<p>Do schools ever call to reject you? Or is it typically only email or letter…?</p>
<p>I received my acceptance to Harvard BBS today!!! 
(via email this morning)</p>
<p>@bassish101
congratulations! was the email sent by one of the bbs coordinators or your interviewer?</p>
<p>@princebear: Thanks! It was an email from Kate Hodgins with a letter from David Van Vactor attached (dated 2-5-13). I hope you hear from them soon!</p>
<p>Congrats all of you who got in to Harvard BBS! Hope you enjoyed recruitment and I hope to see you here next year! PM me if you want to talk, I probably met some of you already :)</p>
<p>@biotechstudent My interview “buddy” recommend wearing a suit for the interviews. So looks like I’ll be bringing one.</p>
<p>@jeffklm Thanks! My grad student host said the same thing to me as well.</p>
<p>my “buddy” said people wear suits, and some more business casual. she said that she was wearing jeans when she interviewed… although I wouldn’t take it that far. I will probably not wear a suit, as I just feel weird and uncomfortable. at my other interviews i wore dress pants and a sweater</p>
<p>Just got a call from a professor that I had interview with, and informed that I am accepted by Duke MGM program. Good luck to all you guys!</p>
<p>@MicroB2012: Congrats!</p>
<p>Just got accepted to Wash U DBBS and Duke MGM within 30 minutes of each other! WOW!</p>
<p>Good luck to everyone else!</p>
<p>@Bassish101: Thank man, congrats to you too!</p>
<p>@MicroB2012: thanks!</p>
<p>@TBimmunology: congrats!</p>
<p>I also got an acceptance from BBS! 
</p>
<p>Maybe this isn’t the right forum for this, but I have a question for any current or former BBS students. I was really impressed with how non-cutthroat and non-competitive Harvard students and professors came across during my interview weekend, considering that pretty much everyone else had been telling me it would be otherwise. Now I’ve been to a couple of other weekends, though, and it seems like the students at these institutions are less reserved and, honestly, happier than the students at Harvard. It also seems like these programs offer more individual support for students. I guess my overarching question is this: Is Harvard really a “sink or swim” environment? Is there a real danger of getting eaten alive? I don’t mind challenges or hard work; I wouldn’t have applied to Harvard if I did. I’d just like to not hate my life for five years while doing my Ph.D.</p>
<p>Any input would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks, and good luck all!</p>
<p>Can’t speak to Harvard, but I have a friend in Yale Immuno who says everything is extremely cut throat, people don’t talk about their work outside of their lab group, and the interviews were not representative of day to day life. Harvard might be similar.</p>
<p>@tapdancer I’m sure there are individual experiences which are both positive and negative at Harvard. A student in our program was there for many years and hated the cutthroat environment and I’ve heard similar stories about sabotage accusations and extreme stress. That said, I’m sure there are people who don’t feel that way at all. It may be related to individual labs/PIs/departments, it may be a bias because so many people WANT Harvard to be an insane environment and perpetuate the worst stories or it may be a very similar stress level as nearly every other school.
I’d say if you are able to find a few labs that do research you’re interested in and don’t have students furiously shaking their heads at you behind the PI’s back, it’s probably fine.</p>
<p>I honestly don’t know what people mean when they say “cutthroat”. And Harvard’s intense, but I don’t know that it’s more intense than anywhere else with a high concentration of star faculty members. </p>
<p>Ultimately, I think it comes down to you – if you’re the type that wants to join a BSD lab and crank out high-impact papers while working 80 hours a week, you’re going to do that whether you’re at Harvard or whether you’re somewhere else.</p>
<p>As for sink-or-swim, or being eaten alive, I don’t know how many of my cohort-mates didn’t finish the program. But it wasn’t a huge number, and I’ve seen the defense notices for all of my friends from first year. </p>
<p>I’m more than happy to answer specific questions, either about the program or about my experience. I find it really difficult to talk in generalities.</p>
<p>^^80?! Wow. I thought some of the students Ive met at interviews doing 60-70 was a lot!</p>
<p>@tapdancer:</p>
<p>I would generally like to echo what mollie has already said - the experience you have at Harvard BBS is almost entirely up to you. The lab you choose has far more bearing on your “happiness” than anything about the program itself. You can choose intense labs where people work through the night or a really laid back lab where you’ll hear crickets chirping on the weekends and after 5pm. The real beauty of Harvard is that given the sheer number of PIs to choose from, you are almost guaranteed a lab where you like both the environment and the science. The administrators of the program are some of the most helpful people you’ll ever find.</p>
<p>I have never heard of anyone in the BBS program describe our time here as “sink or swim” or having the feeling of being “eaten alive.” Its simply not true. What is true is that there is an attrition rate, which in my class is under 5%. In the case of all of these people, they left the program because they decided they were more interested in pursuing other things.</p>
<p>@rabbitstew:</p>
<p>Allow me to say as unequivocally as possible, that I have never heard of any friends, in years above or below, who have had their work maliciously sabotaged. If the student in your program is talking about the environment among Harvard undergraduates, then I will be the first to admit that I do not know about anything that happens in Cambridge. However, that type of environment is absolutely not found in BBS.</p>
<p>I personally know of two disputes with BBS faculty concerning sabotage and stealing data, one of them is incontestably poor form while the other seems more like accusations because of another’s success. It definitely exists, but again, it might exist everywhere and we just hear about it more with Harvard because it’s a big name. It might also be that the pressure for faculty to keep their jobs is too intense and these things are swept under the rug for the sake of success. It’s a large program, of course, and I’m absolutely sure that the vast majority of PIs are honest. It’s not something that would keep me out of such a large and successful program, but it is something I’d keep an eye out for when choosing a lab.</p>