<p>Question for past applicants: Does anyone know how long it takes to actually get travel reimbursements for interviews? Is it generally soon after the interview? Getting worried about my bank account…</p>
<p>@Extension, I got the interview today. </p>
<p>@langerhans, Which program did you apply to at Pitt? </p>
<p>@greenertea, Did you see that Penn gives you the option of a travel agent so you don’t have to come out of pocket?</p>
<p>@mobio2012 Does it say that in the email or in the website they gave us? Cause I don’t see that anywhere.</p>
<p>U Pittsburgh here too! IBGP!</p>
<p>Jan 20!</p>
<p>@mobio2012: Congratulations! Did you hear from Wash U today as well?</p>
<p>Hopefully I will hear from them soon.</p>
<p>Thanks kryptonsa, I’ll try talking to my professors about it.</p>
<p>I finally got my application ID from Columbia, but it looks like nothing is updated on the status website. The email says the committee will convene in December and will contact for interviews by the end of January. Anyone else get this email? Anyone else on here apply to Pharmacology & Molecular Signaling?</p>
<p>@Extension, Thanks! Hopefully you will hear from them soon! I heard from WashU on Dec 8.</p>
<p>@abqNOLA - didn’t apply to Neuroscience at OHSU/Vollum, but heard back by phone from the PCMB program about a week and a half ago</p>
<p>@mobio2012, the IBGP at U. Pitt.</p>
<p>Just got a UC Irvine invite!! Jan 26-28th!</p>
<p>UC Irvine CMB Feb 2-4!</p>
<p>UCI CMB Jan 26-28th!!! SUPER EXCITED!! :)</p>
<p>UC Irvine CMB Jan 26-28!! :D</p>
<p>Got the UCI CMB invite too. I’m hoping my profs are going to understand why I’m missing their classes once a week…</p>
<p>crap… the UCI interview might overlap with UCLA …</p>
<p>
It varies, but unfortunately it’s not generally very quick. The reimbursements have to go through the school, and through whatever layers of bureaucracy that the school’s financial people require. </p>
<p>In general, you can expect to be reimbursed within about a month or six weeks of turning in your receipts.</p>
<p>
I would tend to argue that it’s the reality that matters, actually. </p>
<p>I wholeheartedly agree that every applicant should make the decision that makes the most sense to him in his heart. And there are many reasons to choose or not to choose any program, and the weighting of those reasons is highly individual. But there’s a lot of anti-Harvard propaganda out there, and as a student, I feel I have the right to counter that propaganda with my own experience.</p>
<p>
When I say “treated like a postdoc” I mean that graduate students are given interesting projects and helped to turn those projects into first-author publications, that graduate students are given the academic freedom to develop their own ideas, and that graduate students are treated like the smart-but-developing members of the scientific community that they are. What’s the upside to not being treated like a postdoc?</p>
<p>
And the best graduate students.</p>
<p>
But in this model I’m advancing, both postdocs and grad students are making big advances, so the PI has no reason to favor postdocs over grad students. </p>
<p>
In BBS, we’re “strongly encouraged” to have at least one first-author publication submitted during graduate year 4 – one first-author publication is basically the floor, as it is in other programs. I don’t think my experience is atypical, and I’ll graduate with three first-author pubs, one second-author (second to another grad student in my lab who’s second on one of my first-author pubs), and a co-first-author review.</p>
<p>Anyway, an important point is that these issues are more about big, well-funded, high-impact-science labs, not about programs. You’ll find these issues at play at all top schools in biomedical sciences, and you’ll find them in top-flight labs in non-top programs. This isn’t about Harvard and MIT vs. everybody else, it’s about “GlamourMag” science vs. everybody else.</p>
<p>there are downsides to being “treated like a postdoc” though, especially in a large lab at a large institution. coming from an equally competitive research environment, i’ve noticed that grad students often aren’t trained by their advisors but instead by the postdocs around them. i don’t think this is a harvard/mit thing, but instead a top institution thing. i, for one, would rather be in a lab / environment where i could be predominantly trained by a PI instead of a postdoc.</p>
<p>also, the environments at these kinds of schools are definitely pretty cutthroat. from what i’ve heard about harvard / mit (from alums), they’re the kind of place where you want to lock up your lab notebook before heading home. i would argue that collegiality is of utmost importance and i would choose a school based on that aspect of its research environment. it can be competitive, but cutthroat and unprofessional is definitely something to stay away from, unless that’s your personality.</p>
<p>
For the record, I don’t know any labs at Harvard or at MIT that are like this. </p>
<p>I can only talk about my own experience, but I work in a lab where it’s typical to have a partner with whom you do much or all of your work. As I wrote above, I collaborate with a more junior MD/PhD student who is my best friend and scientific soulmate. Right now, we’re collaborating with four labs around Harvard: two labs gave us mouse lines essential to two of our projects, one lab is helping us carry out and analyze data from a next-generation sequencing experiment, and one lab gave us viral constructs and plans to help us carry out the virus experiments. We have a “sister” lab in our department whose equipment, reagents, and expertise we use on a day-to-day basis (and they ours). We have friends in labs all around Harvard whom we feel comfortable emailing with questions and for favors. </p>
<p>Our experience is not unusual. </p>
<p>Listen, I don’t want to gush – Harvard is a great place for me, but it’s not for everybody. But I do think the reputation for being cutthroat, and for being a bad place for graduate students, is unfair and unearned.</p>
<p>@rocafella @biochem2012 and @molliebatmit
Rocafella, can you elaborate on the benefits of being trained by PIs vs. by postdocs.
Coming from a fairly small lab where everyone can interact with PI sufficiently, I still think it is self-training that is most important. Things PIs and postdocs can train you are very limited in my opinion, as YOU should be the expert on YOUR particular project not the PI. Of course it totally depends on which lab you are in, some PIs simply “distribute” projects among available postdoc and gradstudents while others let you lead your own experimental design within the scope of his/her fundings. I personally prefer the latter.
We can probably all agree that top research schools like Harvard and MIT have more top profile PIs compared to other schools. Which means when it comes to publication, it could be much easier to get through peer review if you are co-authoring with “household names” compared to some new assistant professor especially on BIG3 and PNAS. It shouldn’t be like this way, but sadly it is the reality.</p>