<p>Hi! Im gonna be a senior next year and I plan on applying to grad school for the fall of 2013. </p>
<p>I'm a Chem Eng. major and have a GPA of 3.84/4.00. I'm Puerto Rican (latino/hispanic = minority), have one year of research experience at the University of Puerto Rico and one summer of research experience in UC Berkeley. Here in Berkeley, I've done a great job and my mentor is willing to write a good strong recommendation for grad school. She is a post doc and the letter will be backed up by the PI. I have strong recommendations from PR too (weaker than Berkeley's). </p>
<p>I was just offered an internship possition (Co-op) at Eli Lilly (pharmaceutical) in the areas of process engineering or environmental engineering (my choice). The position is paid around 3K a month, which is more than enough back in Puerto Rico. If I don't accept this position, I'll be back to PR to do research in my lab (not a great project though). </p>
<p>The thing is that I don't know if it will be favorable to go to an internship in my senior year, when I could be adding one more semester of research to my resume. But everyone here in Berkeley has been recommending me to do it since most of the Post Docs of the lab are in there because they couldn't find jobs due to their lack of industry experience. </p>
<p>I plan to apply to grad school, maybe Berkeley (if I consider that i have a realistic chance) or something less competitive to get in. Even though I would love to go to MIT, CMU or Cornell, I'm just being realistic. Im applying to ChemEng or BioEng, all my research experience has been pretty much in Synthetic Biology, which is more like molecular biology and BioE. </p>
<p>What do you think would be the right choice, internship (which could be a semester or a year) or just go back to school? Would it hurt my chances to get into a good grad program. What do you think my chances are for an Chem Eng PhD?</p>
<p>Internship. You really really really do not want to be forced into academia right now, and having work experience will help you out more than going to a very slightly worse school.</p>
<p>engineering employer here. Take the internship. It will be a broadening experience and enhance your future options. Real world experience is helpful too in an academic career, after all, engineering research should have a practical objective. I can’t assure you that a grad admissions committee will like one choice more than another, but I’d bet at worst it would be about neutral. Take the internship please.</p>
<p>It is much harder to find industry experience these days than research. Take the industry internship. You should be fine with gaining admission to Cornell and CMU but I wouldn’t hope high for MIT unless you have a couple of first author publications. Good luck!</p>
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<p>1st author is about 5 times more work than a regular publication. Does that happen very often in undergrad? or are you just saying that as a figure of speech?</p>
<p>I don’t know how often it happens but when I met kids from MIT ChemE thats what they told me. I had 3 second author pubs and got rejected from MIT. I got a first author after i applied though.</p>
<p>well it must have been the rest of your application, your interview (if you had one), or the journal in which the papers you were published. because 3 publications is plentiful. I highly doubt that all of the grad chem e’s at mit had publications at all in their undergrad. Otherwise that would be ridiculous.</p>
<p>I thought the rest of my app was good. 3.85 GPA, 780Q 750V GRE, a LOT of research, and papers were in journals with +10 impact factors. MIT would’ve been nice but im still going to a top 5 school with an NSF fellowship. One day I’ll be department head at MIT just to get back at them hahah</p>
<p>Hi people! So I just took the internship for a semester but Im considering taking it for a year so I can add another summer REU to my research experience, plus I would be able to save money out of both. Is there a reason why this wont be a good idea?</p>
<p>One more question, What ChemE graduate programs do you recommend for a student leaning towards molecular and synthetic biology, biomed, etc?. I have a 3.85 (3.80 major), one year of research at the University of PR, one summer at Berkeley and at least one semester of industry experience. Lets assume I’ll get good GRE scores, plus Im an underrepresented minority.</p>