Soheila
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Posts posted by Soheila
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On 4/13/2019 at 9:12 PM, thisguy2017 said:
great, since I'm using Magoosh entire quant and video (premium) too and also taking the test in end of august I will be using the three month study plan (May, June, July) and the last two/ three weeks of August for Practice tests and corrections. Do you use Studypal so I can add you there?
yeah. My username is Soheila
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On 4/11/2019 at 7:50 AM, thisguy2017 said:
hey when are you planning to take the test? I am also looking for a study partner now: I am currently at 155Q, 155Verb, 5.5 AWA. I am using magoosh prime to study. Let me know if you're interested
On 4/12/2019 at 7:27 AM, thisguy2017 said:What resources are you using to study? I am using Magoosh Prime, The official guide for quantitative reasoning, Manhattan 5lb and Math Review for Standardized Tests 3rd edition. For vocab, I am mostly using the Magoosh App then creating flashcards using Quizlet. When are you planning to take the test and what Study resources do you plan to use? I will be taking the test in the second week of August. Magoosh has well-crafted study plans (day to day tasks well spelled out).
Barron's official guide, Manhattan series for verbal and Quant, Math Review, Magoosh entire quant and verbal videos, a quiz book for RC and TC downloaded from Chinese website (I found it very useful), Barron's 800 essential words for GRE (using Memrise platform). I am planning to take the test by the end of august.
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3 hours ago, thisguy2017 said:
hey when are you planning to take the test? I am also looking for a study partner now: I am currently at 155Q, 155Verb, 5.5 AWA. I am using magoosh prime to study. Let me know if you're interested
I'm in.
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I wanna buy Crunchprep GRE package. Is any international student here who uses this one?or any other package?
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1 hour ago, cmykrgb said:
I am not exactly comfortable making suggestions for you. As I said I am an applicant this cycle as well, so I have no experience in the whole process yet. I do know a international students with great stats(3.9 gpa from ivy league, 2 years experience in undergrad) still ended up being accepted in top programs (also rejections from tops as well). I don't think it will hurt if you apply this year, if you are willing to spend the time and money. For me, I am taking 2 years off for research experience to compensate my low gpa. In my opinion one year just to improve gre and toefl can only do so much for you without research experience. How much longer are you planning on staying that research institute? If you decide to wait, it would be much nicer to be working for the whole time until your acceptance than just a few months.
I will start working at this cancer research institute from this November to the time that I will be accepted and leave the country.
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On 10/12/2016 at 3:29 PM, Bioenchilada said:
You don't have to know details, generally. Interviews are more about you.
Do you think If I apply one year later and get better scores in my TOEFL and GRE, the chance of my admission will be increased? I also want to start working in a research institute in 2 months.
I will start working at this cancer research institute from this November to the time that I will be accepted and leave the country.
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On 10/12/2016 at 5:42 PM, cmykrgb said:
I think that will depend on the schools. I am not sure what most school do. Focus on the GRE first, find out what each school's policy on submitting scores after deadlines. In some case you probably need to email the admission office for answers.
Do you think If I apply one year later and get better scores in my TOEFL and GRE, the chance of my admission will be increased? I also want to start working in a research institute in 2 months.
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On 10/9/2016 at 0:35 AM, Bioenchilada said:
I think you have a good balance of schools. But, if you're choosing schools simply because they're highly ranked, it'll affect the quality of your SOP. Choose schools where you feel you'll belong based on the research being done, the environment, program structure, etc. Of course program strength (i.e ranking), shouldn't be ignored, but it should also not be the main factor that leads you to apply.
I am not an international student, so I don't know how admissions works for that applicant pool. However, I do think that one year of research is typically not enough to write an excellent SOP, especially if only at one lab. I might be wrong though.
I know international students at top schools, but I'm not familiar with their credentials.
PS. I was admitted to Cornell's BBS program, so I could give you some insight as to how the program and interview process is structured.
Thank u so much.
About Cornll's BBS program, since 3 years ago I have been studding papers published by Professor Delisa whose research is on optimization of recombinant protein productions on bacterial cell wall and this in fact is my research interest. He is joint faculty of biomedical engineering and BBS. At first I wanted to apply for biomedical engineering so that I can choose to work with professors on protein engineering and biopharmaceuticals research, then I checked faculty profiles and found out that many of them are joint faculties. The reason for my application to Cornell is that professor Delisa, Putnam and many others at this department are pioneers of therapeutic recombinant pros and antibodies. In addition, this field is somehow biological engineering and there are few bioscience graduate programs whose faculties are joint in this field. The only other schools are UT Austin and Dartmouth. (I may be wrong though; if u have any comment about this, I'd be happy to hear).
Is it important to know anything in detail when u wanna choose a research area for interview? Are we expected to know all experiments or understanding background information suffice?
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15 hours ago, cmykrgb said:
I am an applicant this cycle as well. I was an international student before I got my green card. I think no one had made this point yet but I would say you should retake the toefl and at least make it over 100 points. A lot of top school use 100 as a cut off for international students.
I can retake my TOEFL but the problem is that deadlines are approaching and I have to take my GRE at 14th November and I dont have time for another TOEFL exam before December. Do you think I can take it after deadline and then submit my score?
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52 minutes ago, Bioenchilada said:
Who would be writing your rec letters? How many rotations did you do?
I just think that one year of research experience will make it very difficult to write a SOP that doesn't get too technical or redundant. Your numbers are good and publications certainly help. You also have a good school balance, so that's also good.
In my country the number of lab rotations is not like US. We learn many techniques and do experiments in one practical lab course which includes many techniques.
for example, I learned these techniques and skills in cell culture, genetic engineering and biochemistry lab.
Genetic engineering Lab:
Molecular cloning in Fungi and bacterial system. (all steps from preparing competent cells, ligation, transformation, miniprep, midiprep), DNA extraction, RNA extraction, Cdna synthesis, Primer design, conventional PCR, Real-time PCR
Biochemistry Lab:
Western blotting, Protein purifications (by different types of chromatography systems).
Cell culture lab:
Common techniques of mammalian cell culture + DNA transfection
Recommendation letters from:
- my supervisor, my advisor, 2 professors that I passed some courses in their classes.
- One that is corresponding author of my published paper and book chapter.
- One from my undergrad school who is a known professor of radiation biology field.
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6 hours ago, Bioenchilada said:
You only have one year of research experience?
Do u mean working as a RA after my graduation or something?
I just graduated at April 2016 and I have not worked in a specific research institute or lab cause there were no time slot between my Bsc and MSc. I passed my practical courses through different lab rotations which means spending a whole semester in the lab, but for my MSc thesis I was completely focused on my research project for 1 year working in the lab.
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International student from Iran – graduated from reputed universities in Iran
BSc: Medical Radiation Science – Shiraz University of Medical Sciences
MSc: Medical Biotechnology – Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran
GPA: 3.9 for both my BSc and MSc
GRE: will take in November 14th
TOEFL = 94
Research Experience: completely familiar with molecular biology techniques and work on my thesis project for 1 year at the lab.
- Attended to many workshops
Publications: 1 in JTB as the first author (IF = 2.1), one chapter book of computational biology published in in Wiley (as a co-author), another manuscript under review in which I am the first author.
LOR: 5 professors from my Msc studies and 1 professor of my undergrad who knew me very well at the time and will support me a lot. (1 of my professors is working in NIH and one in drug design company at Washington DC.
I have chosen programs whose research focus are on molecular bioscience and biopharmaceuticals.
Current List:
Cornell (BBS)
Rice (Biochemistry)
Georgetown (Biochemistry and molecular biology)
George Washington (Biomedical science)
Maryland-college park (BBS)
Wisconsin-Madison (Pharmaceutical Science)
UCSF (BBS)
WashU (Biology and Biological Sciences)
University of Florida (Pharmaceutical Science)
Northwestern (Biotechnology, Systems & Synthetic Biology)
Please give me any comment if I need to look for less competitive programs to apply.
P.S. My brother is a lecturer at Cornell university as a faculty.
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International student from Iran – graduated from reputed universities in Iran
BSc: Medical Radiation Science – Shiraz University of Medical Sciences
MSc: Medical Biotechnology – Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran
GPA: 3.9 for both my BSc and MSc
GRE: will take in November 14th
TOEFL = 94
Research Experience: completely familiar with molecular biology techniques and work on my thesis project for 1 year at the lab.
- Attended to many workshops
Publications: 1 in JTB as the first author (IF = 2.1), one chapter book of computational biology published in in Wiley (as a co-author), another manuscript under review in which I am the first author.
LOR: 5 professors from my Msc studies and 1 professor of my undergrad who knew me very well at the time and will support me a lot. (1 of my professors is working in NIH and one in drug design company at Washington DC.
I have chosen programs whose research focus are on molecular bioscience and biopharmaceuticals.
Current List:
Cornell (BBS)
Rice (Biochemistry)
Georgetown (Biochemistry and molecular biology)
George Washington (Biomedical science)
Maryland-college park (BBS)
Wisconsin-Madison (Pharmaceutical Science)
UCSF (BBS)
WashU (Biology and Biological Sciences)
University of Florida (Pharmaceutical Science)
Northwestern (Biotechnology, Systems & Synthetic Biology)
Please give me any comment if I need to look for less competitive programs to apply.
P.S. My brother is a lecturer at Cornell university as a faculty.
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But the professors who replied me did not copy and paste a template. Their replies were nice and they didn't refer me to FAQ pages.
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Last months, I emailed to some professors at the University of Wisconsin, Northwestern and 2 professors at Rice. All of them had the same explanation why they cannot tell me if I can have them as my advisor or they can support my application in the admission committee.
Here are two of those emails I got:
“To enter graduate study at the University of XXXX you must apply to one of the graduate degree programs and be offered admission. Individual faculty members do not have the authority to admit students into their laboratories.”
Or
“At XXX students apply through different graduate programs, which do all of the admissions (e.g., BCB and SSPB). Once entering these programs, students rotate through multiple labs before being matched with a mentor. For this reason, faculty do not admit students directly to their labs until after those rotations. “
After these emails I understood that in biomedical sciences, u cannot get any precise reply from a faculty member to know if you are a competitive candidate or not. Do you guys think I am right? I really do not know what to do? should I apply for these programs or not.
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To those students who has already take the GRE;I just wanna be sure about how do deploy a technique to deal with RC.
The Manhattan book does not recommend not to read the entire passage while in some GRE prep blogs I have read that it can be quite deal with as TOEFL test, that is, read the first paragraph carefully to get main idea and then read just the topic sentence of each paragraph and that will suffice. Do you agree with the second tip? Do you think the second tip will work for RC questions, considering that RC section in GRE is really more difficult that TOEFL? Has anyone here try?
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I wanna to select the universities that I wanna apply based on their funding projects. In some posts, some students recommend to use NIH reporter and look up keywords to show funded projects with project descriptions. Is anybody here could explain more about how to search specifically? I tried to put my keywords at "FOA" blank but it did not show any results.
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I also agree with crewgal. I am graduate from MSc biotechnology (medical background) and as I also wanted to apply for bioengineering I understood that most of their cources are basically material sciences and they consider engineering characteristics of a platform rather than biomedical ones.I recommend you to apply for BBS or PIBS programs with the scope of regenerative medicine.
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I am from Iran. I am considering applying for PIBS ( program in biomecal sciences) for fall 2017.
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Hi there.
I have already emailed many professors, graduate students and graduate offices but no professor reply me to encourage me to apply. Is it too important to get a positive email response or should we just apply and see what admission committee will decide?
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Iran. Applying for PIBS (Program In Biomedical Sciences) or BBS (Basic Biomedical Sciences).
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I saw your message on Studypal. I clicked but it directed me to the membership page. Do I need to have a premium membership for that? Cuz I am using the normal one.