Biomedical engineering safety school suggestions?

[csquare]

Hello, I'm just starting my senior year and have been looking into biomedical engineering/chemical engineering PhD programs to apply to. My broad research interests include gene/drug delivery, biomaterials, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and stem cells. I'm not too concerned with applying to prestigious programs. Rather, I've been trying to select schools that have several professors with whom I would be interested in working. Unfortunately, my list has come out pretty top heavy anyway. Does anyone have any suggestions for "safety" schools that might be a good match for my research interests?

Here are my stats and my current list of schools:

School: top 20 private

Major: Biomedical Engineering

Minor: Global Health

Overall GPA: 3.97

GRE: 800Q / 730V / waiting on AW, hopefully 4.0+

Length of Degree: 4 years

Type of Student: domestic, Asian female

Research Experience:

- summer after freshman year to March of soph year: Research in my school's BME dept on HIV diagnostics for developing countries. Unrelated to what I'm doing now, but it was a good introduction to research and I got to work on my own independent project for a while. I'm still interested in global health but decided I wanted to do more biology-oriented research.

- summer after soph year: Summer REU program at University of Washington. Research on non-viral gene delivery vehicles. I started off doing one project but was forced to switch projects with about 3-4 weeks left because my peptide synthesis wasn't working. My final project ended up being relatively trivial, but it was something to present at the closing symposium, I suppose.

- beginning of jr year to present: Research in my school's chemE dept on gene delivery and applications in regenerative medicine. I started working on an independent project at the beginning of the summer; it's not panning out too well so far, but I'm going to keep working on it through this school year.

Rec letters:

1. Professor whose lab I currently work in and who is fairly established in my field. I've actually had very few interactions with him but am confident that my grad student will tell him good things about me. I also took one of his grad-level classes as a junior and got an A. The basis of the class was reading and discussing papers, and the final was a group NIH-style research proposal, both oral and written.

2. Professor of a lab-based class on how to design and analyze experiments. This was a junior-level class that I took as a sophomore. I only got an A-, but I worked harder for it than for any other class, asked lots of questions, and hopefully showed myself to be a very competent and detail-oriented researcher.

3. Summer REU professor from UW. As I mentioned above, my original project was kind of a fail and my second project was trivial. I interacted with her on only a few occasions, but she was actually the one to offer me "a strong rec if I ever need one."

Papers: will be 3rd author on a paper that will hopefully be submitted soon. also got an acknowledgment on another paper.

Awards/Honors/Recognitions: honors program, summer undergraduate research grant, Tau Beta Pi, Dean's List, nothing spectacular...

Schools (all PhD programs):

- University of Washington - bioengineering

- MIT - biological engineering, may also apply to HST-MEMP

- UPenn - bioengineering

- Berkeley-UCSF - bioengineering

- Colorado-Boulder - chemical and biological engineering

- Pittsburgh - bioengineering

still considering:

- Vanderbilt - biomedical engineering (I hear they are very selective?)

- Rutgers - biomedical engineering (seems like a safety school based on ranking, but their website says they only have 5-10 PhD students per entering class)

- Rochester - biomedical engineering (no idea how selective they are)

- Virginia Tech-Wake Forest - biomedical engineering (no idea how selective they are)

So, what safety schools should I add? (Or top schools that would be perfect matches that are obviously missing?) Which schools should I move from my "maybe" list to my "definitely" list? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

And if you want to chance me while you're at it, that would be great, too. But not as important.

Edited September 10, 2010 by csquare

[renegade]

On 9/9/2010 at 9:05 PM, csquare said:

Hello, I'm just starting my senior year and have been looking into biomedical engineering/chemical engineering PhD programs to apply to. My broad research interests include gene/drug delivery, biomaterials, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and stem cells. I'm not too concerned with applying to prestigious programs. Rather, I've been trying to select schools that have several professors with whom I would be interested in working. Unfortunately, my list has come out pretty top heavy anyway. Does anyone have any suggestions for "safety" schools that might be a good match for my research interests?

Here are my stats and my current list of schools:

School: top 20 private

Major: Biomedical Engineering

Minor: Global Health

Overall GPA: 3.97

GRE: 800Q / 730V / waiting on AW, hopefully 4.0+

Length of Degree: 4 years

Type of Student: domestic, Asian female

Research Experience:

- summer after freshman year to March of soph year: Research in my school's BME dept on HIV diagnostics for developing countries. Unrelated to what I'm doing now, but it was a good introduction to research and I got to work on my own independent project for a while. I'm still interested in global health but decided I wanted to do more biology-oriented research.

- summer after soph year: Summer REU program at University of Washington. Research on non-viral gene delivery vehicles. I started off doing one project but was forced to switch projects with about 3-4 weeks left because my peptide synthesis wasn't working. My final project ended up being relatively trivial, but it was something to present at the closing symposium, I suppose.

- beginning of jr year to present: Research in my school's chemE dept on gene delivery and applications in regenerative medicine. I started working on an independent project at the beginning of the summer; it's not panning out too well so far, but I'm going to keep working on it through this school year.

Rec letters:

1. Professor whose lab I currently work in and who is fairly established in my field. I've actually had very few interactions with him but am confident that my grad student will tell him good things about me. I also took one of his grad-level classes as a junior and got an A. The basis of the class was reading and discussing papers, and the final was a group NIH-style research proposal, both oral and written.

2. Professor of a lab-based class on how to design and analyze experiments. This was a junior-level class that I took as a sophomore. I only got an A-, but I worked harder for it than for any other class, asked lots of questions, and hopefully showed myself to be a very competent and detail-oriented researcher.

3. Summer REU professor from UW. As I mentioned above, my original project was kind of a fail and my second project was trivial. I interacted with her on only a few occasions, but she was actually the one to offer me "a strong rec if I ever need one."

Papers: will be 3rd author on a paper that will hopefully be submitted soon. also got an acknowledgment on another paper.

Awards/Honors/Recognitions: honors program, summer undergraduate research grant, Tau Beta Pi, Dean's List, nothing spectacular...

Schools (all PhD programs):

- University of Washington - bioengineering

- MIT - biological engineering, may also apply to HST-MEMP

- UPenn - bioengineering

- Berkeley-UCSF - bioengineering

- Colorado-Boulder - chemical and biological engineering

- Pittsburgh - bioengineering

still considering:

- Vanderbilt - biomedical engineering (I hear they are very selective?)

- Rutgers - biomedical engineering (seems like a safety school based on ranking, but their website says they only have 5-10 PhD students per entering class)

- Rochester - biomedical engineering (no idea how selective they are)

- Virginia Tech-Wake Forest - biomedical engineering (no idea how selective they are)

So, what safety schools should I add? (Or top schools that would be perfect matches that are obviously missing?) Which schools should I move from my "maybe" list to my "definitely" list? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

And if you want to chance me while you're at it, that would be great, too. But not as important.

 

I don't know where you got the idea that Rutgers is in any way a safety school, it consistently ranks in the 30s for the Biomedical Engineering graduate program and it recently received it's 25th continuous year of NIH funding for training. I think you really need to reconsider your criteria, you are very light on research and otherwise look pretty typical, I would in no way look at Rutgers as a "safety".