fishinabowl

Hi everybody, I'd like your advice on filtering down my potential list to ~5 institutions for which I would have a real chance as all of the applications will become quite expensive. Would like some insight, if I have a chance at US schools as an international or if I should focus on my Canadian applications instead. Undergrad Institution: Top 3 Canadian UniversityMajor(s): Biomedical ScienceMinor(s): GPA in Major: 3.00Overall GPA: 3.00 (3.2 last 2 years)Position in Class: Most likely struggling?Type of Student: InternationalGRE Scores (Taking at the end of September):Q:V:W: Masters University: Top 3 Canadian University (different from undergrad) Masters GPA: 4.0 Masters Field: Bioinformatics Research Experience ~4 years: 1) Undergraduate research assistant (2 years). Developed novel bioinformatics approaches for drug discovery. 2) Masters R.A. (2 years). Research on evolutionary algorithms. 4 papers (1 published, 1 submitted, and 2 in preparation). 1 first author, 2 second author, and 1 middle author. 3) 1 poster presentation at international conferenceAwards/Honors/Recognitions: (Both awards within the school) Graduate Student Research Award Graduate Academic Excellence Award Pertinent Activities or Jobs: (Such as tutor, TA, SPS officer etc...) TA for undergraduate biochemistry class TA for graduate bioinformatics classAny Miscellaneous Accomplishments that Might Help: Did well in graduate courses at undergraduate university, and aced all my classes at my masters institution. Hopefully, it might compensate for my poor undergraduate performance. The change of environment was highly beneficial. Special Bonus Points: (Such as connections, grad classes, famous recommenders, female or minority status etc...) Should hopefully get a good letter from a famous professor for which I did a summer project, my current supervisor, and another letter from the professor for the class I'm TA'ing. Applying to Where: All PhD in bioinformatics or computational biologyUniversity of Toronto - Molecular Genetics and Computational Biology University of British Colombia - Bioinformatics McGill University - Bioinformatics Boston University - BioinformaticsUCSD - Bioinformatics and Systems BiologyUCSF - Biological and Medical Informatics Berkeley - Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomics University of Michigan - DCMB Carnegie Mellon University/University of Pittsburgh- Computational Biology Yale - Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Stanford - Biomedical Informatics