Victorious Secret

I personally know of one student admitted to MIT for chemE at the end of last week. They always do a few admits in December but the bulk tend to be in January. According to the surveys on this site, Purdue also has an admit already. Should be a few more this week but mid-January is when most of them tend to go down.

In my experience, it has been required for several programs, like Stanford and MIT. Not sure about all of them.

Wow, such a wonderful message to read, thank you so much for your feedback and kind words. These weeks have been a bit overwhelming, so it's reassuring to hear your thoughts. Best of luck!

Let's see... An upward-trending 3.8 GPA at a strong school with a perfect GRE quant and several highly relevant research experiences. Your letters sound about average. Papers, especially in engineering, are not the norm for undergrads at the time of application. But all a paper really does is demonstrate that you can do high-caliber research. This can be accomplished in other ways. Make sure your recommenders talk about your projects (bullet point some things for them to discuss) and highlight your independence of thought and work in our SOP. Unfortunately, it is probably to late to get some poster sessions onto your CV. They are not as good as a paper, but presentations at national conferences do demonstrate your commitment to becoming a scholar within the discipline. Your schools sound reasonable, though Stanford might be very tough, it is for everybody. And don't worry too much about funding, all of those universities will give you enough to live on. If you love research, you're well on your way to a career with your background. Best of luck, man!

You definitely don't need to worry about GREs now. I'm still contemplating re-taking but leaning against it. No professor I've spoken with has said that it is a critical part of the application.

Hi Gimingo, I'm not familiar with any rankings for sub-specializations within chemical engineering. That is more common for broad subjects like business and biology. There are a number of other rankings available for chemical engineering. TopUniversities.com ranks them for all programs globally based on their QS rankings. There are some differences, such as UCLA being much higher and Minnesota somewhat lower than in the USNWR rankings. However, as a gauge for the consensus among those in academia about what the best programs are, the USNWR rankings align closely with what I have heard from professors. Whether this is because US News reports the sentiment accurately, or manufactures the sentiment, is not for me to say. Collegechoice.net has some rankings too, but I don't know much about them. Times Higher Education has a listing as well. Both of those rank Stanford as #1. I would urge you to use other resources in your analysis as well. The NRC ranks according to several categories, and is sortable, so that you can see how your priorities align. https://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124712/ All of this said, rankings will only give you so much information. You want to work with people who are talented and qualified, and you will find that at any school in the top-(insert number here), but do some leg-work now. Email some professors or some of their grad students, ask about the department and how they like it there, and ask professors at your current institution for their thoughts. Importantly, use your admitted student visit weekend to ask very specific questions and assess your feel for the campus. The final decision may be quite clear once you have seen your top prospect programs first-hand. I hope that helps. Cheers. -VS

I was curious about your home institution... Small ChemE class (25), very small overall class (240 students). High ChemE to overall ratio; sounds like a tech/engineering school. Your test scores are stellar. And your school has a research journal... Is it Caltech?

I'll start. My GPA/scores are not perfect, my school is not very prestigious, and none of the faculty I have worked with are famous, so I don't know how I will stand with the top institutions/fellowships... Undergrad Institution: Medium-size public R2, strong regional reputation in STEM.Major(s): Chemical Engineering (emphasis in bioengineering) and Biology (emphasis in biotechnology); Honors Student.Minor(s): Mathematics and Biomedical EngineeringGPA in Major: 3.95Overall GPA: 3.89Position in Class: Top 5-10%Type of Student: Domestic male, non-minority. Non-traditional student, first-generation college graduate.GRE Scores (revised/old version):Q: 167 (92nd %ile)V: 165 (96th)W: 5 (93rd) LOR: 5 very strong letters from tenure-track faculty, sending only 3 per school. Research Experience: I love research. Period. **Summary: 13 projects in 9 labs (2 industrial, 7 academic) over four years.** • 4 years at home institution (two biology labs, three engineering labs; bioprocess, cell culture, biochem, cancer bio, molecular bio) • 1 summer REU in cancer biophysics • 6-month R&D co-op internship at Fortune-500 biopharm company (bioprocess research) • 6-month (extended) SULI research internship at a DOE national lab (biofuels research) • 1 summer REU/Amgen Scholar doing CRISPR/Cas9 signaling studies at a Top-5 institution Publications/Abstracts/Presentations: • 4 papers in preparation (2 first-author, 2 second-author). Hoping at least two will be accepted by December deadlines. • 12 poster presentations at conferences (9 of them national), 2 oral conference presentations, 2 in-house oral presentations in industry. Awards/Honors/Recognitions: • Goldwater Scholar • Amgen Scholar • Tau Beta Pi Engineering Scholar • ISPE Goldenberg Scholar • Honors Research Fellow • Awarded grants and DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge and Engineering Prototyping Competition funding for my NGO (see below) • A bunch of school/department merit scholarships Fellowships/Funding: • Received an undergraduate fellowship for research. • Applying to NSF, DoD, DoE, Hertz, and Ford fellowships. Pertinent Activities or Jobs: • Founder and Director of 7-person NGO dedicated to researching, engineering, and implementing biodigester technology in Haiti. Have raised funds to finance numerous team trips to Haiti, and oversaw the construction of a pilot biodigester plant near my school. Cultivated partnerships with organizations in the US and Haiti. Conducted bench-scale work in a faculty lab to develop preliminary results for an EPA grant application. The team has received 3 school-wide awards as a result of efforts I spearheaded. • 4 years of academic and industry research experience • Peer tutor and mentor in engineering Any Miscellaneous Accomplishments: • Co-Founder and Vice President of campus Engineers for Change club. • Secretary of two other STEM-related clubs • Member of AIChE, ISPE, and 3 honors societies (ODK, TBP, OXE) • I have taken 15 online Coursera courses in Systems Biology, Statistics, and programming in Python and R. • Completed and will defend my honors thesis Anything else in your application that might matter (faculty connections, etc.): • 4.0 GPA in seven graduate-level courses like Experimental Design, Biomedical Engineering, and Isolation/Purification • Have taken 20+ credits most semesters, with very challenging electives • Very strong faculty connections at Berkeley, strong faculty connections at Caltech and Santa Barbara. • Strong interviewer and SOP writer Research Interests: I am mostly applying to chemical/biological engineering programs, but I am still seriously considering biology programs where there is particular research that interests me. Broad interests include cancer/systems/chemical biology and metabolic and protein engineering, as well as computational modeling. Institutions/Programs: Engineering programs (will shorten this list over time): MIT - Chemical Engineering, Biological Engineering (Love, Wittrup, Langer, and many others) Stanford - Bioengineering (Barron, Cochran, et al.) Berkeley - Chemical Engineering (Landry, Schaffer, Keasling) Caltech - Chemical Engineering (Shapiro, Arnold, plus others outside the department) GA Tech - Chemical Engineering (Champion and many others) Princeton - Chemical Engineering (Avalos, Nelson) UC Santa Barbara - Chemical Engineering (O'Malley and Muhkerjee) Hopkins - Biomedical Engineering (too many to list) UCSD - Bioengineering (many) Wisconsin (Shusta), Michigan, Minnesota (Azarin, Hu), UTAustin (Alper), Cornell (Varmus), and Northwestern, all for Chemical Engineering. Biology programs: MIT - Biology (Young Lab, et al.) Harvard - Chemical Biology (Schreiber, Liau, Silver, et al.) Rockefeller - Computational/Cancer/Immunology Comments: Please let me know what you think. Thank you in advance for your thoughts/suggestions.

Hi All, Let's adhere to the time-honored tradition of seniors stressing each other out on GradCafe, and begin the thread for 2019 applicants. Here's the classic template: _________________________________________ Undergrad Institution (approx. rank/reputation in STEM): Major(s): Minor(s): GPA in Major: x.xx/4.00 Overall GPA: x.xx/4.00 Demographics/Background: GRE Scores: Q: xxx (xx%) V: xxx (xx%) W: x.x (xx%) LOR: Research Experience: Publications/Abstracts/Presentations: Awards/Honors/Recognitions: Fellowships/Funding: Pertinent Activities or Jobs: Other Miscellaneous Accomplishments: Anything else in your application that might matter (faculty connections, etc.): Research Interests: Institutions/Programs: Comments:

Wow, it's finally time for me to put my own profile in one of these results forums. I'm erring on the side of providing too much information, so this is a bit long. My GPA/scores are not perfect, my school is not prestigious, and none of the faculty I have worked with are famous, so I don't know how I will stand with the top institutions/fellowships... Undergrad Institution: Medium-size public R2, strong regional reputation in STEM.Major(s): Chemical Engineering (emphasis in bioengineering) and Biology (emphasis in biotechnology)Minor(s): Mathematics and Biomedical EngineeringGPA in Major: 3.95Overall GPA: 3.89Position in Class: Top 5-10%Type of Student: Domestic male, non-minority. Non-traditional student, first-generation college graduate.GRE Scores (revised/old version):Q: 167 (92nd %ile)V: 165 (96th)W: 5 (93rd)B: will not takeResearch Experience: I love research. Period. **Summary: 13 projects in 8 labs (2 industrial, 7 academic) over four years. 12 poster presentations at conferences (9 of them national), 2 oral conference presentations, 2 in-house oral presentations in industry. 4 papers in preparation (2 first-author, 2 second-author). Hoping at least two will be accepted by December deadlines.** • 4 years at home institution (two biology labs, three engineering labs; bioprocess, cell culture, biochem, cancer bio, molecular bio) • 1 summer REU in cancer biophysics • 6-month R&D co-op internship at Fortune-500 biopharm company (bioprocess research) • 6-month (extended) SULI research internship at a DOE national lab (biofuels research) • 1 summer REU/Amgen Scholar doing CRISPR/Cas9 signaling studies at a Top-5 institutionAwards/Honors/Recognitions: • Goldwater Scholar • Amgen Scholar • Tau Beta Pi Engineering Scholar • ISPE Goldenberg Scholar • Honors Research Fellow • Awarded grants and DifferenceMaker Idea Challenge and Engineering Prototyping Competition funding for my NGO (see below) • A bunch of school/department merit scholarshipsPertinent Activities or Jobs: • Founder and Director of 7-person NGO dedicated to researching, designing and implementing biodigester technology in Haiti. Have raised funds to finance numerous team trips to Haiti, and oversaw the construction of a pilot biodigester plant near my school. Cultivated partnerships with organizations in the US and Haiti. Conducted bench-scale work in a faculty lab to develop preliminary results for an EPA grant application. The team has received 3 school-wide awards as a result of efforts I spearheaded. • 4 years of academic and industry research experience • Peer tutor and mentor in engineeringAny Miscellaneous Accomplishments that Might Help: • Co-Founder and Vice President of campus Engineers for Change club. • Secretary of two other STEM-related clubs • Member of AIChE, ISPE, and 3 honors societies (ODK, TBP, OXE) • I have taken 15 online Coursera courses in Systems Biology, Statistics, and programming in Python and R. • Completed and will defend my honors thesis Special Bonus Points: (Such as connections, grad classes, famous recommenders, female or minority status etc...) • 4.0 GPA in seven graduate-level courses like Experimental Design and Advanced Cell Biology • Have taken 20+ credits most semesters, with very challenging electives • Very strong faculty connections at Berkeley, strong faculty connections at Caltech and Santa Barbara. • Applying to NSF, DoD, DoE, Hertz, and Ford fellowships. • Strong interviewer and SOP writer • LORs will probably be the strongest part of my application. At least 5 PIs can write excellent letters (only sending 3 per school)Applying to Where: **I am mostly applying to chemical/biological engineering programs, but I am still seriously considering biology programs where there is particular research that interests me. Broad interests include cancer/systems/chemical biology and metabolic and protein engineering** Biology programs: MIT - Biology (Young Lab, et al.) Harvard - Chemical Biology (Schreiber, Liau, Silver, et al.) Rockefeller - Computational/Cancer/Immunology Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology Engineering programs (will shorten this list over time): MIT - Chemical Engineering, Biological Engineering (Love, Wittrup, Langer, and many others) Stanford - Bioengineering (Barron, Cochran, et al.) Berkeley - Chemical Engineering (Landry, Schaffer, Keasling) Caltech - Chemical Engineering (Shapiro, Arnold, plus others outside the department) GA Tech - Chemical Engineering (Champion and many others) Princeton - Chemical Engineering (Avalos, Nelson) UC Santa Barbara - Chemical Engineering (O'Malley and Muhkerjee) Hopkins - Biomedical Engineering (too many to list) UCSD - Bioengineering Wisconsin (Shusta), Michigan, Minnesota (Azarin, Hu), UTAustin (Alper), Cornell (Varmus), and Northwestern, all for Chemical Engineering. Please let me know what you think. Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

I am a chemical engineering, biology, and math major applying to chemical engineering programs. I have completed 13 projects in 9 different labs/venues over the past 4 years, and delivered 11 poster and 6 oral presentations in that time, with 5 different papers now in preparation by myself and others. Half of this experience was at my home institution, and half was from a pair of summer research programs and a pair of six-month research co-ops. The problem is that most SOP prompts seem to want the SOP to be around 1000 words (2 pp single spaced) maximum and, even when I start omitting very important details of some of my projects (methods, computational tools, etc) I still am winding up at about 3 pages by the time I talk about my motivations, what I want to study, and who I want to study with. How can I pare this down? Should I simply say how many projects, labs etc and then focus on 3-4 projects that were most impactful? I am presenting a draft of my SOP this week to a professor at a top-5 program who is working with me to see what I can improve upon in my SOP. I would hate to omit that much information, but I don't want to just have a lot of superficial information without going into some depth about what I have done. Has anyone else encountered a similar problem? How would you suggest I address this. Thanks for your time and attention.

Hey SquigglyFace! Congratulations on your recent industry success! There is certainly going to be a way to incorporate and frame those accomplishments into your application such that they are beneficial for you. The extent to which your industry experience will ameliorate the less impressive aspects of your application will depend on how you construct your "story" so to speak. You will want to discuss (so long as this is genuine and accurate) how your academic adolescence, lack of study skills etc. gave way to a re-invigorated research superstar, whose accolades are now evident in your productive career and steep professional trajectory. A way to demonstrate that you graduated with those high-level study skills would have been to enroll in, and ace, some grad classes at a nearby research university, but that is not essential here. I might caution you to not put all of your eggs into the industry basket when it comes to LORs. You mention the director, CEO, and CMO, and it is good that they have strong connections. But for PhD applications the most important connections will be among faculty members. The CEO (is it de la Zerda?) or CMO may be quite valuable, especially if he/she is a faculty member in biology (and not just the medical school), and especially for applications to Northern California schools where his name might carry even more weight, and especially if he can comment about specific contributions that he has seen you make (a specific, detailed LOR from a director will generally carry more weight than a generic one from an executive). The more personal those letters are the better. It might be a good idea to use no more than two letters from your current employer. And I hope that others will comment on this also. But if your three letters are all coming from a single industry entity, that may not give the admission committee the breadth of opinion on you for them to believe that they have a good feel for how your work has been received by PIs. And if all 3 LORs came from the same company, the details might be somewhat repetitive. Does that make sense? If you have worked in two academic labs and one industry lab, I would use a letter from each. Especially the professor in whose lab you completed your honors thesis... that could be a very strong letter. Caveat: Do not use a LOR from any lab you have worked in where you don't believe the letter will be at least good. (And three excellent LORs is better than 3 excellent + 1 fair LOR.) Other things to consider: which research/work experience most closely reflects what you want to do your PhD research on? And did your undergrad PIs have reputation/connections of their own that can be helpful? You probably don't want to hear this, but I would also consider re-taking the GRE. It's not lethal for you, but it takes a lot to overcome a low GPA coupled with a mediocre GRE. Getting your scores into the 160s, just 5 total points of increase, would improve the optics of your stats enough to erase this from being an issue. If there is a local, short-term GRE crash course you could take, I would give it some thought. It's one variable you still have a good amount of control over. I'm not the best person to tell you where to apply, but I wouldn't try for the ultra-competitive landing spots like Harvard/MIT/Rockefeller unless you feel you have a specific "in" at one of those schools. If you feel you can reach for Stanford because of your industry connection, go for it, but yours is a slightly non-traditional path, so apply broadly, and apply enthusiastically. Stay aggressive. I wish you all of the best in your research future!

Universities will generally have some guidelines for letter writers. Talk to your professors and make sure that they are in a position to write you strong letters. It is best to do this in person. They will generally know what to write about, but they do need time to get those documents prepared. It is usually best for the letters themselves to focus on your research and what potential you have to be a good researcher in the future. For these top schools, the letters can be among the most important pieces of your application. There are a lot of good resources online for more information about LORs, including this message board.

A 4.0 student from Berkeley with a perfect GRE quant and three publications will always be among the very top tier of applicant pools, so long as your LORs and SOPs are in keeping with your scholastic performance. I would say that now you should focus on refining your SOPs through iterative draft revisions, and focus on making sure that your professors have their letters done on time. Most legitimate BME programs will have several labs that fit your interests. Throw in a couple backup schools if you like, but it probably will not be necessary, and see which graduate fellowships you might qualify for as international student. I would be surprised if you are rejected from more than maybe one or two schools on that list. Congratulations, you have a very strong profile!

I have taken over 10 grad courses now, all in STEM subject matter. I find them to be harder in some ways, easier in others. More topics are covered and sometimes in more depth, but they are specialized. Cell and Microbe Cultivation is not a harder subject than Organic or Physical Chemistry were, but it is focused more tightly, and you are learning more that you are expected to use directly, rather than foundationally. Grad courses sometimes do not have finals, and it is rare to see a C in those classes, but partly because students in there are already advanced. Some graduate math and physics courses can be very hard indeed, but I feel that many grad courses were actually easier than the hardest undergrad subjects. Just my 0.02

Your GPA will not keep you out but emphasize that your health problems were temporary, and specifically note that you now have the top grades in your class. Your lack of undergraduate research is much more of a problem. Grad schools expect you to have research experience. You don't have to be published, but they're not willing to bet the $250,000+ on you to get a PhD if they don't know if you even like doing research. You mention great letters, but letters from professors that you have not done work for are going to be at best plainly good. All of the strongest letters are recountings of research that the student has completed. Industry experience is also far less helpful than academic research. Do everything and anything you can to get research experience now, even if you have to do it at another school. You seem very committed, I wish you the best.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of ferretting out where the biggest room for improvement is. Publications aren't a requirement by any means, but top schools will sometimes see applicants with as many as a dozen conference presentations and 5 or more papers published. Their profiles are all over this site. Doing research and an REU is great. But you've mentioned MIT and Stanford, among other top-10 schools, so you want to be seen as exceptional, which means that your research should be significant enough to hold up to peer review (pubs) and presented well enough to stand out among your competition (this means posters are good, poster awards are great, and oral conference presentations are even better). So yes, by default, your research is your weak spot compared to your GPA (and we can't compare it to your GRE yet), but that does not mean that it is weak compared to the average applicant. An EE/physics student will typically have little if any required biology coursework, and little to nothing in physical and organic chemistry. So often when students in those majors with to pursue something like systems biology, with its heavy biology, CS, and chemistry components, they will take foundational courses in those subjects to earn a minor, and it makes sense to take an advanced elective in something like molecular biology or genomics, upon which SysBio relies heavily. Ultimately the courses are what matters, not the minor itself. You didn't mention those courses before, so I am glad that you did/do plan to take Ochem and molecular. (Also consider cell biology and biochemistry, which are pretty ubiquitous disciplines in the bio research world.) But if you'd had no significant background in bio or chem, many professors would want some other evidence to demonstrate your command of those subjects. Perhaps your research displays analyses that required an intimate knowledge of those areas, but that needs to be carefully articulated in the SOP, since the professors reading your application cannot currently look up your manuscripts on PubMed. I am less familiar with synthetic biology, but I imagine that cell/molecular bio coursework would go a long way there as well. Do as much as you can with the time that you have. When it's all said and done, I think you should be able to gain admission to some of the institutions you've listed. I'll be rooting for you!

Your demographic is not conducive to REU admission, unfortunately. It is always good to have a backup plan in case an REU doesn't happen. National DOE labs have much higher acceptance rates, but it is too late for that now. Your only option is cold-contacting professors at universities and asking to do work in their labs. If you do this, go for top schools (summer research at a mid-tier institution won't really raise any eyebrows unless you get a publication from it). Your research is your weak spot. You need to do everything you can to correct that now. You can usually work in more than one lab at your school, so do that. I find it a bit odd that your majors are EE and physics but your research interests are synth/sys biology. Do you have the ability to stick around another year and do more research and maybe an REU, and minor in chem and bio during the extra time? Or perhaps do a fall research co-op, or a fall stint in a DOE research lab and cram spring semester full of coursework? Few have that freedom, but if you did, it would put you in much better shape for a top-10 school. As it is, your GRE scores will be more important than usual. High scores combined with the GPA and several years of experience (emphasize techniques you learned in your SOP) can get you into a very strong program. You will also want to apply to some safety schools. Everything you've listed is very tough, even for other students with elite GPAs.

Tier 2 UC could mean a lot of things. Are you talking about Merced/Riverside or Irvine/Santa Cruz, or Davis/Santa Barbara? They're all on different levels. I would say if you're at Merced, moving up to Berkeley would be a smart thing to do. But if you're at UCSD or Davis now, or a UC of a similar caliber, the marginal difference is much less, and probably not worth it unless you know that your personal situation will be better at UCB. I don't know what your major is right now. You mention doing a biochemistry/molecular focus, I assume you mean in grad school. ilovelab is right to mention that you may need to re-take some things. But the CAN system, assuming that is still in place, means that the process is somewhat simplified over a public to private or out of state transfer. You should be able to get a good grasp from Berkeley of what you still need to take based on the transfer credit they assign. Also, I sometimes recommend that students who are going to graduate early stick around for an extra semester if they can afford it (such as, when scholarships or mom&pop's money make such a scenario possible. A couple of extra advanced or graduate electives, coupled with more time to do research and generate relationships for LORs, can mean the difference between an acceptance and a rejection at highly competitive institutions. Also, consider that Berkeley is known to have very difficult STEM classes, and your GPA may bear the brunt of that. At the end of the day, it is mostly your disciplined intensity and academic viciousness that will get you into grad school, and not a brand name school. But brand names still count for something. Even if you ultimately choose not to transfer, congratulations on your acceptance.

My ex got her position after a couple of weeks as I remember. But it was good timing with the interview, and she was selected for her position due to the experience she had in the microbiology lab at Pepsi in Hayward. It is not that bad to get a technician or even associate scientist position out of a BS or MS program, and once you do, the initial career trajectory is not bad. You do plateau out eventually if you only have a BS. But PhD's usually are after scientist and above-level positions which are tougher since there are fewer positions around to start with. In general, it takes them a while to find a position, even with a postdoc under their belt.

Thanks for your response. I like the reassurance, but my pessimism leads me to think that a few dark spots on my app may come back to bite me. My grades from 15 years ago included a C in a calculus course. I was out of school for about 5.5 years to care for my mom, during which time I had a bunch of W's while I was trying to take coursework and manage her care. I attended a very good community college for a few years (feeder program for a lot of UCB, Davis, and UCSD transfer students), and though I earned straight-A's in physics and organic chemistry there, I know that medical schools don't like to see foundational coursework at the community college level, and I fear that top PhD programs may be of the same opinion. I am also over 30 years of age, don't go to a top-25 institution, and neither my GRE scores, as they are now, nor my overall GPA will be truly exceptional. I fear that I will be seen as good across the board, but not outstanding, and thus have a hard time standing out during the selection process. I sense that my next summer REU could make or break me for top-5 schools. If I can work my butt off again and develop something worthy of a publication, hopefully with a truly novel technical application or insight, or develop a working relationship with some well-renown faculty, that could be what I need to set myself apart. Either way, I would feel very honored and happy to attend any of the programs I have listed here, all of which have multiple faculty members I would love to work with, I really mean that. But I have seen the facilities and met students from a couple of the most prestigious programs, and was awe-struck by the resources at their disposal. Thanks again for your time.

Applying for 2019 admission cycle. What I want to do, using quantitative tools to accelerate the development of therapies for cancer and other diseases, is a field that lies at the interface of chemical/biological engineering and biology, hence my program choices for graduate school. At this time I am still studying faculty research interests and narrowing my list. Please let me know how competitive I appear to be for my top choices, and where the soft spots in my profile appear to be. Thank you! Undergrad Institution: mid-tier, large public research university Major(s): Chemical Engineering (concentration in Bioengineering) and Biology (concentration in Biotechnology) Minor(s): Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering (using almost all graduate courses to complete these) GPA in Majors: 3.96 Overall GPA: 3.7 (due to poor initial showing in college 15 years ago; returned to school in 2013 and GPA is 3.91 over last 4 years) Position in Class: top 5% in major classes at current institution Type of Student: Domestic white male, non-traditional, first-gen college student, below poverty line GRE Scores (revised/old version): (estimates based on practice exam) Q: 165 V: 168 W: 5.0 B: Not going to take Research Experience: 4 overlapping years, spread across 4 faculty labs. Mix of bio/chemical engineering and chemical biology. 1 year pharmaceutical powder process modeling/simulation for NIH-funded project 1 year honors fellowship, mammalian cell culture engineering/analysis. -> led to symposium presentation summer REU in cancer bioengineering/modeling -> led to a national conference presentation; first author publication in review. (LOR) 3 years cell/bioengineering in nano and tissue culture lab. -> 2 presentations and 2 publications, one first author review, A second author experimental paper in high IF journal (LOR) 1 year in chemical biology, included computational modeling -> led to national conference presentation (LOR) Yearlong Honors Research and Thesis forthcoming during senior year, will be following the theme of biology integrated with chemical engineering principles. Planning to do another REU in Summer '18, and possibly a 4-month internship at a DOE national laboratory Awards/Honors/Recognitions: Goldwater Scholar, Honors College, several university scholarships, Dean's List, Honor Societies: Tau Beta Pi, Omicron Delta Kappa, Omega Chi Epsilon Pertinent Activities or Jobs I founded and am director of an NGO that designs, validates, and builds medium-scale (500L-2500L) sustainable biodigesters in developing nations. Founded in 2015, my organization has won various local innovation and engineering awards and raised large sums from various sources. 4 Grants total. Currently in an iterative experimental design/evaluation process at a farm near my campus, and looking to apply for EPA P3 funding in the next fiscal year. 6-month biochemical engineering R&D internship at Pfizer (poster presentation from this) Vice President and Secretary of two engineering student chapters on campus ChemE Car Design Team for AIChE Student Chapter Summer Internship Designing Fuel Handling Devices (oral presentation at competition) Peer Tutor in chemical engineering and biology Peer Mentor Member of AIChE and ISPE societies Honors Library Website Curator Designed and maintained a website for a biopharm conference My jobs have been mostly research-based in faculty labs, aside from some professional tutoring, web design, retail, and manual labor work. My poor GPA years ago was due to a family illness that is related to why I want to enter this particular field, but I don't want to dwell on that in my SOP. Special Bonus Points: Glowing LOR's, but not from particularly renown faculty I have earned three online verified Coursera Specializations (around 5-6 courses each): Statistics with R, Systems Biology and Biotechnology, and Python Programming (Did this mostly for personal enrichment, is there any value in mentioning this on applications?) I will have taken 4 honors courses and 16 graduate courses before I graduate, in math (experimental design, stats w/R), physics (medical physics), chemistry (computational biochemistry, quantum chemistry, advanced organic synthesis), chemical engineering (3 biochemical engineering courses), and biology (7 courses), with a 4.0 across the board so far I am a strong in-person interviewer Skilled grant writer and fundraiser Applying to Where: (my interests are based mostly on faculty fit; I have already researched which U's allow you to apply to multiple departments) MIT (chemical engineering, bioengineering, biology) Harvard (chemical biology w/ therapeutics certificate, systems biology, bioengineering) Stanford (Either ChemEng or chemical and systems biology) Berkeley (chemical engineering) Caltech (chemical engineering) Georgia Tech (chemical and biomedical engineering) UCSD (bioengineering) BU (biomedical engineering w/ biomolecular pharmacology sub-program) UCSF (CCB) Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology Rockefeller Princeton (chemical engineering) UTAustin (chemical engineering) Delaware (chemical engineering) Tufts (chemE) Northeastern (chemE) Brown (biomedE)

Hi, I am a chemical engineering and biology undergraduate student planning to graduate in 2019. I want to pursue a doctoral degree in some area of cancer biology/drug discovery. I love research that allows me to employ quantitative principles to model the biological system perturbations that arise in disease states, and I would also like to investigate the effects of small molecules and biologics on those systems. Many programs exist in chemical engineering, bioengineering, biology, etc., to pursue such a route, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to make a career out of this work. At this point, I have completed both a six-month industry co-op internship and a 3-month REU. I have the option to do another six-month co-op, or go to school during that semester and do another summer REU (plenty of juicy and highly specialized graduate electives I can potentially take during that additional semester, such as medicinal or quantum chemistry, statistics with R, Python programming, and bioinformatics, to name a few). Any advice? For the summer research, I am particularly interested in the Amgen Scholars Program, if I can get in. It seems to be exactly what I am looking for. If I did an industrial internship it would probably be in drug discovery, if I could get one, or another bioprocess engineering position. Any other suggestions are welcome as well. Stats below: Undergrad Institution: mid-tier, large public university Major(s): Chemical Engineering (emphasis in Bioengineering) and Biology (emphasis in Biotechnology) Minor(s): Math, Physics, Chemistry, Biomedical Engineering (mostly used graduate courses to complete these) GPA in Majors: 3.96 Overall GPA: 3.7 (due to poor initial showing in college 15 years ago; returned to school in 2013 and GPA is 3.9 over last 4 years) Position in Class: top 5% of current institution Type of Student: Domestic white male, non-traditional, first-gen college student, below poverty line GRE Scores (revised/old version): (estimates based on practice exam) Q: 164 V: 168 W: 5.0 B: Not going to take Research Experience: 4 overlapping years, spread across 4 faculty labs. Mix of bio/chemical engineering and chemical biology. REU in cancer bioengineering/modeling -> led to a national conference presentation and first author publication. 1 year pharmaceutical powder process modeling/simulation for NIH-funded project 1 year honors fellowship, mammalian cell culture engineering/analysis. -> led to symposium presentation 3 years cell/bioengineering in nano and tissue culture lab. -> 2 presentations and 2 publications, one first author review, one second author experimental paper in high IF journal 1 semester in chemical biology, included computational modeling -> led to national conference presentation Yearlong Honors Research and Thesis forthcoming during senior year (another REU leading to a publication would really go nicely here) Awards/Honors/Recognitions: Goldwater Scholar, Honors College, several university scholarships, Dean's List, Honor Societies: Tau Beta Pi, Omicron Delta Kappa, Omega Chi Epsilon Pertinent Activities or Jobs I founded and am director of an NGO that designs, validates, and builds medium-scale (500L-2500L) sustainable biodigesters in developing nations. My organization has won various local innovation and engineering awards and raised large sums from various sources. 4 Grants total. Currently in an iterative experimental design/evaluation process at a farm near my campus, and looking to apply for EPA P3 funding in the next fiscal year. 6-month Engineering R&D internship at Pfizer Vice President and Secretary of two engineering student chapters on campus ChemE Car Design Team for AIChE Student Chapter Summer Internship Designing Fuel Handling Devices Peer Tutor in chemical engineering and biology Peer Mentor My jobs have been mostly research-based in faculty labs, aside from some professional tutoring, web design, retail, and manual labor work. Special Bonus Points: Glowing LOR's, but not from particularly renown faculty I have earned three online verified Coursera specializations (around 5-6 courses each): Statistics with R, Systems Biology and Biotechnology, and Python Programming (Did this mostly for personal enrichment, is there any value in mentioning this on applications?) I will have taken between 14 and 16 graduate courses before I graduate, in math, physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, and biology, with a 4.0 across the board so far I am a strong in-person interviewer Applying to Where: (my interests are based mostly on faculty fit; I have already researched which U's allow you to apply to multiple departments) MIT (chemical engineering, bioengineering, biology) Harvard (chemical biology, systems biology, bioengineering) Stanford (Either ChemEng or chemical and systems biology) Berkeley (chemical engineering) Caltech (chemical engineering) Georgia Tech (chemical and biomedical engineering) UCSD (bioengineering) UCSF (CCB) Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology Rockefeller Princeton (chemical engineering) UW-Madison (chemical engineering) UMinnesota (chemical engineering) UTAustin (chemical engineering) Delaware (chemical engineering)

Hi, I am from the Bay Area (Chabot College, transfer c/o 2014) and I am familiar with both institutions. In general, it is always a wiser decision to go with the MS over a certificate, unless you know for sure that you can get a job with the certificate alone. An MS might take twice as long, but it is worth more than twice as much in terms of credibility. My ex graduated with a BS in bio from CSUEB and now works for a major pharmaceutical company in manufacturing, but I would also say that SJ State is going to have a significantly better reputation than the smaller EB. For the positions you are looking at, I would go for the PSM at SJS. While you are there, see if you can do some research work, even if it is not a thesis program, and start inquiring early about that, as well as looking for summer graduate research opportunities at other campuses, and internships in industry. You want your resume to be full by the time you re-enter the job market. Good Luck, Mike

Pterosaur: Thank you for your feedback, I appreciate you volunteering your experiences with the process. It is helpful for me to know what to expect.