bioapplerobot

Sloan Kettering acceptance!!! OMG can't describe my feeling right now

I received my first acceptance to Northwestern's NUIN Program yesterday. So excited, and very relieved!

Received my first acceptance yesterday! It's been a long journey to get to this point. Wishing the rest of you guys luck!

Just heard back from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, so excited! I applied right on the deadline Dec. 15, I was feeling kind of hopeless about that one because I saw so many people had interviews already.
Now I'm just waiting on CU-Boulder.. So happy rn

Acceptance to report!
University of Washington- biomedical informatics!

Hey you guys, after almost giving up hope and crying..I finally got my first interview for Molecular Cell Biology & Genetics, PhD at Drexel University. I'm so excited. Don't ever give up hope, everyone's time is coming! Interview dates are Feb 6-7, Feb 16-17 and Feb 27-28.

Like you mentioned, most interviews should be fairly casual and conversational. However, this can all be based on luck and whoever ends up interviewing you. I was asked at one interview why I didn't want to pursue an MD since my CV had some clinical and public health experience on it. We literally spent over half the interview just discussing about why I should not pursue an PhD, but rather get an MD and do research without practicing medicine.
I've heard of people getting interviewers that wanted them to do a chalk talk of their research or draw out signaling pathways for them. I've also heard of interviews where the faculty member completely disregards the student's research/field as irrelevant or wrong. I had an interview where the faculty member did not want to hear about my research at all.
In one of my favorite but more stressful interviews, my interviewer started talking about his research and background info in his field and then asked me to come up with hypotheses given the information he had laid out. He was really encouraging and the interview was really engaging, but nonetheless, it was stressful at the time. 
In this end, its going to be a mixed bag with a dash of luck depending on who you get. There's only so much you can do to prepare for the interviews - just know your research well and be able to explain the logic behind the big picture. If you get any interviewer who is just hostile or disrespectful to you, it's ok to bring that up with the program coordinator. After all, if the program coordinator brushes you off or doesn't care that you brought up a genuine concern to them - then perhaps they might not provide the best student support when you're actually in the program. 

They will probably ask you what kind of research interests you have and why you're interested in that particular topic/field, regardless of if you have experience or not.
I think one of the more important things to think of is questions for them. In most of my interviews, both for my current full-time RA position and last year for grad schools, at least half the time of my interviews were spent asking my interviewer questions (mostly at their urging). Most of my interviews were more a conversation than anything. You can ask pretty much anything you want -- what their background is, why they like working at the university, what the composition of their lab is like (postdocs, grad students, RAs, etc.), what a typical day is like for their grad students, what a typical day is like for them, skills they think it's important for grad students to have, etc.

Thank you for this information! Better to go in with a competitive environment than feeling overconfident.

Just so everyone knows, I'm almost 100% sure that every school's admissions committee is biased and discriminatory. I have a medical disorder that is highly stigmatized in society, and even though I can do laboratory work perfectly fine (I've worked in many labs before), someone on an adcom whom i know very well told me that the school did not extend me an interview solely because of my condition. I don't want to disclose too much, but just a warning to people who will interview that if you have a medical condition (overt or covert) that is stigmatized, do your best to convince your interviewers that your condition will not interfere with your ability to perform lab work.
I'm extremely disappointed in the discriminatory nature of graduate schools' adcoms, but I just feel like I should let everyone know what happened to me so that you are all aware.

Got accepted to University of Arkansas CMB -- it doesn't sound glamorous but I love the area and the lab I'd be in (and the generous fellowship I qualify for)!

Just thought I'd share this haiku:
Oh Columbia,
My anxiety abounds!
Please email me now.

Just got an email invitation from Case Western Neuroscience. So is JHU going to send out invites today? I've been refreshing my email like crazy

Red flag - lol - go focus on some research please.

No worries.  I feel you.  I hope you get some interview offers soon!  I've gotten 2 interviews and have a prescreen set up for next week, but I'm also bummed at missing interviews for some schools I thought I was a good fit for.  I interview well (and my odd background is easier explained in person), so this was a big disappointment.  After missing some of these targets, I'm concerned for how the rest of this cycle will play out.

I was told by an adcom from a high-ranking program that I had a really competitive app, and that I should expect a lot of interest.  My letters were stellar.  My GRE was OK, not amazing (165V, 158Q, 4.5W).  My undergrad GPA is a 3.9cum/3.7 sci from a good school.  I took every neuroscience course available at my college along with a bunch of self-designed tutorials.  I did a year of independent neuroscience research in college that got published (2nd author behind my PI) in a decent journal.  A family emergency required that I take the first job offered out of school, so I had to work in a non-neuro lab.  At least it was heavy on molecular bio, so I learned a lot!  I could have -- and I guess I should have -- switched labs to a neuro group, but I didn't want to give up a first author paper I was leading.  I stuck around for 5 years to see this complex translational human study published in a good journal, and I had a number of other basic science/translational pubs come out in the meantime. I've got 6 published papers total in solid journals with 5 more in prep or review.  Yes, only 1 paper is neuro, but I've shown I can be a highly productive scientist and that I have the dedication to lead and support multi-year long projects -- even when that research is in a field that is relatively outside of my passion (neuroscience).  

I'm in my late 20s, and I don't want to sit out another year.  Hopefully some of the places I interview at choose to take me.  They're wonderful programs, and I'd be delighted to go there.  I don't mean to sound ungrateful.  I have some good prospects.  I was just encouraged to get my hopes up for even more options. 

Meh, science involves boatloads of rejection -- papers, grant proposals, etc.  You live.  You learn.  You develop a thick skin.

From my (limited) experience, much of your graduate experience will be shaped by your peers. I believe there is a benefit to having a sizeable number of other students doing research in the same general area so you can share ideas and talk with. It might also be better to look at the size of the program relative to the number of faculty too. I personally do not really prefer small programs.

Lol the average class size for the UPenn Pharmacology group is like 10 people, so I really don't know what you mean by "larger program". In my opinion, there's no much benefit to going to a smaller program since that sometimes translates to fewer faculty, which might in fact end up increasing the amount of overlap between students in terms of rotation. Also, it might also be risky if, for some reason, a PI can't take students for X/Y/Z reason. I think you should aim for large umbrella programs since you have more freedom with respect to the fields you can explore (i.e you can rotate with anyone within the Biomedical Graduate Studies department regardless of your program affiliation) and you have WAY more faculty to choose from within and outside your field, which decreases the amount of stress with respect to a faculty member not being able to take students. For example, I REALLY wanted to rotate with a PI this semester but they couldn't take students since they were still setting people into their lab. Tried another PI and also wasn't able to rotate there; however, though it still sucked that I wasn't able to rotate with my "top choices", there are plenty of labs here to choose from. 
I don't know about the Dartmouth Experimental and Molecular Medicine program since I decided to apply to MCB due to more people doing what I wanted but, again, I felt like I was very limited due to the amount of professors in the department.  This made choosing who to interview with VERY difficult, but this might have been because I applied to the wrong kind of program. 
(Same thing happened with UChicago, so make sure you choose your programs very well. It kinda sucks to interview at a place where you already know you don't fit in well, or feel very constrained.)