extramaniac

lol just "received" my "rejection" from penn after being "invited" to a "chat" yesterday despite the deadline to choose a school on monday. worst graduate admissions office of any school I applied to. wait till after the deadline to "give" a decision and be completely unreceptive to any sort of emails. fuck them

Accepted at WashU! It's nice to have good news for once

Congratulations! I might check the application website/completion email. Usually there is an email somewhere for updating materials.
 
Also: is anyone else going to Michigan next week?

I'm quite surprised at the people saying not to contact current students and/or alum. Unless the website specifically says not to contact them, it doesn't hurt to try. Just be direct in your email. At one school I applied to, the website straight up encourages applicants to contact graduate students, postdocs, and professors. All of my conversations with people at this school and others have been nothing but informative and courteous.

Hey guys! Trying to promote some positivity. Don’t be so hard on yourselves over rejection. Remember that you just need one school to give you the green light to go to grad school and I am sure we will all do amazing and interesting work wherever we end up  don’t forget to celebrate your victories- we’ve all jumped through so many and different hurdles to be here today. 

i just heard back from a school today for the first time. it seems a lot of places are behind this year compared to last, especially for bioe

i just got an email from penn and i literally had a mini heart attack only to see its for a student chat

@extramaniac It's hard to say anything more specific than stellar grades from R1 institutions. Many of the people in my Ph.D. cohort were rejected from Stanford, so I'm guessing research fit is also a big part of it. I spent the summer before applying at Stanford working in Bioengineering and met with the chair of the admissions committee and was still rejected (probably because of my GPA), so who you know definitely isn't all of it. 

Submitted all of my apps. Let the agony of waiting begin.

Thanks for your answer! Your change in interest totally makes sense. I have heard that working with stem cells is a huge pain, but I hope to work more on the materials development side and less with seeding the scaffolds with cells, but we shall see. Maybe I might actually like doing that. Organ-on-a-chip models are pretty neat. I have read a lot of research papers and articles about them and might even consider them for my PhD.
Imaging is also a very fascinating topic. I hope you get good news soon from your the schools you applied to. Thanks again for your help!
I actually haven't heard of this. I am going to check it out, thank you. I am even applying to Northwestern, so that's awesome!

hey, so i worked on organ-on-a-chip models using stem cells to accurately model human organs (e.g. heart, liver, fat). its actually a supremely cool field which requires intimate knowledge of materials science and molecular biology. i'll say that using stem cells is just kind of a pain in the ass. they are so finnicky and getting them to model adult cells is not trivial at all. TBH, my interest in it started to wane when I realized that getting these stem cells to mature was a big hinderance to getting this type of technology to be used for clinical needs. and they need to be mature in a variety of ways: gene expression profile, metabollically, electrophysiology (for neuromusclar joints or cardiac systems), mechanically, etc.
 
the aim is to really use these systems as a way to model human physiology and pathophysiology. rodent models are not great at this because they can not take into account differences between individual humans. tissue engineering technologies, however do, and with advances like CRISPR in the biological realm, the possibilities to model disease for individual patients to discover new drug therapies in endless. the field, however is very young and my main interests lie more in EE and more direct applications to the clinic. i personally like imaging more, and this interest dates back to middle school when i was obsessed with building computers with high end graphics.
 
 

i'm the opposite of you guys. took no classes but have decent experience doing research in this area. happy to answer any questions if i can

Hey! thanks for the kind words. Yeah I'm trying to bring up that MCB background as a positive haha. I'll check out this schools thanks for the recommendation.
BTW, I saw on your post that your research interests are in biomaterials/tissue engineering/regenerative medicine. I have a decent experience in this area so if you have any questions about it feel free to PM me.
Thanks for the response and the recommendations! Calms my nerves a little.