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Sorry for the triple post, ? but I looked at previous grad cafe stuff for the schools I applied to and figured it would help for people with overlap:
 
Harvard: December 18th-20th
UC San Francisco: December 18th-20th
UC Berkeley: December 18th-20th
University of Washington: December 18th-22nd
University of Michigan (PIBS): December 20th-22nd
MIT: December 17th-27th
Columbia: December 22nd
UCLA: December 19th - January 8th
GPP: December 20th-January 12th
UC San Diego: December 23rd - January 3rd
Stanford: Week of January 3rd
 
Keep in mind I did all these ~fast and loose~ so they could be a bit off.
P.S. the 18th-22nd usually aligns with the last day of the week before Christmas (soooo I speculate this friday ?)

After 2/3 interviews I received my first admissions offer today! Huge sigh of relief knowing I will be able to go into a PhD program this fall, I was worried about coming straight form undergraduate. Ah! Exciting day!
 
Good luck to you all!

International w/o Us degree, just got rejected by Northwestern, and that’s five rejections in a row. Good luck with the interview guys.

Yes most Biomedical PhD Programs are fully funded and usually include tuition, a stipend and occasionally other benefits like health insurance or relocation funds. The amount depends on the Institution. There are also other funding you can apply for like Grants or Fellowships. 
Some places might not fund International students so I would check but the financial information is usually located on the websites.

Hello guys I'm Korean (of course South) future neuroscientist. I graduated my local top 5 Univ. and have a 3yr research experience in one of national science institution. 
I just got an interview offer from UMass Neuro. I guess international interview offers are kinda late this year. Lets wait for more interview letters.
Good luck for  both domestic and international applicants.

Hi! 
Super SUPER nervouse PhD applicant here. I only applied to one PhD program due to some issues/self-doubt. 

I am very nervous about receiving an interview. My GPA is terrible (GREAT GREAT resume, over 400 hours of research), but I really SHINE in the interview portion. 
Interview decisions come out at the end of this month and february, wish me luck please?

From NYU
"We have sent out interview invitations to our top candidates. We may send out additional interview offers at a later date but it is not guaranteed. Official decisions on all applications will be sent out later this spring."

I signed up for the SNAAP program that was also advertised on this forum. I met with a PhD grad student that gave me some tips on what things I could work on. One thing she suggested is important to have is to have a good 20-30 second elevator pitch that you can use to explain a little of your background (where you graduated from, majors, RESEARCH). She said to practice outloud, which will allow you to be comfortable talking about your research. I'm also meeting with another PhD student for her advice and will ask the PI that I work for to meet also to discuss. If you don't have neuroscience research per se that is fine, just shift the focus on something else but that shows that you have initiative and also what brought your passion to learn about neuroscience (taking a class, going to a summer internship, etc).
I will also try to do at least one mock interview. 

UCLA neuroscience response 1/11/21 9:00 AM:
"Thank you for your email and for your application! Currently applications are still be reviewed for the NSIDP program. We will contact you directly with any updates regarding your application and status."

Hey, I applied to Yale BBS Immunology track. I just finished the interview with Yale committee yesterday. I don't know if they are done sending all invites. Keep your faith and if you need any advices on interview, please feel free to ask. 

Thank you so much! I knew that I had a little chance but I still wanted to try it and since I have had conversations with program heads and they've encouraged me to apply I thought I might have a chance but we'll see what other opportunities are coming on my way ❤️ 
 
Hey, I think you're from my neighboring country! Hint: I'm from the wine homeland 
Yes, I only applied to 4 programs since it was super expensive and most of them said I couldn't get the fee waiver, so I was pretty limited finance-wise. To be honest, in the summer I haven't had many hopes of getting into a top universities but as I went to their annual gradschool meetings and heard different inspiring stories from people I felt I had a shot. The program director at WUSTL even said that a person with my background would be a good fit for their program but now I think all of that was said solely out of politeness. It's especially hard for me because no one from my college program had gotten into a US PhD program before and from my generation (late gen-z/young millennials) only one girl managed to get into a UC PhD program and that was only after completing a masters degree in US. 
I have never thought about RA positions in US, any guides or tips and tricks? 
Thank you so much for your detailed answer, I wish you all the luck! 

I am an American student and I have my bachelors in psych (3.69). I have 4 years of neuroscience research experience as an undergraduate, and 2+ years of neuroscience and brain imaging research experience as a full time research specialist. 1 first author publication and two other publications in prep. Have lots of involvement in the field and was invited to give talks at formal conference and other relative things. 
 
And yet i did not receive a single invitation this year.. the problem seems to be with this cycle not being an international student. Most schools waved their gre requirements because of covid and a lot more people applied. Also, most schools have limited spots for next year, so that seems to be a huge problem too. I know it’s super disappointing but please don’t give up on your dreams. There are a lot of people who apply twice and three times to get in and it’s totally fine!! 
 

I'm gonna rant here if it's not a problem as I saw international applicant getting rejected.
I myself am an international undergrad applicant from a small post-soviet country and small, new (but the best) college from my country. My major GPA is 3.96 (Biology), my minor GPA (in chemistry) is 4.0, I have three different research experience - two of them at my university labs and one of them at the most prominent research center in my country. Before applying I've contacted every school I was interested in to see what the international applicant situation was, explained my situation (new college, my country's scientific situation not being great because we have trouble recovering from post soviet environment and stuff) and all of them seemed very excited about me applying and all of them said that they don't discriminate between international and local applicants. My LoRs were pretty strong (2 from the lab heads where I worked, one from the head of my faculty). My SoPs were looked at and corrected by current Ivy neuro students. Also I've published conference speech in a national scientific journal.
However, I've already received rejection from WashU and UCSF and something is telling my that NYU is not gonna accept me either. I've got interview from PennState, but I doubt whether the neuro program there is a strong one. I've also applied for 2 masters degree scholarships in Europe and waiting for their results. It's just kinda sad, how every university during the graduate fairs and stuff like that goes on and on about how they want to diversify their environment and give everyone a chance and in reality good schools accept grads from other good schools and it's a closed circle. Like how am I gonna get a LoR from a Nobel laureate if my country never had a nobel laureate or from a top field scientist if in my country the field is represented by only like 5 scientists?
Sorry for the long comment, my romantic Hollywood movie-watching self really thought she had a chance at the grown ups table.

This may be controversial: I don't think that it's worth investing your heart and soul into the Ivies or the UC's. For domestic & international students alike, it's a game of 3D chess to determine who they call to interview. More often than not, it's domestic students with connections and/or legacy. I feel for international students because they are going through rings of fire due to our current administration and the lack of available spots in the Ph.D pipeline throughout the U.S. Going to lesser known and/or top 50 programs, doing a killer job, then kicking ass in your postdoc may be the most secure route for now. I know that this is a path that non-traditional domestic students consider since we're also in a difficult position here when competing against your stereotypical "strong" applicants. Don't lose the faith and keep pushing for your dreams. It's going to happen one way or another. ❤️ 

Yeah...my biggest fear now is that they received too much applications that they decided to only look at internationals who has a US degree in the first round. I'm currently working at a top5 school in the US as a lab RA but guess that doesn't help much.

This situation makes me hold onto hope that maybe international applicants are invited later than the American ones. I wonder when I should let go of this hope and accept that I am not actually going anywhere... Someone in the thread said Sinai would be sending interviews next week. Maybe these are not the only ones? However, there have been posted quite a lot of them and it looks like all are out already?

I mean what the Dean said might be true, the question is how they "rank" things. It could simply be that US degrees are ranked higher than degrees outside of the US, or LoR from a US professor is ranked higher than a LoR from other countries. It's a bummer for ppl who studied outside of the US, but totally understandable.

I mean what the Dean said might be true, the question is how they "rank" things. It could simply be that US degrees are ranked higher than degrees outside of the US, or LoR from a US professor is ranked higher than a LoR from other countries. It's a bummer for ppl who studied outside of the US, but totally understandable.

The Dean of Admissions at Mount Sinai told us in a webinar in the application season that all applications are pooled together and "ranked" based on everything (LOR, CV, publications, academic record, research experience, etc) and they set a cut off value based on how many interview invitations they want/can send and they didnt discriminate by country, sex, gender, background or anything. But, seeing the results page 90% of accepted students are american in most universities and institutes, so they accept more US applicants than international applicants so I dont think thats necessarily true. I have no problem in giving preference to students from their own country, but they should specify it in the admissions requirements so we know the probability of being accepted is lower, even if we have better cv than US applicants.

International here having the same question for many other programs (e.g. Harvard, Yale, NYU...etc). Hearing ppl saying these programs have sent out invitations but barely see a international without US degree (‘I’) report on grad cafe. Welp could also be that these schools aren’t giving many chances to ppl w/o US degrees.

About Sinai: I did not get an interview invite and I did not get a rejection either (I am an international applicant). Do you think all the invites have already been sent out? Is it possible that they will send invites to international applicants later?

I saw a person on here unironically say that they are more afraid of interviews than rejections... ruined my day

The dude is clearly a troll. Don't play into his game.
 

Harvard is done, I know UPenn is still sending out invites and Stanford will start sending them out next week

I'm still waiting for Harvard to reject me. 
I'm a second year PhD student.