DontchaWantaPharma

I was wondering this exact same thing - I saw a bunch of people register rejection emails in the result database, but I haven't gotten anything at all from them.

Did anyone else just get a weird email from MIT BCS confirming the application without actually saying anything about interviews?

Did they happen to mention when official emails are being sent out?

Kind of in a weird place where I think my numbers look fine for acceptance to the places I'm applying to (this might be wrong, too, but that's my impression), but concerned about my overall lack of other distinguishing factors. Undergrad Institution: UW-MadisonMajor(s): Biochemistry and NeurobiologyMinor(s): -GPA in Major: ~3.79 (Kind of hard to calculate with Madison's weird way of allocating classes to majors in the life sciences school)Overall GPA: 3.75Position in Class: They're very quiet about that, so no clue.Type of Student: Domestic white male.GRE Scores (revised):Q: 165V: 165W: 5.0Research Experience: I've been working in a genetics lab on campus since freshman year, and pretty much part or all of every summer, involved in neurogenetics and synaptic plasticity, have one publication, albeit as second-to-last author out of 6 authors. My only presentations have been at our undergraduate research symposium, and that was like freshman and sophomore year, so it's been a while.Pertinent Activities or Jobs: Editor of content at the undergrad research journal that got started up a few years back.Applying to Where:Harvard - Neuro MIT - Biology UCSF - Tetrad Columbia - Neurobio & Behavior Mt. Sinai - Neuroscience Vanderbilt - IGP Yale - BBS UNC Chapel Hill - BBSP UC Berkeley - Molecular and Cell Biology Scripps - TSRI Stanford - Neurosciences My research interests are in structural and chemical neurobiology, and the intersection of chemistry and neurobiology, thus the mix of bio and neuro programs.

Hey all! I've got a question regarding a dilemma I'm facing in my senior year of college. I plan to graduate this fall and to apply to PhD programs concurrently for the following fall. I joined a neurogenetics lab in my freshman year and have been there throughout my entire undergraduate college life, as I've transitioned from being interested in biomedical engineering to loving biochemistry and neurobiology. Here is my dilemma - my research interests have slowly changed to have more of a focus on neurochemistry and protein engineering, and as such I'm interested in applying to Biochemistry and Pharmacology PhD programs. I'm concerned that my undergraduate research experience, wherein I've primarily done computational phenotype analysis of synapses (and got authorship on a paper, albeit second-to-last author), classical genetics (i.e. crossing flies), and some work with PCR and plasmid creation via ligations, etc, has little relevance to what I'm more interested in working on in graduate school. As such, I've been contemplating leaving this lab and joining a biochemistry lab so that I could at least have ~10 months of biochem lab experience to document when I apply for programs. I've talked to my undergraduate advisor, who argued this wouldn't really bolster my application and that I might have issues getting into a lab as a senior since there's less payoff for a lab to accept a senior for training compared to a freshman they could use for longer. I was pretty set on leaving my lab prior to this, but those seem like valid arguments. As a result, I'm now kind of stumped and looking for advice - should I stay in my established lab where I do work that has little relevance to anything I'd want to do in graduate school, or leave and face the potential negative of not being able to get into a lab, plus whatever perceived negatives might be associated with the act of leaving my first lab? I'm also mildly concerned about my chances for getting a positive recommendation letter if I leave my current lab right now, since my PI has shifted my work towards the beginnings of characterizing a candidate gene found in a screen I took over from another undergraduate that graduated recently that's been lagging severely and it might be leaving with a bad impression of my aptitude as a researcher. Any comments would be greatly appreciated!