Probability of acceptance - types of schools

[Dan M.]

Hello, I have been seeking advice for a while now on how competitive I am as a potential new graduate school applicant. I plan on graduating next year, totaling 5 years as an undergrad with a BS in Chemistry, with the ACS certified degree program. This degree simply requires more Chemistry classes than the normal BS degree. In addition, I am taking all the biochemistry classes my school has to offer and plan on minority in Biology. I expect to have a publication this spring in research, which I have been involved in for almost 2 years now. By the time I graduate I expect to have 2-3 publications based on the progress my research group has attained. My gap is around 3.4-3.5 but I hope to raise it to at least a 3.6-3.7 by the end of my 5th year next spring. I have a moderate amount of volunteer experience and expect to have at least two good recommendation letters from professors I have a good relationship with.

I plan on applying to a PhD program in any of the following schools:

Madison, Boulder, UCSF and/or UCSD (California), and perhaps Berkeley. These are just my top choices, I plan on researching more schools.

[prolixity]

Unless your volunteer work is directly related to the research you wish to pursue, no one will care about it.  Focus on raising the GPA, taking courses which will strengthen your chemistry application, and developing your own research interests so you might propose a project to interested PIs early on.  

 

The minor in biology doesn't seem very useful for admissions into a chemistry program if you've already taken biochemistry and chemical biology coursework.  I would focus instead on statistics courses, programming courses, and computational modeling courses.  Your competitors at top universities will likely be proficient in python, MatLab or Mathematica, and probably one or two ab initio modeling programs.  

 

good luck.   

[Quantum Buckyball]

I think it's very important to have some sort of volunteering experiences, especially if it's in the chemistry field. It shows the school that you're willing to "give back". I was a member of chemistry club at my former school, and held a leadership position for 2 years before I applied for graduate school.

Having a minor in biology will definitely boost your application, it's better than those with only a BS in Chemistry. If you haven't noticed, majority of chemistry research groups are currently working on research somewhat related to biology.

Lastly, you should definitely take a programming course or computation modeling course before you graduate.

[Dan M.]

Good advice, my degree requires that I take only one computer science class so ill definitely look into that more.

[Cookie]

What kind of research are you interested in doing for your PhD? if it is not closely related to biology, I would spend that time/effort for research.  Would you be able to have your independent project? Big or small, the learning involves in planning and carrying out your own research would really help shape your interests and prepare you for graduate work.  An honor thesis would be a nice addition.

I would add to take some stats courses. 

[frankstoneline]

What criteria did you use to pick those top choices?

If you have decent research experience and are authoring papers, your GPA shouldnt hold you back, though it seems you'd be fighting a bit of an uphill battle for admission slots at some of those schools (though, strong LOR's, compelling statement of purpose and some first author publications would certainly make that more manageable).

I agree with previous posters, if you arent headed for a med. chem or biochem research group your time might be better suited picking up a math minor or looking into learning a programming language.

[Dan M.]

I would find it ideal towards my interests to be involved in a research group that does chemistry in relation to medicine, natural synthesis, etc. My research group currently focuses in the area of natural drug synthesis. I have a very strong organic chemistry background as I basically started doing this research before I even took organic chemistry. The context on my studies lies on the fact that I originally was a biology major, then changed it to biochemistry. Finally, I decided that I wanted to get a degree in chemistry. The original motivation for this decision was for the fact that it would give me an advantage getting into a good grad school so that I could be involved in a research group that does work in the application of natural synthesis. Obviously, I am not so interested in doing biological research as I am currently interested in organic chemistry. So, in a way, I can't think of a more ideal situation to attain so that my career interests have been satisfied in the long scheme of things. So, in context of that, how important is it really to have a strong math/programming background to have the ideal qualifications to do such research? I think that in this post, there is a bias toward thinking of chemistry research by default as necessarily involving lots of computational work., I understand that there is a great deal of tools that can be used for such things as chemical structure determination. However, I feel that there is also a huge difference between inorganic chemistry (maybe even analytical chemistry) and organic chemistry, specifically in the realm of medicine. What are your opinions on this?

[bluerocket]

I tend to disagree with those that argue for taking math/programming courses when you are clearly interested in organic synthesis. If you're going to do any extra coursework, I would say begin taking graduate courses in organic chemistry and organic synthesis. It's important to know how to do math but programming you can live without, there's a reason why it's not such a hot requirement in the ACS certified degree program. You can learn more as an aside in graduate school if you want, but as an undergrad, you want to show the grad adcom that you are serious about pursuing chemical studies. I have not taken a single programming course, if it makes you feel more comfortable, and instead chose to take enough graduate courses to fulfill a master's in chemistry as an undergrad--many students achieve this in fact. Focus on building a research repertoire and becoming an advanced student in synthesis, pattern recognition and retrosynthetic analysis, that is, with elegance, is difficult and if the adcom thinks from your laboratory preparation that you won't be able to make an easy transition into doing it independently because you chose instead to learn programming, it will hurt.