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ManifoldsAreMadeUp

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Everything posted by ManifoldsAreMadeUp

  1. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Yeah I'm not sure who has said they saw PiN release over multiple days but I've followed them for 3-4 cohorts (I have friends in the program that I chat with at times and I always have friends begging me to ask the former when interviews go out/are done sending them) and I haven't seen/heard of them ever doing that. I think people are looking at the dates things get posted on the Results page and extrapolating but keep in mind that people do not post they got an interview as soon as they get them. I feel the need to push back on this because it gives people false hope. It's definitely the most desired program in the world for neuroscience if GradCafe means anything. Don't ask me why I'm on GradCafe.
  2. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Yes, they really do (http://www.rdgao.com/blog/2021/12/23/). I've never served on committee but I've spoken to about 3 people who have for neuro. Here's a hypothetical admissions review process: 1) Committee convenes and the director pairs up faculty/student reps with each pair having someone who's already done admissions once. If faculty have messaged the committee to "keep an eye out" for a particular student, these may be flagged. 2) Each pair (sometimes trio) is given 50-100 applications to read and they're given 1-2 weeks to discuss and rank. Each team picks their top candidates (maybe 5-10) to discuss in open session. All others don't make the cut. 3) All the teams reconvene and the top candidates are discussed and balanced and approved for the director. 4) The director then takes that list and extends invites. The whole process can take only a week or two. Applications are read to varying degrees which is highly dependent on the reviewer. Maybe a student rep remembers what it's like to apply and really takes their time reading all of the material; maybe it's a busy junior faculty member with a newborn and they blow through the apps in one night; maybe it's a senior faculty member that is fixed in their views of what a "high-quality candidate" is and just checks off boxes. You never really know. I've heard of people who never read statements of purpose or only focus on LoR's or some other method etc. It's why it's so crucial that if you have a bad circumstance (poor GPA for instance), that you are upfront about it in both your statement and LoRs because then it makes it hard for the reviewer to look at that number and trash your app. Why do committees do it like this? It's essentially the same format as NIH grant study sections and (I think) initial screening for search committees (new TT-professorships). A lot of the strategies for a good PhD app mirror what's taught in academia and is known as "grantsmanship". In an ideal world, they'd take their time and carefully review each applicant but in reality, professors are busy people who (mostly) eschew committee work. At least from my time in a neuroscience institute helping screen techs for hiring, it's extremely clear a large proportion of applicants are unqualified so it's pretty easy to chop it down. The remaining people are all excellent and would succeed so it's just a matter of discussing them. It's also why there's so much randomness in the process even if you are a high-quality applicant. Maybe the committee is trying to balance out all the computational people with wetlab and as such, disproportionately many comp. neuro. people get cut despite being a good fit. Maybe the program just hired two new computational faculty and will want to make sure that these new hires are likely to get students and thus go for a computational heavy set of interviewees. Maybe the lab an applicant wants already took a lot of students last year or they failed to get demonstrable funds this year and would be available for students. There's a huge number of hidden factors.
  3. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I AGREE AND CANNOT STRESS HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS!!!! Having neuro on your PhD almost does not even matter as it's all about who you work with and the work you publish. You can still work in the same neuro labs whether you're psych, neuro, engineering, bio, etc etc the PI just has to affiliate with the given department which is just signing a few forms for them (and most of the time they're already affiliated). Neuro programs are starting to hit admit rates of 1-2% for top programs but at those same schools you will find other engineering/life sciences programs at 15-30%! Even at places like Harvard (compare PiN to SHBT) or BU (GPN has 3% admit rates while A&N has 19%). It makes almost zero sense to apply for pure neuroscience anymore unless you know you're one of the top applicants.
  4. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    You can check the results page but many get back within 2 weeks some even under 10 days. I have friends on ad comms and initial reviews are in a week so interview offers are probably shortly after that. Almost all schools get back to you before the holidays.
  5. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Not at all true. I know of many programs that give offers only to around half of the interviewees. One program I know of in neuro gives offers only to a third. Lots of rich programs (neuroscience) can afford to fly out many more applicants than they have spots for.
  6. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    There's a neuroscience admissions thread if you search for it. I think that your 3.72 will help a good amount especially if you went to a more "grade deflatey" Ivy (not Harvard). Most programs are cagey about their admissions stats but I know that most top programs have admissions rates under 5%. Here's an example of one top-25 program that does publish theirs and usually admits 2-4%. https://www.bu.edu/grad/why-bu/phd-program-profiles/graduate-program-for-neuroscience/
  7. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I would only leave the original research articles but even then I am skeptical that they aren't predatory journals. What journals are these in? All journals charge APCs regardless of if it's Nature or PLOS One so that isn't a distinguisher of whether they are predatory or not.
  8. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I don’t really think that this is that common tbh. First of all, it’s hard if not impossible to know which professors are serving on the rotating admissions committee. Second, it expends a lot of social capital for someone to ask for a “favor” to interview one of their students. I guess I’ve heard of it happening but it’s definitely not common. Third, the LoR definitely already serves this function if you make the shortlist: I’ve spoken to faculty and they really do read these letters and they pay attention to who is writing them. A friend of mine was admitted to her program because the admissions committee faculty member who reviewed her profile said “all your letter writers were great friends of mine”.
  9. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I think you have a great profile and are well-matched for the schools you are applying to. I don’t think you’ll have to worry too much about getting interviews especially with less selective places on your list like UO, CU Boulder, and UC Irvine. For CMU, PNC is great but CMU Neuro is also a newer program that might not have as many applicants although maybe this isn’t true anymore. I wouldn’t even suggest additional places with lower admit rates because I think you’re fine. If you really want more to look at, you can check out Stony Brook, Rochester, and UCSB.
  10. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I'm not quite sure what Springer and Taylor & Francis connote as, just as journal articles, books can be padding as well. I would say cut away any journal articles that aren't in well-known peer-reviewed journals like the ones I've listed (you can ask me if there's some in particular you have questions about). The JNeuro piece sounds like it's one of their "Journal Club" articles and I would keep it listed but make sure you communicate that it is a "Journal Club" piece. You should ask around and might get differing advice but if your profile is seen as being "padded", that's a red flag. I think that a GRE is necessary since you have no GPA and your papers might not be taken as seriously. What you really need to show committees is that you will be a stellar future scientist and not having a GPA is an enormous barrier. You need everything you can leverage to give them some reason to justify your admittance. In the absence of evidence, risk-adverse ad comms will assume the worst and not hesitate to reject an applicant. Of course, get other opinions on this but this is my assessment.
  11. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I'd be a bit leery of applying so highly. Coming from a school in India, it's already hard to assess you as a student (by American profs) and that's made much more difficult by you not having a GPA to show for it. Also, 15 papers with 14 first-authorships makes me skeptical that you are overselling yourself and admissions committees can sniff that out. Are these publications in well-known journals? At least venues like PLOS One or eNeuro but preferably some in places like JNeuro or JNeurophys or higher impact factor. Having that many articles smells of paper-padding which is a net negative.
  12. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Doesn't seem too unreasonable to me that you'd get some interviews at programs with comp neuro. CMU/Pitt PNC does like somewhat non-traditional people from what I hear as they're a program that tries to draw students from other disciplines into neuroscience. Your research experience is a bit light and you won't have a ton of experience in your research assistantship. I would say shoot high as if you have to apply another cycle, you should be in good shape.
  13. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Seconding this! I've seen students join the most prestigious school they get into and it turns out the faculty they want to join have no space or no money and the student is forced to make a huge left turn in a direction they didn't expect by joining a lab they aren't jazzed about. In worst case scenarios, they fail to place into a lab and are dismissed from the program. It's rare but I've seen it happen even at prestigious institutes especially in which the student's skillset is relatively niche.
  14. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    It's an interview
  15. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I hope everyone isn't too bummed about PiN being done with invites and not having one! A few years ago I was going through the exact thing as it was my #1 choice and the admissions director even said "I'd love to have someone like you in my lab"; the end of that day without an email from PiN was probably my lowest point in research. I had also been rejected from all of my other top choices at that point too. However, I ended up at a great (but not top) school and have been extremely productive with a first-author in a decent journal (think Cell Reports), two second-authorships in small journals (think PLOS Bio), and several other first-authorships in the works and I'm only two years in! I've done a lot more publishing than any of the dozen friends or so I have in PiN or other schools of similar caliber (not to say PiN isn't an absolutely phenomenal program!). I say this not to brag but just to hopefully communicate that it's not about where you land but instead about "blooming where you're planted". Postdoc is really when being part of a big name lab matters anyhow ?.
  16. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I know internally that some programs are scrambling because they expected to have in-person interviews but with the recent delta surge before even omicron has arrived, they might be rethinking things.
  17. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Sorry don't know much if anything about neurodegeneration! I know BU A&N has Ann McKee and several other neurodegeneration folks. As you probably know, she's the biggest name in CTE. If you like glia, UVA has a good unit and if the glymphatic system is interesting, you can try Rochester. I would've considered pharmacology programs for you but it's probably too late now. I only bring up the GPA because you remind me so much of myself: I similarly had a low GPA (3.1) and had 4 years of industry experience (also a 3.7 in a masters with high GRE scores) but my undergrad GPA hurt me a ton during application time. I similarly applied to around 16 schools and only ended up getting into the 2 least competitive schools neither of which I realized I wanted to be at (you also have two schools that presumably are fairly less selective than the rest). I still ended up at a very good school I was originally rejected from (one on your list) but that was the *only* one I got an interview from among the 14 highly selective schools. I could've extremely easily not gotten into the school I'm at and been left with two options that would've left me unhappy (mostly due to their locations and that I didn't jive with the current students). I similarly had hoped my experience would've carried me through but it did not and in hindsight, I would've applied to more schools that were less selective. I got to where I wanted to be on the slimmest of margins but it could've very easily gone the other way. I don't want you to have the awful awful interview season (or lack thereof) that I did. So you know where I'm coming from with the GPA comment, this graph is from SfN's periodic survey of neuroscience graduate programs; here they're showing the distribution of average student undergraduate GPAs entering the programs. You can see the middle 75ish% of programs have average GPAs between 3.5 to 3.7 and this number has been trending higher over time (this was 5 years ago and 5 years before that it was a 3.5 average). You can imagine top programs have averages even higher. Hopefully this will encourage you to expand the types of programs you are applying to. Of course, I'd be extremely happy to be completely wrong on all of this. You do however have a good amount of research experience and some stellar letters of rec. can really overcome a low GPA hurdle.
  18. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    You have a lot of schools on your list but it's not unheard of to have that number or even more by international students. However, make sure you really are a good fit and you're not just adding schools to add schools. I would also comment that your list is extremely top-heavy. If I were you, I'd swap out 3-5 highly competitive programs that are your worst fits for some that are less competitive. Unfortunately, your GPA could get you filtered out from most highly competitive schools especially without an exceptional GRE to compensate. Industry experience is also less beneficial compared to academic research with one reason being that your LoR's won't be coming from colleagues of the admissions committee members. One constant I've seen in people at highly competitive schools is that most of the time their LoR writers are well-known to the ad comms. I've seen individuals who applied with a similar profile as you and a very top-heavy list of schools not end up with any interviews. Your age isn't a problem by the way but the amount of time you've spent away from academic research might be. If you are more explicit about your interests, I can give you suggestions of schools and programs you might want to consider. If you really really like the schools you've listed, get creative with what programs you apply to. You don't need to be in each school's flagship neuro program, you just need to get into an affiliated one; usually these are far less competitive. Examples of this are Harvard's SHBT or BU's A&N which are lesser known but still give you similar access to labs (although some programs are subfield focused).
  19. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    This is not a program question, it's a lab-dependent one. It makes zero sense to look for programs that don't require their students to do wet lab because, again, this has nothing to do with the program. Just choose a computational lab. Literally every neuroscience program has computational labs so that should help you narrow your list down to . . . every single neuroscience program. Sorry for being snarky but it's really not a well-posed question.
  20. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Don't worry about the competitiveness because you yourself are a competitive applicant. If it's a good fit and you like the work there, then apply.
  21. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I should also mention that CMU has a ton of different programs. They used to have bio which contained their neuro but that has now split off into its own Program in Systems Neuroscience (PSN). There is also a joint institute with Pitt called CNBC (Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition) which hosts its own PhD program called the Program in Neural Computation (PNC). Pitt itself also has its own neuroscience program as well (CNUP) which is also very good. It's confusing I know!
  22. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Yeah I would not trust any guidebook. The info is outdated probably if not outright incorrect. UW's admissions rate is probably below 5% (that's just a guess) but I actually went there so I'd like to think I have some idea of its competitiveness. It's more competitive than the program I'm currently in (I got in here but not UW) I think and my current program's admissions rate was around 3% or less. UW's program is in the top-10 for the U.S. and my current one was top-20 at the time. I didn't end up accepting the offer because in the end I realized I would've done better in a major city than a town but I had a great time there so it was a difficult decision. They have a beautiful new science campus funded by Phil Knight that's focused on translational work.
  23. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I think you should reorient your rankings a bit. UW is very hard to get into imo harder than Brown or CMU Bio unless by CMU Bio you mean PNC (they have a separate Bio and now Neuro program [led by Barbara Shinn-Cunningham formerly at BU]). You might want to also consider UChicago if you're interested in ML and neuroscience: they are making strong in-roads into this with their new sys/comp neuro building/program led by Brent Doiron. If you're interested in ML and Neuro I'd put a place like Columbia in there too. There are also programs like USC that really specialize in ML and neuroengineering that you might be interested in. UC Davis I can say will have a new faculty member (still not public) that you will be *very* interested in working with. Davis also hired like an insane number of new neuro faculty (like 10) and with new faculty comes lots of spots for grad students. Also, UO has a small computational unit and Tim Gardner is there now who co-founded Neuralink who you might know (he used to be at BU). I'm also a bit surprised that NYU is not on your list given your background in network analysis what with Buszaki and Xiaojing Wang among others. I think your list is slightly top-heavy but not unreasonable depending on the quality of your LoR. Do everything you can to get that manuscript to at least bioRxiv before you submit your apps! Tons of applicants say "first-author manuscript in prep" but that's really meaningless; show committees that you have an actual paper and aren't still "collecting data". As a final piece of advice, don't focus on admissions rates *at all*. These are all extremely competitive programs and so you should just think about fit and making the case to these schools that you're the perfect grad student for their program specifically. You're in the category of solid student with great research experience and grades but to stand out, you'll need to really make it clear you've thought deeply about their program and how you fit into it. I guarantee your app will get eyeballs so you just need to show them the magic.
  24. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    I mean, you can certainly ask but it would probably annoy a professor. Professors don't want to be asked "how do I get into your program", they instead only want to be asked "how can I work with you". Big difference.
  25. ManifoldsAreMadeUp
    Different departments can run things extremely differently. I know of a school with two neuro programs and one's admissions is by committee and one is run nearly by a single person.
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