[2020 Neuroscience PhD Applicants and Admission Results]

5 hours ago, Mimititi said:

When did Brandeis have interviews? Anyone know?

They have 3 weekends. One in Jan, one in Feb, and one in March.

[2020 Neuroscience PhD Applicants and Admission Results]

4 hours ago, saliva_everyday said:

Does anyone knows what will happen if you haven't heard from Berkeley now? Apparently they have sent out ALL of their invites in mid-Dec but I still wonder if the molecular and cellular program would email me for an interview or the neuro waitlist may showup. Do Berkeley just silently reject students they didn't send invites to? Should I email my POIs or program coordinators? I saw someone posting in Jan 15 that they didn't reply to emails of inquiries.

They send their rejections in March for whatever reason. It's a bit annoying.

[2020 Neuroscience PhD Applicants and Admission Results]

2 hours ago, gene_machine509 said:

Has anyone heard about interviews (or anything) from Utah?

Utah interviews came out earlier this week

[2020 Neuroscience PhD Applicants and Admission Results]

16 minutes ago, nerdyneuron said:

hahaha that's awesome congrats ? 

i'm a 4th yr undergrad & worked in a lab as a full-time RA at UCLA for 4 months and volunteered in the lab for ~5 months , got a great LOR from the PI, author in Cell Press and unfortunately did not receive an invitation from UCLA  (my top choice of school) so far...

i'm thinking that my GPA is my limiting factor. Even though I don't have as much research experience, I thought I made a lot of contributions and the output was there but perhaps not enough compared to other candidates.

I basically only applied to the top Universities so I'm assuming I probably won't get an invitation from those places as well. I don't regret not applying to maybe R2 or R3 schools, because I knew I wouldn't want to go to those Universities anyways. 

But yeah, looking through this site, I guess some people did post bac or masters first with high GPA and good research experience yet did not get invitation to these R1 schools, so it's not guaranteed that I can get into a good R1 school by taking a gap year to get more research experience and it is a risky path because I am not the type of person to take multiple gap years and just hope I will get in that time around. 

With that said however, I love research, but I know not everything comes easy with just passion - the GPA needs to be there unfortunately. Not sure what my next step will be, assuming I won't get an invitation from the schools who do send a second batch of invitations. 

The gpa thing is not true. I got invited to a R1 school and I have a 3.25 

I did 1 postbacc/gap year and it was great. I got a chance to get more awards that boosted my applications. Try not to see gap years as failures, please. They're quite fun. GPA is not the be all end all, many neuro programs look at you as a person and not just a set of numbers, which is why many schools dropped the GRE. 

 

Also, people coming directly from undergrad are at a disadvantage since they don't have much full time (emphasis on full time) experience. Many, if not all, programs want a year MINIMUM. From the looks of it, its not the gpa that's the issue, its amount of full time research. From the perspective of the ad com, someone who has minimal full time research experience doesn't really understand the complexities of research and are less willing to invite someone in.

 

Lastly, we're barely getting into interview season! Don't give up hope!