Got accepted in Indiana Bloomington Neuroscience PhD.

[salimdmc]

Is there anyone know about indiana university?

Is it a good choice?

I got accepted in PhD 2009, but also waiting for University of Texas Medical Branch and Medical University of South Carolina decision.

Any advice on which one I should attend?

[mgmuscari]

All you need to know about Indiana University and anything related to the brain is that this guy works there:

http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/hofstadter.html

Read his book G

[frankdux]

i did my undergrad at IU.

AWESOME campus! very peaceful and relaxing. there are parks, forests, fields, and streams all over campus. people are really friendly and the cost of living is pretty low. and if you do go, i'd recommend taking up an instrument once you're there. IU has one of the best music schools in the world.

[salimdmc]

Thanks for your nice comments, but can anyone tell me about reputation of the university and of the department?

Is 20+K per year fellowship is good enough to cover living expense? Can you give any idea if i want to stay in dormitory what is the average total cost of living per month?

[frankdux]

$20,000 per year is plenty to live off of in bloomington. my senior year i had a one bedroom apartment to myself for $385 a month, and that was "pricey". bills were another $100, and i spent maybe $300 a month on food and gas. add in another $200 for entertainment and miscellaneous expenses and you're still not up to $1000 a month.

my sophomore and junior years i lived in rented houses with friends. IU is full of houses for rent that are literally a few blocks off of campus. and the prices are comparable to apartments as well. actually i think i had more fun living in a house than an apartment, but my senior year i wanted to live alone.

may i ask why you would want to live in the dorms? compared to an apartment or a house, with a dorm you're gonna have less space, less privacy, less amenities, possible shared bathrooms, miscellanous oddball rules and noise restrictions, kinda childish and not really attractive to the opposite sex, etc.

*******

i dont know about the reputation of the department, but the reputation of the school is fairly high.

from wiki:

IU has over 120 majors and programs ranked in the nation's top 20. 29 graduate programs and four schools at Indiana University are ranked among the top 25 in the country in the US News & World Report's Best Graduate Schools 2001

[mgmuscari]

Thanks for your nice comments, but can anyone tell me about reputation of the university and of the department?

Is 20+K per year fellowship is good enough to cover living expense? Can you give any idea if i want to stay in dormitory what is the average total cost of living per month?

While I would take these statistical comparisons with a grain of salt, here is a list comparing graduate programs in neuroscience:

http://graduate-school.phds.org/rankings/neuroscience/rank?w1=5&w9=3&w7=5&w32=5&w12=5&w17=5&w8=5&w100=rw

[Michelley262003]

Hey what does anyone know about IUPUI?

I got in, am excited about it, but would like the input of others.

[seunghwane]

Unless you're interested in cognitive science, I'm not sure what is so great about Doug Hofstadter.

He is a writer (pulitzer prize is not even a science prize) and definitely not a neurobiologist (he has 0 publications in pubmed).

Also that ranking is very flawed, as it has arbitrary weight factors and only 4 out of the top 10 would generally be considered to be among the top neuroscience programs by most neuroscience PI's.

In addition, I'm not even sure how they got a lot of these numbers.

The amount of money HHMI gives out is not even publicly disclosed and many of the top schools have many neuroscience labs that are funded heavily by HHMI, which gives the most generous sums of money.

[Michelley262003]

Is the IUPUI campus considered the same as IU in Bloomington?

DOES anyone know this?

[mgmuscari]

Unless you're interested in cognitive science, I'm not sure what is so great about Doug Hofstadter.

He is a writer (pulitzer prize is not even a science prize) and definitely not a neurobiologist (he has 0 publications in pubmed).

Also that ranking is very flawed, as it has arbitrary weight factors and only 4 out of the top 10 would generally be considered to be among the top neuroscience programs by most neuroscience PI's.

In addition, I'm not even sure how they got a lot of these numbers.

The amount of money HHMI gives out is not even publicly disclosed and many of the top schools have many neuroscience labs that are funded heavily by HHMI, which gives the most generous sums of money.

Douglas Hofstadter is a very well-respected Cognitive Scientist. I'm just assuming that CogSci and neuroscience are somewhat related here .

[Aceflyer]

This is a much better Neuroscience ranking. Unfortunately they only ranked the top 11 programs. Considering that IU-Bloomington is within the top 30 in the general biological sciences rankings though, I'd say it's pretty good. (For comparison, UNC-Chapel Hill, which is generally considered to have a strong biological sciences program, has a ranking of 26.)