Victorious Secret

If they drug tested grad students it would really reduce the workload for professors. There wouldn't be anymore pesky grad students to mentor.
I have never heard of drug testing in grad school and would be stunned if it existed at any significant level, even outside the US. 

I'm planning to accept my offer from Stanford. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and good luck with all of your interviews and decisions. You're all amazing!

I'm planning to accept my offer from Stanford. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and good luck with all of your interviews and decisions. You're all amazing!

I'm planning to accept my offer from Stanford. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and good luck with all of your interviews and decisions. You're all amazing!

I'm planning to accept my offer from Stanford. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and good luck with all of your interviews and decisions. You're all amazing!

I'm planning to accept my offer from Stanford. Thank you for sharing this journey with me and good luck with all of your interviews and decisions. You're all amazing!

I'm out, y'all. I am done playing this waiting game with schools. I plan on attending UConn this fall! Good luck everyone!

Thank you! It is definitely a huge relief! I hope everyone gets to this point soon, and I wish everyone else the best of luck as well!

Accepted at WashU! It's nice to have good news for once

Master's programs are quite expensive, especially since you won't be receiving Pell grants, etc. You might want to go with a BS-level analyst position in consulting and then try to get one of them to finance the MS. But those positions are still challenging to find, especially for top firms. Keep in mind that technical consulting often looks for different credentials than management consulting (also, many MBA students from top-10 programs end up interning with, or working for McKinsey straight after graduation). 

Yay! Congratulations, so happy for you!!!

MIT is not Stanford in that they do not typically send out all of their interview invites on the same day. They trickle in a little bit. In 2016 they invited over a span of 3 weeks. Also, when you search for MIT's bioE program, use "biological engineering" since that is the actual name of the program and will yield actual results. You also need to spell out MIT's name since "MIT" is too short. 

This was so totally unexpected, but I received an interview offer from Mayo Clinic for the biomedical engineering/physiology PhD track just minutes ago! I'm trying not to tear up at my lab right now lololol. I knew I would feel much better if I got a first interview anywhere. Stoked that I am not a failure

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!

Your scores are super impressive! From what I can tell, any quant score above 165 is good for a top program, and for verbal honestly a 155 is good for STEM haha. I definitely wouldn't retake it if I were you. No school is going to take a second glance at your scores.

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:

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!

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!

Check with each school specifically about what they allow in terms of apply to related programs. Some schools I looked at specifically forbade applying to multiple programs at the university in the same year. In contrast, I went on my post-acceptance visit to CMU (for bio eng), they asked why I hadn't applied to the robotics program there as well. Given the big time gap between your first go at university and your current success, if I were a university I would have no problem with it. With very high recent grades and research experience, it's clear that you've matured, become more responsible, have fewer other distractions or responsibilities. Whatever the case, something clearly changed drastically for the better. I would put a sentence or two about it in a personal statement: a very brief explanation (without making it sound like an excuse), framed in terms of how things have changed and led to this improvement. I don't think it has completely destroyed your chances of doing a PhD. Honestly, I think you're doing everything right to compensate: research experience, high grades, broader impacts (to use the NSF term). The big two things that you can affect now are your personal statement and letters of recommendation. From my experience, admissions people put a lot of weight on letters of recommendation. I would definitely recommend sitting down with your letter writers when the time comes. As professors themselves, they're the ones best able to assuage any fears of professors handling admissions that you wouldn't be successful. If you haven't started building those relationships with professors yet, start doing so now. I have some experience with 2 of these schools - I did undergrad at Northeastern and I'll be starting at Harvard SEAS for my PhD later this month. You specifically mentioned fit, which is good. Honestly, that's the thing that's make or break for getting into PhD programs for qualified candidates: do they think your research interests align with theirs so that it would be mutually beneficial to have you. Part of the way they did this at Harvard was with informal Skype interviews arranged by faculty. The first interview I had was with someone who did really cool work, but was much more on the mechanical engineering side (I felt under-qualified and I was kind of embarrassed and awkward), but he ended up passing my info on to a professor who I hadn't put down on my application (because she's in CS and I was applying for bioengineering). Long story short, we hit it off, her research is awesome, she's the one who emailed to tell me I was accepted, and she'll be my advisor. Sorry for the tangent, but that was my experience with one of the schools you have on your list! Fit is really big, so make sure your applications are framed to show why you and the program fit together like puzzle pieces.

Do not worry.you have good potential and you demostrate it.they will look for your most recent gpa and if you publish as 1st author,it will be perfect.They do not consider gpa only.what i suggest ,your chance may be lower on ivy league schools so do not apply ivy leauge and i strongly believe that they can accept you to boston university.they also publish their admission statistics.Check it