<p>Hi,
I'm applying to PhD programs for Fall 2013 for biology/biomedical sciences and I'm having some difficulty narrowing down schools. My list so far includes: U Arizona, UCSF, UCLA, Stanford, UCSD, U Colorado Denver and Boulder, Georgetown, U Mass Worcester, Johns Hopkins, U Michigan, NYU, Cornell, Sloan Kettering, Mount Sinai, NYMC, Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, U Penn, OHSU, and U Washington.
What I would like to know is which schools are good at graduating their students within 5 ish years and which are not (columbia is not on the list because I've heard that it is almost unheard of to graduate in under 7 years), which schools are well received or not well received by the outside world, and anything else that anyone has heard that might be useful. I would also be interested to know which schools would be reaches, targets, or safeties for me. My GRE scores are Q:720 V:630, my undergrad GPA is 3.67 and I was invited to Phi Beta Kappa, I have around 2 years of undergraduate research experience in two different labs, I did a Masters at the University of Glasgow and graduated with merit, not sure what the american gpa equivalent is yet as I'm still waiting for WES to get back to me but from what I hear it's nothing to sniff at. While I was there I did two three month research projects. Right now I work at Mt Sinai as a tech.
Thanks!</p>
<p>You can look on department websites for statistics on graduation rates, or use NRC data posted on phds.org (though this data is a little old)</p>
<p>thanks for the suggestion. I’ve done that but firsthand accounts are always better than numbers.</p>
<p>I don’t have any specific information on the schools on your list, but most biomedical sciences programs are actively trying to cut time to graduation, since it’s a metric NIH uses to decide whether the programs should continue getting training grant funding. </p>
<p>As a departmental metric, I can’t say I find time-to-graduation terribly useful. The time a student takes to graduate is dependent on many factors unique to the student, like the student’s work ethic and maturity, the project in question, and the student’s advisor and thesis committee. If graduating in five years is a major priority for you, and you communicate this clearly to your advisor (and pick a project that can be tied up in three years or so, allowing an extra year for publication), you should be able to achieve this – the program you’re in doesn’t have a huge effect.</p>