collegebum1989

Ah well good luck! I applied through SOPHAS for the online/part-time MPH program. I hope you are making little booties and a cap for the baby!

I have also been waiting for Hopkins! Losing my mind. Maybe I should take up knitting as well. What program did you apply for?

Ahhh yaaay! so excited!!!!!!!!!!

Just got an email from GW! Accepted!

looks like emory released a lot of decisions today: http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=public+health&t=a&o=&pp=25

haha yeah i feel yah! i wish i had applied to GW earlier on so I could have potentially heard back already. I only applied to two programs....hope I didn't screw myself over! congrats on GW though!!!

Pink toes- I think we are the same person! I am also waiting to hear back with about the same story as you. I submitted 11.15 and was verified two weeks later... Lots of email refreshing! Hang in there!

I am sure this exists somewhere but I just cannot find it- anyone know when most of these programs let their applicants know in the past?

Thanks for the info! Anyone else apply for Hopkins online?

Thanks so much! Guess I will have to wait to be verified.

Hi all, Congrats to those who have heard back already and been accepted! I submitted on 12/15 so have not been verified yet. Applied to Hopkins part-time MPH and GW full-time. Only received a confirmation from Hopkins. Did GW applicants receive a confirmation from the Milken Institute?

Yeah, its because i was in a non-thesis engineering masters, so I did not write a thesis, but instead worked in a lab and will continue to work on it in the summer for a second-author publication (since it's not a thesis). My undergraduate research wasn't that great because I had a manipulative PI who took advantage of undergrads, making it highly unlikely to get a first-author publication in his lab. However, the pilot study which I will be conducting this upcoming year will be a first-author publication. But I plan on applying next cycle, so I will be in the process of conducting the study during applications so I don't know how much it would help. If you could ask, I would more more than delighted to find out lol. PM me if interested.

I just finished an MEng with the intention of doing a PhD after my program and here are some of my thoughts: First, some will say that the MEng can be a "backdoor" entrance to the graduate program since you are already in the system and this is certainly true. But it depends on the school. At Cornell, they explicitly say that it is impossible because they don't want "cross-breeding" between programs, which means they don't want people thinking the MEng is the ticket to their more prestigious program. However, I have friends who've made the transition, and like the previous poster stated, the ticket in is (a) finding an internal adviser who agrees to be your adviser, and ( pursuing research which will lead to a publication after the program. From my experience, it's definitely possible to cater your MEng to anything you want to do afterwards. We had people who wanted to go to medical school, dental school, industry, PhD, etc. But I think this is more dependent on the program than the degree itself since requirements are different at various schools. Also, since its mostly coursework, you will have the chance to do well in graduate classes if your undergraduate performance wasn't as well as you expected it to be. However, different schools will weigh graduate and undergraduate GPAs for admissions. My Advise: Contact the schools and clarify everything before you choose to pursue an expensive degree (MEng is self-funded). Find out how lenient schools are with having people shift around in programs. It varies by size of specific departments within schools as well. Best of luck!

Hi everyone, Just wanted to get a feel for whether I would be a good candidate besides my undergraduate performance. Undergrad GPA: 3.2 (Biomedical Engineering, State School) - 3.60 final year Graduate GPA: 3.95 (Biomedical Engineering, Masters at Ivy) Research -2 Years at National Laboratory - One Conference Presentation and Abstract -Senior Design award from College of Engineering and Applied Sciences -Masters Thesis - Conference Paper, Second-Author Publication -International Fellowship (1-year) - Pilot study to developing nation with MIT HST department LORS -Great, one from faculty member affiliated with MIT HST department, one from DoD, one from masters adviser. GRE -Q: 780, V: 550, W:5 I understand that my undergraduate GPA may not be competitive, but will my upward trend and graduate GPA along with my research experience with the department and pilot study research next year compensate for this? My LOR is also coming from a faculty member. Would this have an effect on admissions if he is willing to sponsor me as an advisor? Thanks

I say the best applicants are the ones who are able to articulate their views and career goals explicitly through their applications with past decisions, work experience, and research experience. All the different aspects of your resume, experience, research, need to be intricately woven together in your SOP to create an individualized story which represents your personality to an admissions committee. The best applicants are the ones who understand what the committees are looking for and cater to those characteristics of potential applicants in their essays by emphasizing strengths and putting weaknesses into context. And the most important part, just be yourself. About Law School: I found that opinions/perceptions from forums and internet discussions about careers and/or professions tend to be very biased and unrepresentative (takes certain personalities to write on forums). If you really want to pursue a JD, speak to recent attorneys, law students and/or people immersed in the field. Not people who sign up on a forum. This was my mistake in choosing a career path. Lastly, broaden your horizons by reading more about the world. Your china experience already shows that you are doing that already. These are the types of experiences which make you unique during interviews. Take some time and practice expressing your experiences very fluently and you will do well on interviews. Best of luck!

Yeah, you're right. My circumstances may be different since I will be conducting an international pilot study. However, a brief search on his lab website and the student alumni from his previous researchers, only 1 out of 40 students became PhD students in the department, and it wasn't with him as his thesis adviser. He's also not in a traditional department, he's affiliated with a multi-institutional department, which is super prestigious. He has about 40 people in his research lab, many of whom are visiting international PhD students. Even a student who has conducted research with him for about 3 years, published 10 papers, did not become a PhD student at the affiliated department. I'm beginning to think that his department may be an uber-competitive program and to be admitted into the doctoral program requires exceptional application beyond just a professor support. Although a strong recommendation letter from an affiliated faculty member, and an international pilot study could potentially boost my chances. Thanks for all the help!

All of the posts regarding law school are true (I'm not a law student, but I've been doing extensive research on law school forums) and speaking to law students and recent associates. Second, law school is a professional school, which means the volume of applicants is a lot larger than a graduate school. Since graduate school applications are based on specific fields, and are research-oriented, their applications processes are more holistic than professional schools. Secondly, law schools face pressure to publish statistics regarding their incoming class (undergraduate institution, undergraduate GPA, LSAT, etc). Schools try to keep perceptions of their rank and reputation up based on their median, 25% and 75% GPA and LSAT scores. Graduate GPAs and undergraduate majors are not included in these reports so they play a minimal factor in admissions. Which is why a 4.0 history major could conceivably do better than an 3.0 engineering major (no offense to history majors). Likewise, since majority of applicants do not have graduate degrees, it does not give you an admissions edge, since there is no universal basis of comparison between undergraduate and graduate GPA scales. Second, with a 178 LSAT, you would be considered a "splitter" (low GPA, high LSAT or vice versa). Some top schools favor a higher LSAT than GPA (Northwestern, Georgetown, WashU, Cornell, etc), while others are more GPA-heavy (Berkeley). You should research schools which are known for admitting splitters. Likewise, check out TLS (top-law-forums) since it has all the information you'll need about law school admissions and applications. For previous statistics from applicants to individual schools check out LSN (lawschoolnumbers.com). Finally, top 10 is an arbitrary number for law school ranks. With respect to law schools, there are top 14 consistent schools, also known as the T14, and the top 6 (Yale, Harvard, Standford, Columbia, Chicago, NYU). These are the elite schools. However, on TLS, the consensus is that a 170+ LSAT will get you into at least one or two T14 schools (assuming a GPA over 3.1, great LORs, and SOP). While it is true that prestige dictates your career options, your class rank also plays a large factor in your job prospects. The Dean of Hofstra Law School said that the Valedictorian from Hofstra Law has the same opportunities of a middle-graduate from Harvard Law. Finally, if you are going to law school, your intention should only be to a lawyer. This is because you will be in a large amount of debt, and being a lawyer is the most lucrative employment option to pursue after law school to repay this debt. If you intend on getting an MBA, you can skip law school all together if your intention is to not be a lawyer. Actually, getting a JD makes you less employable in other fields besides the legal industry since you are technically more expensive to an employer. The more educated you are, the more debt you accrue, the more an employer is expected to pay you. However, some lawyers do work in BigLaw (which offer the highest salaries) for a certain number of years before settling down in another industry). However, these are the most competitive firms nationally. Degrees don't necessitate employment. As a lawyer, the only reason you should pursue a masters is if it's in a technical field such as engineering, which will be beneficial for IP/patent work for patent prosecution as a patent attorney. From what I understand, for other fields of law, these graduate degrees help minimally during law school admissions and less so for actual employment after. MBA could mean a higher starting salary after law school, but it's definitely not mandatory. Best of luck!

Thank you for the insight again, I will try to apply for NSF along with applying this upcoming cycle. Not sure how the school works with graduate students since its not a traditional department. The PI who I will work for does not have any graduate students at the moment, which makes me suspect he won't the funds to support me.

That's a very interesting perspective on funding which I never even considered before! Thanks for the insight. I was speaking more on an admissions standpoint. I understand that for PhD admissions it's more like you are being hired by the university to conduct research. My situation is a little different, because, the only reason I was able to conduct the work with the current professor is because I received the Whitaker Fellowship (with his letter of support) for the upcoming year. With the fellowship, I will be conducting an international study of a device he initially wanted to conduct anyway. So, I got my foot in the door, and now I'm thinking if I could find a way to turn this fellowship research into a thesis. A lot of my friends have said that there are many ways to get into top programs through "back doors" such as having professors sponsoring students due to research matches. My question is, after this year, I will have conducted a year's worth of research for the professor, wouldn't it be make sense for him to sponsor me for a spot into a doctoral program since I have already conducted research affiliated with his institution. In terms of admissions, wouldn't this be favorable over someone who hasn't done any work related to his lab? Second, credentials-wise, my undergrad GPA was low (3.2), but my masters GPA at an Ivy is 3.95. I wanted to know if the Whitaker in conjunction with the support of an internal faculty member could be the tipping point for doctoral admissions. I guess it really depends on the professor's circumstances.

How does the Whitaker International Fellows and Scholars Program factor into for Biomedical Engineering PhD Applications? I understand that it is a prestigious fellowship, but would doing research associated with a professor of a BME department of a university in the US, help with admissions into a PhD program with the professor as an advisor after the fellowship period?

Bump, any insight?

Hi everyone, I'm currently in a non-thesis masters program (M.Eng) in BME, and thought about going into a PhD program in BME. Randomly during this year, and having things fall into place properly, I met a NAVY researcher who was trying to conduct a pilot study in a developing world with a professor in the US. With a little bit of networking, I was able meet with the professor and asked him to support me for a fellowship application for funding. I found out recently that I got the fellowship and will have a chance to directly participate in the pilot study by conducting the research work abroad. The NAVY researcher said that I would be able to turn my work for the fellowship into a PhD thesis with the professor's lab. The professor is from a very prestigious university. So is this too good to be true, or is it an opportunity in disguise to perhaps penetrate a top graduate program? I don't want to be too optimistic, but it feels like this is too good to be true lol.

Hi everyone, I plan to apply for the Whitaker International Scholars Program after my Masters at Cornell. Please provide any helpful feedback. I appreciate all the positive (and negative criticism) Question (2 pages) Describe scientific research activities in which you have participated within the last 5 years. Provide details on the title of the research project, the dates it took place, and your role in the research, if it was a group project. In addition, list any publications or presentations that you have authored or coauthored within the last 5 years. If you have no research experience, describe your understanding of biomedical engineering research and why you expect to succeed in this field. I have had the chance to participate in multiple research disciplines throughout my undergraduate career. Although each has given me a unique experience in a specific field, I feel that the strength of my research experiences comes from understanding the weaknesses and failures which I faced during each project I have been involved with. I began my first research experience during my sophomore year at _ in January 2009. I worked as a research assistant in the neuropharmacology and neuroimaging laboratory under Dr. _ at _ National Laboratory. I was one of the select few students to participate in first-hand experience to preclinical research. I performed in vitro autoradiography on rodent brains to assess the binding of radioactively-labeled ligands to assess neurotransmitter levels after drug abuse. While simple in concept, I learned that these imaging techniques were fundamentally challenging in practice. This was clearly represented by the seven months of planning I had to do for an hour-long binding experiment. During those seven months, I conducted various literature reviews, and often times fell into a daze after reading an eloquent research article and then picking up another article which completely contracted it. Inexperienced in the neuroscience field, my mentor was my sole means of guidance through the critical analysis process. It was then how I learned how the intricate apprenticeship relationship is fundamental to the progress of research. As I learned more about radioactive labeling of neurotransmitters, I began to work with a beta-imager to measure binding levels of tritiated dopamine receptor ligands to quantify how neurotransmitter levels were affected after cocaine abuse. I then analyzed radiation profiles using specific software to localize dopamine D3 receptor binding. I also learned experimental behavior paradigms for drug abuse such as the forced swim test for sleep deprivation and the self-administration for quantifying drug addiction. With the guidance of my mentor and my principle investigator, I was able to present my work on the effects of cocaine addiction, abstinence and extinction on dopamine D3 receptor levels at the Annual Society for Neuroscience Conference 2010 in October 2009 in Chicago, IL. While I enjoyed the models of cocaine abuse in mice and the implications they may have for drug addiction in society, by my senior year I was more intrigued by the real-world applications of biomedical engineering. Specifically, I was interested in innovative cost-effective medical instruments for global health application. My senior design project starting September 2010 further developed this interest in instrumentation by providing an excellent opportunity to analyze the etiology of tuberculosis in tropical regions of the world. Our senior design team focused on developing a cost-effective diagnostic screening device for tuberculosis which needed to be capable of functioning at the point-of-care. While in my previous research, the fundamental challenge was controlling for confounding variables, and creating a controlled experimental model, this project was a true engineering challenge: designing an instrument through design constraints. I learned for the first time, that in science, sometimes it isn’t the technology which can be challenging, but finding a way to optimize it for a particular application. In our case, tuberculosis is a disease which is often treatable in developed nations due to the advancements in diagnostic medicine. However, in developing nations, diagnosis is practically impossible due to population crowding increasing transfection rates, making it difficult to predict. Understanding our constraints, we developed an optics-based system which utilized fluorescence as a means of preferentially exciting bacterial cells within patients’ blood. We characterized the resolution of our device using negative-targeting blocks. We then developed alternative designs along our design path and realized how constraints can sometimes lead to uncompromising dead ends. Constraints, of course, are the guidelines by which engineers live by, and it is this challenge that makes this field so alluring. Our final design was a laboratory prototype which consisted of a inexpensive complementary metal-oxide sensor (CMOS) found in common cellphones to detect light through a two-lens system to detect fluorescence emitted from bacterial cells excited by a laboratory-grade laser. Ironically, the simplicity of our design resulted from a complex design process which made us truly appreciate the beauty of our device. We used fluorescent beads of known sizes and fluorescently-labeled e.coli bacteria as a proof-of-concept to represent the resolving power of our microscope, which was sufficient enough to detect the morphology of tuberculosis bacteria. Our efforts earned us _ University College of Engineering’s Most Socially Responsible Design from all the engineering disciplines. This was a symbolic moment for my teammates and I, and a pivotal moment where we truly understood the implications of the field of Biomedical Engineering to human healthcare. After graduating from _ in May 2011 and understanding my interests in medical imaging technology, I came to Cornell University as a master’s student to learn more the implications of imaging modalities towards biomedical research. I started my masters design project with two other students with Dr. _ in August 2011, working on a project focusing on using two-photon laser microscopy (2PLM) to develop a novel rodent model for cardiac microinfarcts. While cardiovascular diseases are a widely studied within biomedical research, our project is the first to look at in vivo changes in microvasculature following a microinfarct. Our research strategy primarily focuses on using femtosecond laser ablation to create a disease model for microinfarcts by differentially ablating vessels of interest. Then, using 2PLM, we can use non-linear optics to represent in vivo changes in network architecture resulting from infarcts and perform some exciting experiments to see how local blood flow is affected. While our project has the potential to create a new paradigm within biomedical optics research, my experience within the project has been a little more humbling. The number of complex procedures involved in the process of analyzing infarct tissue has currently limited previous success in creating a stable disease model. One of complications which occur is motion artifacts associated with conflicting motions between breathing and heartbeats. To solve this, we performed tracheotomies on the rodent and artificially ventilate it according to the EKG signal. We also found that motion artifacts are reduced and produce the most stable signal within the QRS peak in the EKG cycle. Consequently, we have built an electrophysiological trigger circuit which utilizes hysteresis to send a signal to the microscope only when the input voltage from the EKG is greater than the threshold voltage we set to the trigger circuit. This allows us to preferentially image specific phases of EKG, often known as phase-synchronized imaging. Our next goal for this upcoming year is to be able to create EKG-trigged image stacks of microvessels following ablation to reconstruct three-dimensional images of vessel architecture following microinfarcts. My research experiences have broadened my exposure of biomedical research from various disciplines. Likewise, my experiences have taught me to think from a larger perspective. Biomedical engineering represents an integration of small breakthroughs, all motivated by unmet clinical demands. As an undergraduate, I tested established preclinical models of drug addiction, and as a master’s student I am working to hopefully create a new paradigm for a preclinical model of cardiac microinfarcts. Through the Whitaker International Scholars Program, I hope not only to take these research experiences to a larger global context, but I hope to apply everything I’ve learned through my experiences to a new direction of biomedical research in Bangladesh.

So then how does one pursue research after masters to enhance a phd application profile?

Hey guys, I'm currently in a Master of Engineering program at Cornell and will be graduating this upcoming May 2012. Since this is a non-thesis program, and I want to pursue a PhD within 2 years, I figured it would be best to get some research experience at a lab in an academic institution. I emailed a professor whom my mentor directed to towards who was doing work on a field I was interested in. The professor asked if I had my own funding and how long I would be able to stay since they do not accept short-term guests. I do not have funding obviously since I'm in a professional masters program, but how does one go about getting post-graduate funding? Would it just be better to get a job in industry and get some experience instead of a lab for PhD applications? Thanks.