<p>I'm currently interested in applying for a PhD in public health program beginning in fall 2013 (i.e. I would be applying in 2012). What would be my chances of getting into a top PhD program (i.e. Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins, UC Berkeley, UCLA, etc) with these stats: </p>
<p>Undergrad GPA (cumulative): 3.2
UpperDivision GPA (last 60 units): 3.65
GRE Scores: 720 (Quant); 450 (verbal); 4 (AW)
Current job: Health Educator/Research Assistant
Publications: 4 (2 as first author)
Presentations: 6 (1 as first author)
Letters of Recommendation: 1 from employer, 2 from Research Project Principal Investigators</p>
<p>Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!</p>
<p>Your research exp is awesome enough that I think you have a good shot at those top univ, especially if the pubs are on the higher impact journal.</p>
<p>Your research record is very impressive. IMO the only concern is your GRE score. If you could try to increase your verbal part up to over 500, that will be better. I also have several publications, but when I asked these top schools about grades, one of them answered they use GRE verbal score to evaluate English proficiency. Lower grades in GRE verbal will bring the school a concern about your English ability. I thus took GRE again in order to avoid this risk.</p>
<p>Even if you don’t want to take again, you are supposed to get admitted by top schools since higher quality research experience may make up for lower test scores.</p>
<p>Verbal’s a bit low, but I know if you’re an American they tend to care a bit less about it. If you’re a non-native speaker, it’s expected you’ll be able to do well, but even then it’s not a big deal since it’s pretty well known people can cram for the GRE verbal, do well on it, and hardly be able to hold a conversation or write an intelligible paragraph in English.</p>
<p>You’d be surprised, it’s not that hard if you have a pub/research record. Grades and GRE don’t matter that much if you are a good researcher. Grad schools and professors only care about pumping out much research and articles as possible in order to bolster their own prestige or advancement.</p>
<p>I’m in a different field but no way we would look at someone with this verbal score. SImply no way. Way too easy to get publications for the wrong reasons.</p>
<p>Racin is right but that makes verbal a necessary but by far not sufficient condition. Its why we would not look at someone with this verbal score and probably not if they improved it either.</p>
<p>We can’t really evaluate chances like that because PhD programs are subjective - aside from your record, it also matters who are you are competing against in that pool and what your fit is with the department. Also people are saying your research experience is impressive, but you didn’t post what your experience was. You posted your publications and presentations, which ARE impressive, especially if the publications were in high impact journals and related to public health. However, I’m going to assume that you also have quite a few years of research experience as it takes a while to get publications out the door.</p>
<p>I would retake GRE were I you, especially if your aim is to go into a more social/behavioral science department as opposed to epi or biostats (you didn’t say). Here - I’m in a public health PhD program at Columbia - that low verbal score would be a deterrent from wanting to accept you, although I can’t say whether they would overlook it or not (it depends on the professors and the applicant pool that year).</p>