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Some recommendations from a current student interviewer. This is just from my personal experiences interviewing and discussing with admissions committees.
1. Be prepared to answer WHY you want to do a PhD in general. If you are coming straight from undergraduate, be especially prepared to justify why you believe you are ready to enter directly into a PhD program instead of taking a year or two off.
2. Have justifications for why you applied to a specific institution and program. Being able to pinpoint specific faculty, resources, graduate outcomes, etc. all help show you are applying to a program for a particular reason and not just because it is ranked highly.
3. Be able to talk about your research clearly and concisely. If you do not know something, do not be afraid to say you do not know. I would rather have someone answer "I do not know" 10 times than try to make up an answer once. It is also helpful to be able to identify specific things you have taken away from each experience. Also, if you have multiple experiences, it is best to focus on the one you are most comfortable talking about rather than trying to give equal time to all of your research.
Above all, be enthusiastic about your own research, research in general, the program you are applying to, and pursuing a PhD. If you can talk about your research and genuinely seem excited about it, then that will come across to us and we will remember it more than if you can answer every single technical question flawlessly. It is okay if you are nervous and it is okay if you can't answer every question - it is not okay if you are just going through the motions.
4. For faculty interviews, don't worry about knowing their work inside and out. If you want, you can read a couple abstracts from their most recent papers + look at their lab websites, but anything beyond that is not expected.
5. Prepare questions! They can be general questions about graduate school, specific questions about a PIs research, etc., but do not just sit there blankly if you are asked if you have any further questions.
6. If you have a student interview in addition to faculty interviews, be forewarned that at many schools this interview will be weighted alongside your other interviews. This means you need to maintain professionalism and decorum.
7. You ARE being evaluated at all times, but 90% of the evaluation that goes into the final decision is done during the interviews. However, there are really only three things you can do that will get you immediately disqualified (and yes, I have seen each of these happen at least once): (1) Making sexist, racist, or homophobic remarks, (2) falling asleep during an interview, and (3) aggressively hitting on current students or PIs to the point of harassment. Every year, without fail, there are at least three recruits who do one of these things (usually #1 or #3) and are disqualified from consideration.
8. It is okay to drink alcohol if you are someone who likes to drink alcohol. It is okay to abstain from alcohol if you are someone who likes to abstain from alcohol. It is NOT okay to get belligerently drunk and make bigoted remarks or harass current students or other recruits. I would recommend knowing your limits and what type of drinker you are - we want you to have fun but try not to embarrass yourself. Believe it or not, we have accepted people who have gotten black out drunk and thrown up at recruitment parties, but do not put yourself into that situation.
9. Dress to impress for your interview day. A full suit is unnecessary for guys, but some nice slacks, a good button down, and a blazer will suit you well for all interviews. Gals, do not wear heels - you will seriously regret it. For the rest of the weekend, feel free to wear whatever is comfortable.
10. Have fun! All participating faculty and students go into the interview weekends trying to recruit EVERYONE. We want everyone to love our school and our program and want as many people to attend as possible. Talk to as many faculty and students as possible, be engaged, and generally look like you want to be there and you will find the biggest challenge will be deciding where you actually want to go from all of your options. Getting the interview is the hard part - we interview around 8-10% of applicants and accept around 75% of those interviewed. If you have gotten an interview, you have all the qualifications to get accepted - we just need to make sure that you look as good in person as you are on paper.
I hope this helps! I'm sure I'll be seeing a few of you in the coming months.
 

Generally they don't request study abroad transcripts, especially if they're already reflected on your undergrad transcripts.
I don't know how being an international student will play in, but I think you should add some mid-tier schools. Rockefeller, NYU, and Cornell are good options, but very highly regarded (though not quite Harvard/UCSF level). Consider BostonU, UWisconsin Madison, MD Anderson, etc. All well regarded schools that are high mid-tier.

Hi all,
I just wanted to share this in case some of you weren't aware. There is a growing movement, #GRExit, where biology/biomedical programs are no longer requiring the GRE for admission! To me this is fantastic, standardized tests are biased and useless. Not to mention expensive and anxiety provoking. There is a Google docs spreadsheet that is currently maintained by Joshua Hall, PhD who is the director of the school of medicine at UNC. Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MYcxZMhf97H5Uxr2Y7XndHn6eEC5oO8XWQi2PU5jLxQ/edit#gid=0
Good luck to everyone applying in the upcoming application cycle! 

Hi all - I'm an electrical engineering graduate from the Class of 2017, and will be applying to grad schools this cycle for the Fall of 2019 (M.S. program in the same discipline). Unfortunately, I'm one of those people looking to get in somewhere with a bad GPA - specifically, a sub-3.0 GPA.
It's literally right around the 3.0 cutoff (2.95), but my major GPA is lower than that; it's a B- average. I took a look at my transcript, and there really isn't anything good that I can take to shed any kind of positive light on either one of my GPAs. There is no significant upward trend at any point, and I didn't have any "special circumstances" that severely limited my ability to study and get good grades. The only upward trend that I've got is a jump from around a 2.86 my freshman year to a 3.05 during my sophomore year, but a measly jump like that during my underclassman years is insignificant. My academic marks as an undergraduate were pretty much always stagnant, and remained around a 3.0 until the very last moment.
My reasons for the poor marks? I was involved, yes, but nothing crazy by normal standards. What really killed me, though, was my personality. I wasn't lazy, and I wasn't a party-goer. I was just afraid to ask questions, even when I didn't understand something. When I first stepped foot on campus, I had absolutely no background in the STEM fields aside from mandatory coursework at the high school level. In my first engineering class, I was taken aback by how much everybody else already knew about the discipline. Lecture material went right over my head, and I could not find any openings to jump into during discussions. I felt dumb as heck, but I tried to shoulder the burden on my own, tying myself to online resources and other methods that I could try from the comfort of my own laptop. Looking back, what I was afraid of wasn't really looking dumb in front of my professors; it was looking dumb in front of my peers, the guys and girls with whom I would be friends, colleagues, and acquaintances for at least the next four years.
If you take out the disappointing academic performance, however, I do think that I can remain fairly competitive with a lot of other applicants out there. I went to a fairly well-regarded university ranked in the top 25. Among other things, I was involved in a design team, did a big-time internship at a big-time company, served as president of a professional organization, and am fortunate enough to be working as an electrical engineer post-graduation doing stuff that pretty much have everything to do with the line of study I would like to pursue in graduate school. But - graduate school is all about business, and you're not there to mess around. GPA still matters a lot, and I realize that.
Here's my question to you all - I've read a lot of posts on people who have had bad uGPAs, but have had legitimate reasons for the bad marks - be it depression, family problems, or health problems. I've got none of that - I was just too afraid of looking dumb, and, in a way - too prideful to admit my deficiencies early on by asking for help. If there's one thing that I do have to say to that, it's that I really feel like I've improved on this attitude after starting to work as a full-time engineer. In school, I could remain in my little shell, but nobody would bat an eye - I could save my "embarrassment" at the expense of my GPA, but it was all private to me. At work, trying to act like I knew how to do things when I really didn't can lead to a bad product, strained relationships with clients, a bad reputation, and getting the axe - the list is endless. Performance has everything to do with job security. I swallowed my pride and approached work with humility, asking questions as often as I could, no matter how dumb - looking back now, one full year later, I can say that I really have learned a lot not just about my discipline, but about communication, as well. Can addressing something like this in my SOP help me come off as a more mature and prepared candidate for admission, or is that 2.95 on my transcript - especially since I have nobody to blame but me - going to keep admission committees skeptical about my potential and seriousness? In general, if you've got nobody to blame for bad marks but yourself, what's the best way to approach that issue in your writing? If there's one thing that I am absolutely confident about, it's my writing skills - I just don't want to get off on the wrong foot and jeopardize my chances.
I have my range of schools that I am shooting for, but to put things into perspective - the schools that are higher on that list (i.e. my dream schools) are places like Texas (Austin), UCLA, and UCSD. I realize that some of these places have explicit GPA cutoffs of 3.0, and the average GPAs of admitted students is way up above the clouds, but f**k it, I'm going to shoot my shot anyway.
Thanks!

For a December 1st application deadline, I began contacting POIs in mid-September (mid-October is probably the latest you'll want to send them out). For those that I didn't hear back from after a little while, I sent a follow-up email about 2/3 weeks later. Avoiding the end of summer/beginning of the fall semester is recommended, as your email may very well fall into a void.
My goal for sending the emails was to see if the POIs were indeed open to accepting new PhD students for the upcoming cycle, as well as to get more information from them in terms of the program. Some simply responded to me with an affirmative that they were accepting students - I kept those schools on my list. Others, I was able to arrange a phone call with - these are highly valuable! Those who said that they were not looking for new students recommended some other professors for me. Perhaps I was lucky, but I heard back from everybody that I had contacted.
Remember, you don't want to just reach out haphazardly to them...you want your research goals to line up at least moderately with their research interests and the program. At the time I was ready to send my emails, I had identified 9 programs that I felt as if I could fit in well with AND had a good mentor match, and had ranked them into three tiers. When I sent my emails, I reached out to my POIs in my top 2 tiers - the bottom tier were programs with later application deadlines, so there was no need to rush.
Initially, contact your top choice POI at your programs of interest...see if you can arrange a more in-depth discussion to determine if you do indeed match well with their research interests (and personality). If Dr. X isn't accepting new students for the upcoming cycle, reach out to your next choice - I would personally hesitate to have more than one ongoing discussion with any given professor at a school at one time. Maybe it's just being cautious, but it could reflect poorly on you if you're just throwing your hat in as many rings as possible.
In the email, keep it brief (something that I obviously struggled with, given the length of this response). I discussed who I was (pertinent academic/professional/research background), research topics of interest to me, some of their current/previous research, (ask a question about this...show interest!!) and then asked if they had an opening for a doctoral student. My emails were ~250 words, and even that was on the long side. And yes, I included my CV - whether they opened it or not is still a mystery to me, but it can't hurt.