[2020 Applicant Profiles and Admissions Results]

Undergrad Institution: International
Major(s): Bachelors in Engineering, focus on Biotechnology
Overall GPA: 3.7
Type of Student: International, Asian female

Masters Institution: Ivy league
Major(s): Biotechnology
Overall GPA: 3.8

GRE Scores (revised/old version): Studying for new version, expect to score 320+ based on practice tests and my old GRE score.

TOEFL Total: N/A since my Masters degree is from a US institution

Research Experience: 5 years of full-time research experience in cancer biology in the US, partly in industry, but currently working at a very prestigious university (1+ year), 5+ abstracts at major conferences and 2 publications, 1 of which is first author. The abstracts and publications are from my time in industry, working on a paper now but it is unlikely to be submitted in time for this application cycle.

I have strong wet lab experience in planning and carrying out experiments involving cell culture, transfection, transduction, multi-color flow cytometry, western blots, ELISA, PCR, animal handling and organ harvesting, immunofluorescence etc. I have letters of recommendation that will address my skills, work ethic as well as interest in graduate school.

Awards/Honors/Recognitions:

I was awarded a bonus for outstanding contributions to the division of my company (not sure how relevant this award is).

Pertinent Activities or Jobs: I had leadership positions in undergrad as well as my masters program in Biotech-related committees.

Any Miscellaneous Accomplishments that Might Help:

Special Bonus Points: Connections from PIs, will be applying to programs where I work and where my current/previous PIs are from, so it may work in my favor.

Any Other Info That Shows Up On Your App and Might Matter:

Applying to Where:
While my experience is very relevant to cancer immunology, I want to move to a more computational background and focus on developing tools to mine large scale databases. I'm wondering what safety schools I should add considering my limited programming experience? I'm currently using R to visualize patient data for specific gene expression but I highly doubt that's good enough. I had a semester of C, C++, JAVA and SQL each in undergrad but that's the extent of my formal training.

Here are my schools -

Harvard - Integrated Life Sciences: Computational Biology
Cornell TRI - Computational Biology and Medicine 
Stanford - Computational and Systems Immunology, Biomedical Informatics
MIT - Computational & Systems Biology
Caltech - Biology: Systems Biology (tentative)
UPenn - Genomics and Computational Biology
UCB - Computational Biology


Thank you!