Faraday

Deep Purple

My undestanding is similar to djm0017. Unless you score very poorly or extremely well on the GREs then it is unlikely they will have an effect on your application. Realistically the most accurate depiction of whether or not you can be sucessfull in graduate studies will come from your SOP and especially your LORs. A good standardized test taker is not necesarily going to be a good researcher, and vice versa. As such, the people you have directly worked with for months/years writing your LORs will be able to much more effectively describe your potential than any test.

There really is no such thing as a safety school. You can go back and look at past years in the sciences here or on college confidential and see plenty of people who got into top-5 schools but were then rejected from other "lesser" schools. The closest thing would be a school whose chemistry department contacted you through the GRE search service. Presumably your stats are good enough and with good SOPs/LORs you would be able to get in. You know Harvard, Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, and UC Irvine require the Subject test, right? I Can't speak for the others as I have not looked at those.

You should have a pretty good shot at most schools, seeing as how they would essentially be taking you on at no cost and no risk of their own... Your 2004 GRE score is no longer valid though. As usual however, any threads asking for "chances" are rather pointless. Each individual is a different case and a different set of circumstances and predicting these outcomes is rather like trying to predict the lottery.

Looking at synthetic organic chemistry, but my undergrad research has been in biochemistry so I also have a lot of interest there as well. Thus far I am planning on applying to: University of Maryland-College Park, University of Pennsylvania, UC Irvine, Indiana University, University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and University of Utah. You can never bet on any "safety schools I had set aside some of the "Top 10" schools doing things I would be interested in (like that's hard to do) but I am still up in the air about applying to any those. I attend a small private catholic liberal arts university and will be graduating with a double major in Chemistry/Biochemistry. Overall/Major GPA: 3.7/3.8 GRE: took it once late spring without preparing and did not do very well (although not horribly), will update when I take again next week. Experience: I've been working in a Biochem/Molecular Bio lab since fall semester of my sophomore year more or less working towards my senior honors thesis. I worked in that lab the summer between So/Jr years, and this past summer I did an undergraduate research fellowship at NIST working in gas metrology. I was working on a pretty important project involving gas standards for them but by nature it wasn't exactly a publishable project. I've been a lab TA and SI (attend lecture, hold review sessions) for a bunch of class/lab section since sophomore year (Gen Chem and Organic) and this year I am "head organic lab TA" (not as important as it sounds) so I have to help with the preparation and setup for all labs. I would like to think I will have 3 very good LORs, one from my mentor at NIST, one from my undergrad advisor whose lab I worked in for the past 2+ years, and another from the Organic Professor who I have worked under in various capacities for 2 years. I think it will be interesting to see how I stack up in this process. I undoubtedly have lots of experience working in a lab on many levels and teaching students but I don't exactly have any experience in working in a synthetic organic chemistry lab. My mentor at NIST said he was very impressed with my ability to work well independently so that should help.

There is no need to attack me. I have been reading this forum for over a year and I have actively followed the thread you mentioned. I was just curious if anyone had thought of things after their posts in that thread that might be useful. I see that is not the case so we can just ignore this thread.

This is helpful, thank you. I was looking for more Chemistry-oriented responses that might differ from general advice.

As the next application season rolls around I was wondering if some of the past applicants (mainly this past year I suppose) had any advice to give as they look back on the application process. What did you wish you had done that you hadn't, what would you have done differently, what useful things did you learn during the application process that might have been useful to know ahead of time, etc. I know there was a previous thread but I thought a new one might be nice.

Yes, I was under the impression that application season referred to the time you were planning to begin graduate studies, as most posters this past year had 2012 fall selected... Thanks. This is what I gathered from the brief browsing of the Subjects test that I have done so far and based off of what has been said in this thread.

General question. I plan to take the chemistry subject GRE towards the end of the summer and unfortunately I will not yet have taken physical chemistry at that time. If anyone else has been in this situation, what would you guys suggest for preparation to be able to do at least moderately well on the physical chemistry portion while acknowledging that my time is probably best spent trying to teaching myself everything... I have the ACS review book and I was thinking I would look through that as well as try to pinpoint common themes among practice chemistry GREs and try to learn those concepts as best as I can.

Programs also like to see improvement over your college career in academics, so you also have that going for you. The general biology test you didn't do so hot on as a freshman isn't nearly as important as an upper level molecular biology class for example. And of course as Dapi said grades are certainly not the most important aspect of your application, as long as your GPA doesn't cause immediate red flags (and it doesn't sound like yours would).

At the end of the day there really is no such thing as a "safety" school. Just look at the results page and you can see that there are plenty of examples of people with fantastic "stats" who get accepted to top tier schools and then rejected from schools they thought they would have no problem with... At the end of the day there is not way to say for certain how your application will do, we can't looks at what you have told us and poperly evaluate your research experience and LORs as the admissions committees will so we can only guess. Your advisor probably has a more appropriate answer because he/she knows your experience and knonws presumably how strong at least one of your LORs will be...

From what I have read it is generally not expected that undergraduates will have publications when applying straight out of their undergraduate institution. You can think of it as a "bonus", but as ah233 said your letters of reccomendation will be what ultimately speaks about your potential as a PhD candidate.

I am from central Maryland I while I don't live in Baltimore I can say that you can live in perfectly safe areas. The area immediately around the JHU campus is pretty sketchy, and I would not suggest riding around there with your windows down/car unlocked, or taking a late night stroll... I can't say specifically from personal experience but from the people I know who live in Baltimore, there are plenty of "safe" (it is a city) areas outside of that which are very nice. The metro and MTA light rail are very convenient for getting to JHU without a car. Most of the metro is actually above ground, so it is more like a quick train. Oh yeah, make sure you get some crabs/crab cakes first thing when you arrive.

I think you will find that the types of profiles posted on websites like this are not necessarily an even distribution of the overall application pool...

Well the first step is to be confident about yourself and your applications, but not cocky. There is a fine line between those two. Second, because you said it seems as if most of your application is "meh" as you put it, you need to make your SOP outstanding and grab the attention of the admissions committees at the schools you are applying to. A google search will do wonders with this, as well as looking around on this website but here is one quick link I found: http://ogsrweb2.ucsd.edu/admissions/application/statement/ Notice how there really is not an area where this guide asks you to talk about your personal circumstances as you mentioned, however that does not mean you can't use them. Maybe mention them in passing as a way of talking about how you got introduced to and became a part of the Biology work you know today. Anything that is unique will also help you. A good letter of recommendation will also mention how you as an applicant can fit into the respective departments. A lot of what the admissions committee is looking for is if you will be a good fit for their program, so if you can make a convincing case of that yourself then you already have one foot in the door. Good luck!

But when you win the Nobel Prize, everything will make up for itself.