ghanada

Is this a Masters or PhD? If you only need 2 classes at BU it seems like this must be a Masters? Anyways, I am doing my M.S. in a BME lab at BU right now and I have been accepted to BU for a PhD in BME this fall. If you have any specific questions about BU and the BME program let me know. I can definitely say it is a great program and highly respected. Princeton has a great name as well. I would be tempted to say that the lab fit is usually the most important factor since you will be in there everyday but I guess it depends on a Masters or PhD.

Sorry, I don't want to scare anyone away from doing BME if that is what you want to do. It really depends on your own background and what exactly you want to do. For instance, if you want to create biomedical devices (which is what I want to do) than nobody in the BME dept. is particularly doing that. So it made more sense for me to get an electrical eng background because that is a big focus in that dept. But if you particularly want to study the physiology of tissues than there are lots of people doing that and lots of BME classes that teach that. You should also be sure to study the class requirements of each degree and the classes that are offered and see if they interest you. The best part about the LEAP program is that it is flexible in terms of switching departments. So worry about getting in first, then talk to other students, alumni, advisers, profs, etc. about what makes sense to you. I can only tell you that many profs and advisers have told me I was better off getting a more classical degree first, and then specialize for my PhD. It may not be the case for you.

@intirb - wow those are some very impressive stats! Are you an international student or domestic? I wasn't sure because of your international Masters. And congrats on those acceptances, but I am shocked that you got rejected from Stanford and MIT. It doesn't sound like ANYONE is getting into those programs this year? I am a bit sad to hear that you already interviewed and were accepted at Brown, I haven't really heard anyone else mention results from there so I was hoping I still had a decent shot. It looks like all your acceptances (or lack of) after interviews have come like a month after the interview? Is this normal? I thought offers would come sooner than that. Do you know where you are going to accept or are you still waiting for UPenn and UW to respond?

So I started out in LEAP as BME, but because I was pre-med in undergrad and had about 5 years of research experience in neuroscience, I was already decent in the sciences. I also knew that I wanted to be hands-on and gain a strong technical background for the possibility of industry. After lots of advice from various advisers, it made sense for me to switch to electrical eng with a concentration in bioelectrics. That was one of the best choices I have ever made. I love BME which is why I will be doing a BME PhD, but to me, because it is so specialized, I don't think it is a particularly good route to take in undergrad or even a Masters. I am a pretty big proponent in getting a classical eng training in either mechanical, electrical, computer, or software eng, especially if industry is important to you. When career fairs come around and BU compiles a spreadsheet of which companies are looking for which engineers, those "classical" disciplines are ALWAYS sought after. The more specialized disciplines have much less opportunities. And I actually think getting my Masters in EE really helped me in gaining admissions to PhD programs in BME because of the technical experience I have. At BU, my research and thesis is on neuroimaging and signal processing. I work in a BME lab, although almost everyone in my lab has either a degree in EE or math. I also particularly study how different forms of modalities of neuroimaging relate and the physics involved in scanning the brain. I too am interested in devices so my PhD and post-doc will involve brain-computer interface and neural prosthetics. In fact, I am also looking to join a lab that does functional optical/photonics imaging and builds their own imaging devices.

Uhhh haha ok well then my advice to you is to BRUSH UP!! I'm electrical myself, but I stayed the hell away from solid state/emags. In my honest opinion, electrical eng with concentration in emags is probably the most difficult/challenging major in any discipline. The other contender would be theoretical particle physics. You better know your stuff, the math involved is intense. Diff eq should be a cake walk for you. I know what you mean...I knew I wanted to get a PhD in BME for about 6 years now, I knew LEAP was the first step and it took me 3 years to prepare to get in, 3 years to finish it, and now I will finally be starting a PhD in the fall. I always believe if there is a will there is a way.

When I started LEAP there had been 10 years since I took multivariate calc. I went straight into diff. eq. and got an A. As long as you can take the derivative/integral of something you should be fine. Integration by parts is prob the most advanced thing I have had to use so far. The only time I can see you needing to brush up more than that is if you are doing electrical eng and specifically doing anything with emags or solid state devices.

If you want to stay around cali to work, especially norcal, than I think UC Davis is pretty solid and a good bet. If you want more flexibility and are open to potentially working anywhere in the country, I think Duke has a more universally recognized name. However, $40k of debt would definitely suck and I don't necessarily think Duke is worth the extra cost.

given your stats and background, you should have NO problem getting accepted at all. You are pretty much automatic. The funding is the only thing I am not sure about because I have no idea how they judge that nowadays.

UCLA pretty much always ranks better than USC in all the bme systems I have seen. However, I think USC edges out UCLA in terms of general grad engineering, but not by much if at all. In terms of location, there is NO DOUBT that UCLA is in a better place than USC...one of the few things even USC alum will admit to. But if you decide to goto USC you will not be disappointed. It is a great school and socal is a fantastic place to be spending the next 5+ years of your life.

I dont' remember if I mentioned this earlier, but I HIGHLY recommend doing summer school. It is a better deal in terms of cost per credit. I also even more highly recommend taking any standard undergrad courses from Phase I at a community college before going into LEAP if at all possible. The LEAP program is very flexible in reducing the number of Phase I courses you need to fulfill if you have already taken a similar course. So like all the calcs, physics, chem (if applicable), stats, eng computation (which is just MATLAB), and diff eq. are all courses that I would imagine could easily be completed at a community college at a fraction of the cost. Of course the more advanced upper div eng classes won't be offered at community colleges and you will have to take through BU, but you should minimize as many of those as you can. If you don't have any Phase I courses completed going into LEAP, the average time to complete both Phase I and II and get the Masters degree is prob around 3 years (depending on if you write a thesis), 2 years if you are doing an M. Eng. The absolute fastest I have ever seen anyone complete the entire program with having a good amount of Phase I courses done coming in was 1.5 years. The difference in tuition cost between 3 years and 1.5 is like $60k. Even with full LEAP scholarship (which I think is 50% right now), that is still $30k difference not counting the extra loan money you need to live in Boston for that extra 1.5 years.

I pm'd koochipudi about the food stuff, but in case anyone else was wondering about my thoughts on UCLA's bme program here is what I said: I don't know a whole lot about the bme program at UCLA because I was more neuroscience when I was going to school and working there. However, I think the program is pretty decent, definitely a top 25 program, and the UCLA name carries some good weight in engineering in general. The one thing you are prob going to have problems with is funding. First, it is match based so you will have to lock down funding on your own with an adviser. Also, I have had some friends get accepted to the program and were only offered like <$20k a year. This isn't terrible, but it is low for the area that UCLA is located in (surrounded by Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Santa Monica). I would personally think that living off less than $2,000/month is a bit tough.

I agree with a lot of what has been said here. I just want to emphasize that you should really consider exactly what you would want to do after grad school and where you would want to end up. For instance, if you want to goto industry and be somewhere in Cali, I would HIGHLY recommend going to UCSF. I am from Cali and can say easily say that Cali people in general have a huge bias toward UC schools (+Stanford and Cal Tech) and Ivys. Besides those, most people in Cali know very little about other schools in the country. BUT if you wanted to do a post-doc and stay in academia on the east coast, then UNC would seem like a great fit. Keep in mind your advisers in grad school can be a huge help in where you end up after grad school so their connections are very important. And of course it would make sense that UCSF would have more connections to west coast and UNC to east coast. Overall, from my impressions of living on both the west coast and east coast, I think UCSF has a more universally recognized name whereas UNC is definitely more recognized on the east than the west.

anyone else going to Columbia interviews at the end of this week?

Yeah take these reports with a grain of salt, these are specifically looking at the BME dept only, which is highly ranked. The LEAP admissions is not nearly this competitive and there are lots of other types of engineering than just BME. And you are correct, these reports don't reflect LEAP admissions, but for head counts they will count LEAP students in Phase II. This is also because once you finish Phase I you will have to REAPPLY to the Masters program. I haven't heard of anyone getting rejected, so I think it is more of a formality than anything, but once you get into Phase II you have all the same standings as any other "normal" eng grad students. One thing that is nice though is that as a Phase I student, even though you aren't counted as a Masters student, you are still considered a full grad student so you have all the privileges of a grad student.

oh wow, this is great...I have never even seen anything like this from BU before. However, keep in mind that I am fairly certain this is NOT counting LEAP students in the graduate admissions stats. In fact, I think during the time this report was made LEAP was a much smaller program and had less than a dozen incoming LEAP students per year. Those numbers have easily doubled (and then some) since that time.

I'm assuming neither you nor your roommate will have a car? If that is the case, you should def live either walking distance or off a green line branch (maybe a bus, but most people prefer the green line). Most students in general live in Allston, but it is heavily dominated by undergrads and very "party" oriented type of area. Brighton neighbors Allston and is a bit older crowd and more quiet, however, the train doesn't have a stop in Brighton so you would have to find a bus route or have a car or if you don't mind biking, it is a VERY easy bike ride (which is really popular in Boston). If you head a bit south of BU you will be in Brookline. Brookline is great, but it is a big area so depending on where you live in Brookline, you can be as close as across the street from BU or as far as a 20 min train ride away. I lived in Brookline for 2 years and really like it except that there is no overnight parking and most places don't have any type of parking garage. Basically, if you will have any desire to own a car while you are in Boston, Brookline is a terrible place for it. But Brookline is fairly inexpensive and close to campus. If you live a bit further out from BU in Brookline, find a place that is either close to the C or D line trains. The D line is the fastest of the green line branches because it does NOT go in the middle of the street with car traffic like the B, C, and E lines do. The B line is ridiculously slow because of traffic, but the C line is reasonably quick and it is nice because it goes through Coolidge Corner, which is a great area. If you want more of a city vibe you can live closer to downtown. Some people live near Beacon Hill or the North End. These are very busy areas with lots of tourists but are close to all trains and have LOTS of things to do. Also, the South End is a really nice and cool area to live in, but public transportation options are bit limited. And finally, Cambridge/Cambridgeport area is another big area for BU grads. However, you would be living across the river and definitely can't take a train into BU. You would have to either do a long walk, short bike ride, or a bus. ok, that is what I can think of off the top of my head. Dealing with housing in Boston is a pretty terrible experience. 90% of all apartments have a move-in date for Sept. 1st. This means if you need a moving truck you have to reserve it very soon otherwise you can end up renting on in NY and driving it over here. Also, like more than half of all apts for rent require a move-in brokers fee which can range anywhere from half a month's rent to a full month's rent. You should feel free to message me about specifics if you need some more help.

Congrats!! Welcome to BU. Are you going to start in the summer or fall? Hopefully I will catch you around BU if I am still here.

I'm pretty sure it is a mix of both those reasons. Keep in mind that many schools reviews apps on a rolling basis. I know for lots of my schools I submitted my apps a few days before the deadline, but my recommenders took weeks to submit and transcripts/GRE scores took a little while as well. Schools won't even start to distribute your apps to admission committees until every item is complete. But since this is my 2nd time applying, I can confirm that some schools don't care about rejections. I would estimate about 1/4 might not even send you anything letting you know about rejections. You might be able to just check your status online and figure out for yourself. But I definitely had some schools that pretty much never even acknowledged that I even applied.

I completely agree with this. If you have any desire to get into a top grad program, research is key. GPA just shows that you can work hard to do well in classes, but has no bearing on what type of researcher you will be. I have seen or heard of MANY 4.0 gpa candidates (from top schools) get rejected from grad programs if they lacked research. Keep in mind, that doing research isn't just a single checklist item on your resume. If you are good at research, you should be able to publish, get good letters of recs from your advisers, and then make good networking connections through them. Having research really adds another dimensionality to your overall app. As a personal example, I had a 2.6 gpa in undergrad, but did about 5 years of research with over a dozen publications. I am now finishing a Masters at a top 10 BME school and have been accepted to the PhD here as well. So yeah, research can do AMAZING things in overcoming weakness in gpa.

I know you mentioned earlier in this thread that you are interviewing at UCLA? I don't have any tips (as I have yet to goto my interview next week), but if you want to know anything about UCLA in general and the area, let me know. I spent about every day of my life there for 8 years so I am pretty familiar =)

Sooo if you know the final recruitment weekend, do you know if they are still inviting people to it or if that final weekend was just an option for everyone who has ALREADY been invited? I get the sense that it is the latter case and they aren't still inviting anyone else (unless maybe all the admits have turned them down?) haha I wish that was the case, but for some reason I would never believe that.

haha we actually have a LEAP event going on right now to celebrate leap day! A whole bunch of people are gathered in an engineering study hall to play guitar hero haha. Best of luck to you all, the LEAPers are a great group of people and since nobody is a "typical" engineer there's a lot of social things going on and everyone is really interesting.

ohhh did you get an interview with Duke??

you are a perfect candidate for the Boston University LEAP program (google it). There is even a thread not too far down with lots of people talking about the program as a whole. I am a current student there. In fact I came into the program shooting for a M.S. in BME. Check the stats, BU is pretty much ranked in the top 10 in any rankings for BME. It is a great program, it is specifically designed for NON-engineering students to get a Masters degree in engineering. I am pretty sure this is the only program in the U.S. that does this. You are exactly who they are looking for. Now, I should mention a few caveats: 1. It has become increasingly competitive over the last few years. I started in 2009 and it wasn't super competitive then, but according to this year's thread in this forum, it has become pretty popular. 2. There used to a guaranteed need-based scholarship when I started that covered 70% of the tuition. Now, there are so many people that it is getting hard to get funding. And if you do get funding, I believe it is 50% of tuition max. Tuition at BU is about $40k a year. 3. If you have any interest in getting a PhD after your Masters, I can't guarantee that this is the best route. It might be more beneficial to do a 2nd Bachelors. I have just made this realization lately and I can't say I know this for sure, but so far in my experience of applying to PhDs this year I sometimes think a 2nd Bachelors would have helped more. But your mileage will vary on this last point. Well, I don't know how motivated you are right now, but if you don't care about funding, the deadline to apply for Fall 2012 is March 15th so you could throw out an application right now and see what happens...nothing to lose. If you choose to wait, I would suggest you up your GRE score. I don't know the scoring system now, but on the old test, an engineering grad student should be able to easily break 750 on the Quant section. My scores were 770Q, 600Q, 5.5A, and I have been told multiples times that my scores are a bit low. In fact, knowing what I know now, I would have retaken my GREs last year for my PhD apps this year. If you have any questions, feel free to message me, I am always happy to help others as I was in that situation not too long ago.

So I have some thoughts on this. Here is my background: I was a neuroscience pre-med major at a pretty good school but only got a 2.6 GPA for various reasons that I can explain in personal statements. I did a lot of research, published, and then decided I wanted to be an engineer. I found a special program (top 10 biomedical engineering) that lets non-engineering majors fast track through taking all the undergrad engineering courses and then complete a Masters degree. I spent about 3 years doing this program and ended up with a 3.74 graduate GPA. I also have a 770 Quant. GRE score so my stats are not too far off from where you are at. This year I have ONLY applied to top 20 PhD programs in biomedical engineering and out of the 18 schools I have applied to, I have been formally rejected by 8, accepted with funding by 1, interview invite by 1, and still not heard from 8 (however, I am nearly 100% positive at least 5 of those are rejections). Soooo, the point is, I am definitely going to be going to a top 20 school for my PhD, BUT it took me applying to 18 schools, lots of experience and publications, strong letters of recs, and a senior adviser that had to fight for me to get in. Basically, it is no easy feat and all through this process I have broken down and believed I wouldn't make it in anywhere. I have even heard from a few POIs at schools that I applied for that I was heavily being considered, but that my undergrad GPA was the biggest concern. Some of these schools were even skeptical if I would be able to hack it in advanced technical courses because I did so poorly in undergrad. This is upsetting because I specifically took about 2 years worth of undergrad upper division engineering courses and then 1 full year of advanced graduate engineering courses. Yet somehow my undergrad GPA (which was about 10 years ago for me) was still a "concern". So I can say that I am a little bitter and disappointed with how things have turned out, BUT I had been accepted to my current school for a PhD, which is a great school, and I have an interview at another prestigious school. So it isn't all bad, but out of applying for 18 schools, I really thought I could have gotten better results. Now, your undergrad GPA isn't nearly as bad as mine was, so that will definitely help. And while your Masters GPA sounds good, it could be considered a little low for top 20 schools (but this is also dependent on your program). For biomedical engineering programs, top 20 schools have average GPAs closer to 4.0. Also, admission reviewers always assume that grades are inflated in grad school so they don't quite let your Masters GPA erase your undergrad GPA. I hope you have some good research experience, some publications, and some strong LORs. If you have these pieces, along with your reported stats I think you can definitely get into at least 1 top 20 school, but at the same time you might be surprised at the rejections you will receive. Hope that gives you some insight.