How Competitive am I (Bioengineering PhD)?

[SupaMario]

Hello, I'm not exactly sure where I stand as far as PhD applicants for bioengineering go and I was hoping people could give me some advice about what I should be expecting during this upcoming application season. My stats are as follows:

 

Undergrad Institution: Small/local Public University

Major(s): Electrical Engineering and Physics

Minor(s): None

GPA in Major: 4.00/4.00

Overall GPA: 4.00/4.00

Demographics/Background: White Male

GRE Scores: Haven't taken it yet. Started studying and am planning for July.

LOR: 2 Great and 1 Good.

Research Experience: 3 years in a cell bio lab at home university, 1 summer at a US national lab, 1 summer at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. (Nothing this summer though).

Publications/Abstracts/Presentations: 0 publications (the weakest point of my application?), Posters on the Hill Presenter, 1 Poster presentation at a national conference, 1 Poster presentation at an Undergrad conference

Awards/Honors/Recognitions: Goldwater Honorable Mention (applied again this year but didn't receive the scholarship), 2 year long research grants at home university, full ride academic scholarship at home university

Fellowships/Funding: About to start applying for these.

Research Interests: Synthetic Biology, Systems Biology

Institutions/Programs: MIT, Washington University, UCSD, Stanford, UPenn, Rice, still looking for more...

 

I'm worried about applying with no publications, even though I've been working in a lab continuously for 3 years and also that I didn't get any REUs this summer.

Am I shooting too high by applying to only top ten schools? Any suggestions for me? I wasn't able to get an REU for this summer, is there anything I should be doing in place of that?

Thanks!

[Victorious Secret]

Your demographic is not conducive to REU admission, unfortunately. It is always good to have a backup plan in case an REU doesn't happen. National DOE labs have much higher acceptance rates, but it is too late for that now. Your only option is cold-contacting professors at universities and asking to do work in their labs. If you do this, go for top schools (summer research at a mid-tier institution won't really raise any eyebrows unless you get a publication from it). Your research is your weak spot. You need to do everything you can to correct that now. You can usually work in more than one lab at your school, so do that. I find it a bit odd that your majors are EE and physics but your research interests are synth/sys biology. Do you have the ability to stick around another year and do more research and maybe an REU, and minor in chem and bio during the extra time? Or perhaps do a fall research co-op, or a fall stint in a DOE research lab and cram spring semester full of coursework? Few have that freedom, but if you did, it would put you in much better shape for a top-10 school. As it is, your GRE scores will be more important than usual. High scores combined with the GPA and several years of experience (emphasize techniques you learned in your SOP) can get you into a very strong program. You will also want to apply to some safety schools. Everything you've listed is very tough, even for other students with elite GPAs. 

[SupaMario]

12 hours ago, Victorious Secret said:

Your demographic is not conducive to REU admission, unfortunately. It is always good to have a backup plan in case an REU doesn't happen. National DOE labs have much higher acceptance rates, but it is too late for that now. Your only option is cold-contacting professors at universities and asking to do work in their labs. If you do this, go for top schools (summer research at a mid-tier institution won't really raise any eyebrows unless you get a publication from it). Your research is your weak spot. You need to do everything you can to correct that now. You can usually work in more than one lab at your school, so do that. I find it a bit odd that your majors are EE and physics but your research interests are synth/sys biology. Do you have the ability to stick around another year and do more research and maybe an REU, and minor in chem and bio during the extra time? Or perhaps do a fall research co-op, or a fall stint in a DOE research lab and cram spring semester full of coursework? Few have that freedom, but if you did, it would put you in much better shape for a top-10 school. As it is, your GRE scores will be more important than usual. High scores combined with the GPA and several years of experience (emphasize techniques you learned in your SOP) can get you into a very strong program. You will also want to apply to some safety schools. Everything you've listed is very tough, even for other students with elite GPAs. 

Is my research experience actually that weak though? I have done two summer program REUs and worked in a lab at my university for 3 continuous years. The only thing is that I didn't get an REU for this summer even though I applied to many programs.

And is the background from my majors problematic? I've noticed that a lot of the researchers I'm most interested in for synth bio have physics and EE backgrounds as well.

I'm working some extra chemistry into my curriculum and I'll be able to take Ochem I in my last semester, I also took a course in molecular genetics. Plus, I feel as though I learned a lot of the necessary biology through the research I've done.

[Victorious Secret]

29 minutes ago, SupaMario said:

Is my research experience actually that weak though? I have done two summer program REUs and worked in a lab at my university for 3 continuous years. The only thing is that I didn't get an REU for this summer even though I applied to many programs.

And is the background from my majors problematic? I've noticed that a lot of the researchers I'm most interested in for synth bio have physics and EE backgrounds as well.

I'm working some extra chemistry into my curriculum and I'll be able to take Ochem I in my last semester, I also took a course in molecular genetics. Plus, I feel as though I learned a lot of the necessary biology through the research I've done.

I'm looking at this from the perspective of ferretting out where the biggest room for improvement is. Publications aren't a requirement by any means, but top schools will sometimes see applicants with as many as a dozen conference presentations and 5 or more papers published. Their profiles are all over this site. Doing research and an REU is great. But you've mentioned MIT and Stanford, among other top-10 schools, so you want to be seen as exceptional, which means that your research should be significant enough to hold up to peer review (pubs) and presented well enough to stand out among your competition (this means posters are good, poster awards are great, and oral conference presentations are even better). So yes, by default, your research is your weak spot compared to your GPA (and we can't compare it to your GRE yet), but that does not mean that it is weak compared to the average applicant.

An EE/physics student will typically have little if any required biology coursework, and little to nothing in physical and organic chemistry. So often when students in those majors with to pursue something like systems biology, with its heavy biology, CS, and chemistry components, they will take foundational courses in those subjects to earn a minor, and it makes sense to take an advanced elective in something like molecular biology or genomics, upon which SysBio relies heavily. Ultimately the courses are what matters, not the minor itself. You didn't mention those courses before, so I am glad that you did/do plan to take Ochem and molecular. (Also consider cell biology and biochemistry, which are pretty ubiquitous disciplines in the bio research world.) But if you'd had no significant background in bio or chem, many professors would want some other evidence to demonstrate your command of those subjects. Perhaps your research displays analyses that required an intimate knowledge of those areas, but that needs to be carefully articulated in the SOP, since the professors reading your application cannot currently look up your manuscripts on PubMed. I am less familiar with synthetic biology, but I imagine that cell/molecular bio coursework would go a long way there as well.

Do as much as you can with the time that you have. When it's all said and done, I think you should be able to gain admission to some of the institutions you've listed. I'll be rooting for you!