Yeah, you're seriously overthinking how much people care. Hiring managers care about your research experience, skill set, and how well you'd fit in a team dynamic. No one cares where you went to school unless its a top tier school (which all three of your choices are) and in that case maybe - and I seriously mean MAYBE - it will give you a tiny extra advantage over other candidates. For the most part though, no one cares. This isn't like law or business; in biotech, your skill set matters exponentially more than what school you went to. If you want to go into biotech, your number one goal should be to expose yourself to as much cutting-edge technology as possible (NGS, CRISPR, flow cytometry, etc). The exact ranking of an already elite university will mean literally nothing.
And no need to apologize from doubting a random person from the internet. But yeah, I've been in the industry (and multiple companies) for the past 4 years so I do know what I'm talking about here. Hope this helps.
Sure. (And other people, feel free to chime in!)
Bioinformatics/big data genomics coupled with Next Gen Sequencing is super hot right now. The ability to analyze large sets of data is invaluable in the field. Lots of companies are doing flow cytometry or microarray work. CRISPR is also starting to boom along with other genetic engineering techniques. Personalized medicine is the up-and-coming thing in clinical settings, along with immunotherapy and gene therapy for disease treatment. You'll have plenty of opportunities to work with these technologies at your schools in question, especially at UCSF, who helped pioneer some of the technologies.
How fast does the field change? For example, if I worked a lot with flow cytometry, how confident could I be that it will still be hot when I finish my phd in six years?
It ultimately came down to which school had the whole package of research, mentorship/support and location for me. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very hard decision. I definitely lost some sleep over it.
Long story short, the research fit was very good at both schools, and it would be very hard for me to choose solely based on that.
As for mentorship/support, I got along better with the faculty I interacted with at Penn. This obviously depends on who I happened to interview with/run into, but the gut feeling was there. I decided to listen to it because I got matched with POIs I was really interested in at both places, and simply could see myself working with those at Penn over Harvard. I’ve learned the hard way that personality is something that matters to me.
I also approached it from the angle of: “If (or maybe when) something goes wrong, who (other than my PI) can I go to for guidance?” At Penn I could name two such people after the visiting weekend, at Harvard it was a bit harder. I think this one is largely because CAMB is broken up into a few sub-groups, and each has a chair and administrator. It’s very different when you’re one of six or seven people, versus one of 65. Both of them at Penn sought the few of us in the sub-group out during the interviews to touch base and get to know us. Does not being sought out during the interview mean there is less support at Harvard? Probably not. But the structures of the programs are undeniably different, and I decided that Penn fit my needs better.
Also, there is a higher junior faculty turnover at Harvard than at Penn. To me, this had a higher probability of translating into a high pressure environment that I didn’t feel would fit the type of environment I learn best in. Of course that will differ on specifics labs and it’s probably avoidable; but again, it’s there, and might limit who I get to work with. I tend to gravitate toward smaller labs (which tend to be led by assistant professors) so I did not want to be limited by this fear.
Finally, I preferred Philly over Boston. I can afford a one bedroom apartment about a 15 minute walk from campus by myself in Philly, in Boston that is nearly impossible. I wanted to have the option to live by myself comfortably. Ruled out NYC because of this one too.
All in all, I had to go with where I felt I would have the highest probability of being happiest and most successful. So it’s not really one deciding factor, but kind of the context of the whole program, including the location, that just made Penn the better fit for me. It was one hell of a personal decision.
