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Boston University LEAP Program


Bobbi

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So I took a page out of StaNg72's book and emailed Helaine since I had just completed my FAFSA and I'm accepted :). She said the offical letters should be going out this week with Financial aid offers in the next two (what I really want to know about), so everyone should know really soon!

Awesome! Definitely anxious about aid offers...will you be starting summer or fall?

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Awesome! Definitely anxious about aid offers...will you be starting summer or fall?

I've applied for fall and if I get a really good scholarship offer I'll go then, but if not I might try to defer till next summer because I just started a good job that pays well. I'll have to do some number crunching and reflecting on what makes sense since there are a lot of considerations.

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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.

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It sounds like I should be able to take the advanced Phase I requirements at a state college to save money too. I'd like to take as many prereqs before starting graduate school as possible. Boston sounds like an expensive city to live in.

Does anyone know the approximate acceptance rate of LEAP students?

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It sounds like I should be able to take the advanced Phase I requirements at a state college to save money too. I'd like to take as many prereqs before starting graduate school as possible. Boston sounds like an expensive city to live in.

Does anyone know the approximate acceptance rate of LEAP students?

Last year, Helaine mentioned an acceptance of about 70%.

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^ Thanks for the info! That eases my mind a bit.

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.

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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.

As I understand it you first qualify based on need, then you are ranked based on merit. I think this is probably where the real competition is. The CC classes are a great idea; I retook my Calc 1 at a CC before applying. I'm going to study calc 2 on my own (even though I took it in undergrad, that was a long time ago and I didn't do very well that semester), when I went to the open house last fall they said they've made arrangements before to test students out of things even though it's not an offical provision, so I'm hoping perhaps I can do that. Unfortunately, being overseas, I can't take any offical classes very easily :/.

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Yeah I took up to Calc 3 in undergrad and am going to re-visit 2 and 3 before starting. The only thing is that I'll understand the concepts, but in practice I may be a bit rusty. For example, I'll understand the use of the Lagrange Multiplier, but put an intermediate exam question in front of me and I may need help halfway through. In these cases, I wonder if I really should retake a course or just do some more practicing on my own...these skills do take time to develop.

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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.

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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.

Haha, so me basically since I'm looking at doing electrcial and I'm interested in solid state and emag. potentially.

Congrats brella! argghhh!!! You guys are killing me!!! Must. wait. for. official. decision....

Awww just email, Helaine is really nice and will let you know!

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Haha, so me basically since I'm looking at doing electrcial and I'm interested in solid state and emag. potentially.

Awww just email, Helaine is really nice and will let you know!

Hahaha. This has just been a bit of a process for me (a couple years in the making), so part of me wants to keep letting it build up. It's gonna be so awesome to get that acceptance letter (I hope) in all its official official-ness.

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Haha, so me basically since I'm looking at doing electrcial and I'm interested in solid state and emag. potentially.

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.

Hahaha. This has just been a bit of a process for me (a couple years in the making), so part of me wants to keep letting it build up. It's gonna be so awesome to get that acceptance letter (I hope) in all its official official-ness.

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.

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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 right! Theoretical partical physics is fascinating, but mathematically insane. At least with solid state devices you are working on something actually tangible with a defined use. I'm not sure that's where I'll end up, just an area that interests me; perhaps the math will scare me off; I dunno, I enjoy math until it gets purely theoretical, then I get a bit cross-eyed. Photonics is also facinating, but very physics based. Perhaps I'll go more the computer side; I do think I'd enjoy computer architecture. I spoke to a girl at LEAP last fall that is doing a combined electrical/systems combination and that seemed pretty crazy mathwise too, but a lot of linear algebra. I actually am pretty interested in BME, but more in devices which I'm told BU doesn't really focus on. If you are electrical, but getting your PhD in BME, what did you focus on if you don't mind my asking?

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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.

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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.

Interesting stuff. I spoke to some people while I was there about bioelectrics because I couldn't get a complete handle on what it entailed which seemed to be a bit of everything from what they said. It sounds like you are interested in the same side I am; the imaging devices and applications. Very cool. Thanks for your input; I was coming from the same idea that it's better to have a classical eng background first, which is why I wouldn't do something like the photonics masters, but rather the emag/photonics concentration within EE, which would seem to be a better choice for industry since it doesn't read as a specialized degree.

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Hmm... this is making me reconsider a MS in BME. I'm mainly interested in biomechanics, neuro and tissue/celluar but I don't want to graduate and be unmarketable.

Would majoring in ME or EE with a specialization in BME be the way to go then?

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Hmm... this is making me reconsider a MS in BME. I'm mainly interested in biomechanics, neuro and tissue/celluar but I don't want to graduate and be unmarketable.

Would majoring in ME or EE with a specialization in BME be the way to go then?

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.

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oh BU is on spring break right now, so I have a feeling you guys won't hear anything until next week at the earliest.

Huh, seems like an early spring break...especially for Boston :D . The final deadline is today ( 3/15) so I imagine responses are going to be going out soon ( I hope).

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