harish.hn

I'm currently doing my Bachelor's (BTech. - Final year) in Biotechnology in Manipal Institute of Technology, India. I'm quite keen on applying for graduate programs later this year, colleges like UCB, UPenn, Columbia, UCSD, Cornell and also considering Yale, MIT, Stanford and the works. I will be giving my GRE exam shortly and also have completed a 2 month internships in a pharmaceutical company and a premier university (Indian Institute of Tech) in India. I will also be interning from January 2017 at the Centre of Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB, Hyderabad), another renowned lab. I had previously briefly worked on a project in college to devise a diagnostic kit and am currently working on another (in collaboration with the Department of Virus Research, Manipal). I am hopeful of publishing a paper on the latter, sometime later this year. Being from India, I'm severely lost with regards to the requirements expected from top universities as mentioned above in terms of GRE scores, GPA requirements and lab experience & LoRs in general. Given my lab experience and a 8.5 CGPA (Indian standard) without publications, am I being realistic in considering these colleges for my master's? Would working in few more well-established labs and applying next year improve my chances?