<p>I'm looking to have a PhD in genetics. Not going to apply this year but the next, but it won't harm to ask early.</p>
<p>I have seen a few schools (UCLA, Penn, UNC) that mentioned they place a quota on international students or close to saying they don't take international students at all, since NIH funding only gives to US residents only.</p>
<p>The problem is: is this a general phenomenon in all grad schools? If this is true, I might have to consider elsewhere...</p>
<p>I'm not so sure when it comes to biology since that's not my subject of expertise, but in my field of geology there are always quotas on especially public schools on funded students internationally. I guess the government doesn't like to use US tax dollars to educate international citizens over our own.</p>
<p>I would probably focus on private schools and also visit a lot of websites and get a feel for the international/US citizen ratio. Many grad students do keep up websites and you can get a feel by looking at them. </p>
<p>Hope that sort of helps!</p>
<p>Yes, UCLA and UNC are publics... but Penn isn't... Strange?</p>
<p>In general, grad schools do favor US citizens (we are eligible for more national fellowships, like NIH, so we cost less) in admissions, but many grad departments (including top programs) have quite a few international students. While these places you mention may be especially limiting, I'm sure there are other programs that you could look into. </p>
<p>A lot of biology research is funded by NSF, HHMI and other granting agencies which may or may not have the restriction on international students. The likelihood that an institution will accept you comes down to how much grant money they're getting (the major source of research funding whether a university is public or private) and whether a specific PI thinks you will be a benefit to his/her lab.</p>
<p>Event though UCLA has this policy, I'm willing to bet they still have their fair share of international grad students in genetics.</p>
<p>there are only a few schools, such as yale, that offers full funding to ALL admitted grad students, and i haven't heard of any bias towards us citizens.</p>
<p>yeah, your best bet is a private school, perticularly schools like harvard, yale, MIT etc.. that have a lot of money. You probably should contact individual PI's and find out what grants they have, the real benefit of a private is that while any lab that is worth your time will have external grants (aka you can't be paid out of it), they also will have internal support for graduate students. I'm pretty sure in the 2005 cycle ( When I was applying) the majority of public schools simply did not accept applications from internationals, so definately find out if they are just going to toss your application out before you bother applying.</p>
<p>Hey, many people said some thing about your concern. I know UC Berkeley is very hard school to get into as an international student. I know an UC Berkeley alumni . She used to be the interview committe. She was saying that there is very very few (perhaps like 2) in the entire department of biochemistry. </p>
<p>I think that schools in west coast is a bit stricter when accepting international students than east coast (with the exception of big name schools like IVY league schools of course).</p>
<p>I interviewed for biomed programs last year, and while American biomed grad programs certainly have a bias towards US residents, they also definitely accept international students (NIH fellowships and training grants are limited to US residents, but international students can be funded through their advisor’s R01 grants).</p>
<p>And the bias may not always come from a quota how you usually think of it. When I interviewed at Penn, the track I was interested in told us they absolutely would not consider accepting any students who did not appear in person for an interview- they had oodles of qualified domestic applicants, and they felt without an in-person visit neither they nor the student could judge whether the program and student were a good fit. Because the program only paid for domestic airfare for applicants, this obviously hugely hindered international candidates. But if you were willing to finance getting yourself to the US and made this clear, you presumably would have had a shot. Financially painful, but I met several international students who had done this, and programs seemed to be pretty willing to work with them on scheduling so they were able to combine visits to 3 or 4 schools into one trip.</p>