phoenix245

Ditto for the handwritten card. It's a nice gesture. One of my referees helped me out a lot throughout my undergrad though and he will probably be getting an awesome gift after the exams are finished!

I don't know what's 'average' for top programs but I had 3 letters from my research PI's and one from my undergrad director of studies. For programs that only allowed 3 letters I missed out one of the research advisors. I think one letter related to coursework is sufficient, your transcript should be enough of a proof that you did the classes, from there on it's about your research interests and experience...

I'd imagine a lot of schools get enough of an intake from their initial '1st tier' wave. For example, if the school is looking for 25 grad students to matriculate and from their past experience 30-40% accept, all they practically have to do is invite around 80 students for the Open House. If they choose this out of 500 apps, their work is almost done, except for a few odd ones out...of course this gets more difficult with smaller programs where there's higher variability in the percentage of people who eventually accept the offer.

Haha, I love PHD comics.

Maybe, but what part of industry are you thinking of? Because big pharma is letting more people go than they are hiring and the whole system needs rebuilding. Chemical technology companies are looking for more engineers than they need chemists, biotech companies are often short-lived with limited job security, oil companies like Shell expect you to have some geology/petrochemical knowledge as far as I know...it's not an easy pick!

There definitely seems to be a field bias. Too bad I'm in the wrong pile. I just came across this article which concerns the biosciences - http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110302/full/471007a.html Engineering and CS PhD's seem to have an easier life, that's for sure.

I heard back on the following Tuesday, they were pretty quick! I wouldn't worry yet though, maybe they do it by subject area..

I don't know much about Harvard but I worked at Scripps and went to the Open day. Here in Europe, it's considered by many the place to be for synthetic organic chemistry, mainly because of Phil Baran's lab really taking off in recent years. But there are other great labs, KC and Jin-Quan Yu to name a couple. Harvard obviously doesn't need an introduction in that respect. I personally chose to work at an institute because I felt the bureaucracy of a big university can sometimes be a hindrance and in a way that's one of the reasons why these institutes are built in the first place. If you're desperate to TA, you can TA the graduate classes as a senior PhD student. Again, I don't know much about Harvard so all I can say is Scripps is a great place to go and can really make your career take off. However, if you end up at either of those, you should have a great, though quite intense, research training experience. All in all, there is no 'bad choice' at this point.

Scripps California

I've applied to UBC Vancouver. It's for Biochem and mol biol though. Had a skype interview so far.

Sadly, The Student Room is mainly for school students applying for undergrad and doing their A-levels. There is a postgrad section, yes, but most of the posters seem to be applying to bizarre Masters courses rather than PhD's as is the case here. I don't know if this reflects the general trend in the UK, if people applying for MA in Terrorism, Security and Society; MSc Business analysis, MA Peace and Conflict Studies or MSc Transport Planning actually represent the majority of UK's postgrads... Either way the PhD community there is small.

I'm going to 3, that should be enough to choose from.

The time to give up hope is when you get 15 rejections. Which hopefully won't happen.

While looking through some interview advice I came across this question (as per thread title) and apparently it pays to be prepared. But how can you 'prepare' for a question like that? Surely you are not supposed to lie to the interviewer? My answer would simply be a concise summary of where else I'm applying. What else could you say? What are the profs expecting to hear?

Maybe some schools would let you have a Skype interview instead? If you have a long distance to travel you can totally justify it..

Anyone waiting to hear from Harvard? Specifically chemical biology?

I think I'll be going to Scripps California for the first session (in February) so I guess I'll see some of you there. Is anyone flying from NYC?

22

I have one tomorrow...how did yours go?

I think I should have applied to fewer places and tried to look for fellowships instead...

I have a phone interview with Scripps to schedule. Anyone heard from Cornell or Harvard yet?

There are quite a few Americans teaching in European schools, most of them with US degrees. I would say the only advantage to being European in the academic market is having the connections but sometimes not knowing anyone on the committee personally can actually be an advantage (no past conflicts!). I know several prof's in the UK, Germany and Switzerland who were tenured in the US (at places such as Berkeley, Scripps and NYU) and decided to come to Europe afterwards. They seem to be doing quite well. So in short, I don't see any preference for European-educated prof's here in Europe provided we are talking sufficiently large and international institutions with courses taught in English.

I'd say most institutions recognize there is a considerable degree of randomness in whether or not you get a paper. A friend of mine published a first-author after 2 months of research just because something he made fortuitously turned out to be fluorescent. On the other hand, there are projects in each of the labs I have worked that have gone on for years without even a communication and it's driving the grad students crazy. That's science and you shouldn't be judged on whether you got lucky or not. Although I agree that having a paper can certainly not diminish your chances of getting in, and having several is an advantage and means there's probably more than luck involved.

As far as I know, you're not allowed to say bad things about people in references. However, that means your ref has to be really good, because the contrast is then stellar vs great vs good as opposed to good and bad. Fortunately for you, when it comes to personality issues, most schools don't consider that for academic programs and it wold only matter for professional degrees and some scholarships. One of the schools I applied for specifically said 'Please note we cannot accept references to personality and character.' (basically they should comment purely on your professional performance)