<p>Hi. I'm thinking about getting a pHd in bme, but I have no idea which programs are good and which ones have good financial aid packages...Also, for the application process, how much weight is given to research experience, gre, gpa, extracurricular activities, etc? Any advice would help...thanks</p>
<p>Everything you listed is important. What professors have told me though is that the typical undergraduate research experience is nothing like graduate research so it's not necessarily important to do work in what you think you will be ultimately interested in. But it's nice to get summer REU experience that takes you to different schools or get an internship somewhere to show you have diversity. I've been told that above a 3.5-3.6 and solid GRE's, they start looking at other areas of your application, but of course do your best. Remember, that lots of people get 800's on the GRE math, so you have to shoot for that. You also won't get into a PhD program if you can't convince them that you're interested in their research areas so you have to do your research on specific professors. There are some schools where I had to exaggerate in my personal statement about how excited I was to do whatever research they were doing. Maybe I did a really crappy job of it because I didn't get into any of them, but I got into the ones where I really was genuinely interested in the work. Your letters of rec must be huge because they need to show your dedication and your potential to work with others, do in-depth research, and be brilliantly successful and famous. But for BME, you don't need to do the high school thing of filling your resume with extracurricular activities, but hopefully you can show that you have long-term interests.</p>
<p>J/k about the last part. Almost everybody who has the time and money will blanket the top BME programs plus Stanford and some Ivies. Other than that, the easiest way to identify programs for what you're interested in is to ask your profs, especially if you already know what you're interested in, or go down the list of BME schools and look up their research. Your profs advice should be different depending on what your career goals are, industry vs. research/academia.</p>
<p>Just noticed your question about funding...</p>
<p>All the schools will fund at least your first year b/c you're taking classes. But some will require that you get a fellowship of some kind after that while others will guarantee you funding all the way. And some schools do have kind of crappy stipends. At GaTech, it will be about $24k and there are lots of extra little things you can do to increase it. Some places could be as little as $17k. I heard that VaTech was giving $35k for 2 yrs Master's students. Almost all schools will have TA-ships and they should have RA-ships. This year, a lot of people were turned off by San Diego b/c the recruiting visit was uninspired. They didn't get to see any labs or anything. There was also talk that the professors couldn't support that many new graduate students so students were having to go to other departments to look for support. Just stay on top of the news and see if any schools are getting into the public press and such. It's usually a tough choice for everybody.</p>
<p>Another thing I thought of. In your app, they will be looking to see whether you are capable of doing original, interesting things vs. a ho-hum thesis.</p>
<p>i have the rankings from the 2006 USnews:
1. Johns Hopkins
2. UC-San Diego
3. Georgia Tech
4. Duke
University of Washington
6. UPenn
7. BU
MIT
9.Case Western
10. Rice
UC-Berkeley/UC-San Fran.</p>