liddy

When I interviewed, post-interview acceptance rate at UCSF BMS was ~1/3, and at Yale Microbio ~1/2. But this isn't as predictable year to year, or even within an umbrella, as you might guess. Programs often adjust their acceptance rates based on the size of last year's class, but then don't adjust the number interviewed as they often traditionally recruit X number of weekends with X recruits - just because they know that works well and have the logistics down. And especially programs within umbrella groups can have weird rules. For example, at my program, the broader umbrella group decides the number of acceptances each program will send out each year, based on the target class size but programs also get bonuses for the number of their first-years that won the NSF (and are thus free), or accepting students who fulfill diversity criteria. The programs then indvidually choose how many students they will interview.

Doing a fantastic job in one lab will be much better than doing average-good jobs in two labs. Pick one, and as other said, if you don't like it, switch. And as much as I'm sure you love your intended research focus, try to consider trying other areas in a summer REU or something. Your second year into undergrad, there's really no way you've been exposed to enough science yet to really know what you like the best or what to work on for your career. You may like other things you just haven't stumbled across yet much better, and you won't know that unless you branch out a little.

Not speaking English is unlikely to be a problem at a Max Planck- most good German departments will have a big international component and do most everything in English because of it. 3 years for a PhD can seem like a pro, but has its issues... A 3 year PhD is part of the reason some Americans look down on European PhD's- it is not realistic to think you will receive equivalent training in 3 years as you would in a typical 5-6 year American PhD. This is less of an issue for Germans because of how their system is set up. Essentially all Germans would do a 2-year masters in their field before a PhD. Then the PhD does not include any coursework, rotations, qualifying exam, etc. The German master's sort of corresponds to the first 2 years of an American PhD program- which is obviously time-saving to skip, but may not be the greatest idea as far as your training is concerned. Rotations are also an extreme rarity in Germany, so if you went there you'd likely be committed to work with this one specific person. That could go great, but if it doesn't, you have very little back up plan, and living in a foreign country where you have minimal connections, established support network, friends, understanding of how their system is set up, is not going to make that easier.

Doing a rotation with a lab that doesn't have funding for new students really only makes sense if: 1) you have already found a lab you want to join, that is able to take you, and 2) the lab without funding does some method or works on some topic that is very appealing to you and is also unique enough you could not learn it in a different lab in your program that could actually take you. Picking up skills during a rotation is nice, but you will likely do this in any lab- until you have one or two viable thesis lab options it is best to limit your rotations to labs accepting students.

Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) DBBS has a free application. UNC BBSP also has a very generous fee waiver policy, that if I remember correctly, I qualified for solely by receiving any need-based financial aid for college at all (see here http://gradschool.unc.edu/admissions/feewaiver.html)

Well not actually forever, just significantly longer than average for their dept. I doubt such PIs bring it up when recruiting, but I also really doubt they would lie if specifically asked- so ask. After all, you can always ask students how long people take, and PIs realize this.

I would absolutely ask the time-to-finishing and number of students quitting to PIs. There are labs everywhere that are known for keeping students forever, and less frequently, students quitting. I also asked PIs what aspects of their program they thought were strongest and weakest, and got surprisingly helpful responses. Also, ask about approach to training new students, and resolving conflicts between lab members - not that there is any one wrong or right way for these things, but a surprising number of PIs seem to have absolutely no plan whatsoever...

True for business, but grad programs aren't businesses. The students are going to leave after 5-7 years no matter what, and the school will have to recruit and interview new students. And the entire idea of grad school is that it is training. Once a student is fully trained, an ethical advisor lets them graduate promptly, and doesn't ask them to hang around for years so they don't have to waste money retraining a new student. Is it also wasteful that some exceptionally productive students graduate on 4-5 year timelines?

St Louis is a perfectly nice mid-sized Midwestern city. Not everyone would like it, but the same could be said about any place. However, it doesn't have quite the cachet of Chicago, and among Americans from the coasts, the opinion that the coasts are the only places worth living in the US, is not entirely uncommon (regardless of whether they have ever tried living in the inner US).

Many schools don't bother to send out rejections until after interviews are done and many applicants have accepted their offers (April-ish). The DBBS programs seem to send out the vast majority of their rejections right after they make their first interview invites. It is easy to see how this is offputting to people who aren't getting rejections from anywhere else at the same time point. Realistically though, most programs must know that they would not consider accepting the majority of the eventual rejected applicants quite early on. Personally, I think the earlier notification is actually kinder- allows applicants to move on, focus on other interviews, make other plans, etc Also, many people are quite snotty about St Louis as a location, and I think most of the DBBS programs have been burned by this. So they probably prefer to reject even highly-qualified applicants who gives a vibe of "I would deign to think about living in this awful city in their application"...

I did this. At the time, I had already been admitted to the program, but wasn't there yet and hadn't made any commitments to a lab or research group. PI was super receptive and very helpful. We emailed a few times and talked once. I came into discussions with a project idea that basically followed up on the group's more recent papers. PI suggested a different project that tied in nicely with my background, and provided really good comments on the proposal draft. As mentioned above, I think it is important that you come across as very prepared and not just asking them to do all the work for you. As long as you can do this and seem to stand a good chance of being admitted to the program, it is actually not a bad deal for the PI, as it makes it more likely that a strong student, possibly with their own funding, will come to the lab.

Searching for how much grant funding they have is actually quite easy. For NIH (biomed specific) grants, go to: http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cfm and you can search by PI For NSF (basic research, not as obviously medically linked, go here: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearch.jsp and again you can search by PI Obviously, there are other funding sources (especially HHMI, but that is just a matter of whether they are a HHMI investigator or not, and again easily searchable on the HHMI website), but for Micro/Immuno, those two (especially NIH) will be the biggies.

Mostly graduate students: Duke Dartmouth Mostly post-docs: OHSU NIH Yale But in my experience, this varies far more by lab than by school. And career stage of the PI- senior profs groups vary a lot, assistant profs seem to usually have more grad students

It is probably not in the format it was submitted to Fulbright in. I know I wrote mine (applied last year) single spaced, no extra spaces between paragraphs, absolute minimum header (I think 3 lines), on the advice of my FPA. You want to give as much info as you possibly can. I bet formatted like this essay mine would have been 4 pages as well (and I got a grant so it apparently was an acceptable length)

The really helpful published is a research article in a journal, showing that your research went well enough to be worth publishing. ACS book sounds more like a review- still a plus but not quite the same. And most people do not have journal articles anyways. It's totally fine to just have the PIs you did your research under write really glowing letters about your performance in their lab. Make sure your new letter writers can do this - a detailed personal letter is far more important than a famous PI. For your schools, they look nicely spread out. UCSF, WashU, and Duke are probably reaches (but great programs you should totally apply to if you think you're a good fit). UCSF, especially, is not as well known as there is no undergrad school, but is extremely competitive for admissions. To help with selecting schools to apply to, you could talk to whoever you choose as your letter writers and ask where they have collaborators, former advisors, or other strong connections. Most people will trust letters from people they know more than they don't.

How spread out were those 4 schools in competitiveness? If they were Top 5 or 10 programs, your GPA and GRE might have just been too low to make the first cut. However, both are respectable (just not fantastic) and if you spread out the applications to a range of programs you should be able to get interviews and acceptances. If you're published in the standard sense, I'd be surprised if you couldn't get into Top 20 range programs. Keep in mind, though, there is a world of difference between published in your school's undergrad journal and a standard academic journal, and middling author of 15 can mean almost nothing (and adcoms know this). How do you know your recommendations are great; what are you doing to make them stronger? And if you're in Genetics/Biomed as your profile says, obviously apply to programs with PIs doing what you're interested in, but you do not need to (and most likely should not) contact potential advisors. Most biomed programs are umbrellas and you are applying to a program not a lab (as you will do rotations before choosing an advisor).

Your GRE verbal is fine, the quantitative is quite low (most programs want the equivalent of 700+ in the old system). Your undergrad GPA is fine, although not impressive. When I interviewed at Micro programs, I got the impression that while a few really selected for high GPA/GRE, others didn't really care as long as they didn't fall below some threshhold the program considered alarmingly low. Programs that posted things like average GPA/GRE scores of their students (not many do) typically were in we consider GPA/GRE important group. But no matter what, the GPA/GRE never seemd to be deciding factors- they apparently could keep you out if atrocious, but never got anyone in. At every program I interviewed at, by far the most important factor seemed to be research experience - having meaningful research experience, being able to write and speak coherently about it, and having letters from your supervisors saying that you did a bang-up job during said research experience. And bang-up job does not have to mean publications- I had none and was consistently told I had amazing letters. Most profs seemed very impressed that I worked independently and not under a grad student or postdoc, so maybe you could emphasize that you ran micro dept in the enviro lab and presumably had some degree of autonomy...