<p>I'm currently a junior in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Bioengineering. I'm pretty well set on getting a master's degree on Bioengineering, however my low GPA and no research experience are scaring me.</p>
<p>Here are some facts about me:</p>
<p>-Not a US citizen, though I'm pretty fluent in English (%84 percentile verbal in my first try in GRE, didn't really study for it too)
-3.1 GPA (my ECE courses are really bad (C's), however bioengineering courses that I've taken are straight A's, also did really well in supporting courses of bioengineering such as anatomy)
-No research experience
-2 summer internships (One in Coca-Cola, it was a marketing internship)
-Expecting really good GRE scores (800 QR, around 800 VR, I'm a really good standardized test taker)
-Decent letters of recommendation from professors of courses that I did well in.</p>
<p>I'm planning to apply for a master's degree in Bioengineering in following schools:</p>
<p>UCLA
UCBerkeley
USC
University of Illinois
Purdue
Northwestern
UCSB
Georgia Tech
UVA</p>
<p>What are my chances of getting in any of those schools? Should I lower my expectations and go for tier 2 schools?</p>
<p>I would suggest that you get some research experience in a biology/biochemistry/bioeng. lab asap. The summer is here, so I would have suggested to do an internship at a company doing engineering work; however, if you haven’t been able to get one yet (it is pretty much late to do this), ask a prof. if you can work in his/her lab for free during the summer months. If you have pretty much finished your major classes as of the end of this semister, I would take some hard classes (load up) to bump up that GPA, and to impress adcoms. If you can take some hard tech electives, or some grad level/advanced biology/biochem/bioeng. classes do so. </p>
<p>For schools to apply to. You have to be aware that the schools you listed that interest you have students applying to bio-engineering/biomedical engineering with the same GRE scores as you do, but they will have higher GPAs than you do (I think UVa’s avg. GPA for this years class was at least a 3.5). Your GPA will stand out in a bad way, in addition to the fact that you have no research experience. So you might want to cast a bigger net when applying to schools. Look on the US news list and pick some lower ranked univs. that have interesting research going on (e.g. Florida A&M-FSU joint bioengineering program).</p>