I'd like to have had something more substantial to contribute. The grad students laughed a good amount when I told them of my experience because apparently he is exactly the same during classes, so I'm not overly concerned about it (esp considering I'm not looking to be a student in his lab and everyone knows it). A primary reason I felt comfortable in my other interviews was because I had printed off a number of recent papers for each PI I was going to interview with and studied them all for hours on the plane and the nights before the trip. Fortunately, we had been forewarned with an interview schedule and faculty names making the preparation possible, but otherwise I would have been stuck guessing based on the names I dropped in my SOP. I don't think the other students actually read the papers, though. Paranoia FTW. Good luck with interviews!