Best biology programs?

[sawatch22]

Any thoughts?  Evolutionary biology, to be exact.  Just wondering if anyone is out there who can shed some inside perspective on the top programs, or if anyone interviewed at multiple and can compare and contrast.  

 

Berkeley and Stanford currently top my personal list, but I'm happy to listen to any thoughts on others as well.

 

Thanks!

[bsharpe269]

This really depends entirely on your specific research interests. The best way to find the big people in your subfield is to look at the big conferences and see who is speaking at them. From here, you can pin down schools with a lot of people doing research in your area of interest.

[Monochrome Spring]

A couple off the top of my head:

UC Davis

UMich

MSU (if you're interested in the evo program being more of a dual-degree than the primary)

 

It also depends on what you what to study. If you want to study evolution of a certain group of organisms, then you're going to be more interested in certain programs.

 

In evolution programs, most of the time you pick out an advisor before you apply, so you should choose the program based on advisor. You should also be emailing them to ask if they are taking new students and if you are competitive for their lab group.

 

The evo/ecol application process is very different from most biology programs since you don't do rotations. I was calling professors and building rapport months before I made my final decision on programs to apply to.

 

Feel free to PM me if you want to chat about the process, since I applied to a lot of evo/ecol combination programs and am currently working on a dual-degree with evo/ecol.