<p>Currently I'am searching for Grad school in molbio, particularly in cancerbio. I'am not actually sticking to the rankings, yet considering them as a minor component helping in school selection. Generally, I'am finding the professors through the scopus (according to my problem of interest, their publication rate, h-index etc.) and alreafy having a spot on a particular lab I'am adding a school to my wishlist. </p>
<p>Now my schoollist seems like that:</p>
<p>Stanford U.
UCSF
UT Southwestern
Rockefeller U
Cornell U
MIT</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
JHU</p>
<p>The next step is contacting, and here the problem is that the ratio of answers is 6 positive to 3 unanswered to 2 negative. Positive means that prof is ready to accept you to rotate/make a project in his/her lab, negative - means that lab is full. But sometimes you do not get answer, even after remailing. For me it automatically throw the school out of consideration, and that's rather unpleasant. How do you think, what to do if the professor is not responding? Snail mail from Russia (if it is not a 100$ DHL) takes nearly 2-3 weeks to get to USA and in my opinion it is a shot in a dark. Is it appropriate just to call the prof and tell that you are interested in working at his lab?</p>
<p>contacting professors doesn't really have any affect on admissions at top schools. Professors are super busy and usually have a hard time answering all of their emails (especially if they require a long answer). At a lecture I attended by a MacArthur fellow who is a professor at Harvard, he mentioned that 3 other PI's in his field didn't respond to an email he sent to them about potentially collaborating. At top schools you have to be accepted by an admissions commitee, and most professors you might try and contact won't be on this committee.</p>
<p>Thanks for reply. Yeah, I know that this thing won't strongly bolster my application. For me it is mostly the question of elighibility of prof to accept a new grad student: sometimes funds are limited or professor may be just changing his affilation. When the prof who is working on the interesting to you problem is the only one in the school, to get such response may become the question of principle.</p>
<p>Most of the schools that you have listed admit so few students compared to the number of labs that it is very unlikely that any one lab is not accepting grad students. Every PI that I have spoken with at Stanford is accepting graduate students (although not an unlimited amount). At rockefeller the PIs don't pay your salary, so funding isn't an issue (I heard only one lab there is "full" from the director of the program). MIT has like 70 professors and only 40-55 students coming in each year (good odds there), although one professor who I was interested in working with couldnt guarantee me that there would be spots in his lab for the coming year.</p>
<p>Labs that don't accept grad students usually have a reason for that - it's an MD who is doing clinical research, the PI is getting close to retirement, dept has a weird affiliation with an external organization (in my current lab's case, this has to do with being affiliated with school of medicine and not graduate school)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Professors are super busy and usually have a hard time answering all of their emails (especially if they require a long answer).
[/quote]
My PI says that on an average day, he gets about 100 emails an hour.</p>
<p>And my undergrad PI advised me not to contact potential PIs when I was applying, because he said he would never answer an email from a student who wasn't even admitted to the program yet.</p>
<p>It's strange, but 8 out of 11 PIs have actually answered my mails. The only interesting for me PI in Berkeley is changing her affilation and moving to the facility which do not have it's own grad program and one in UCSF is not accepting grad students for current year. The other 6 are ready to discuss the possibility of grad project. All of the PIs I've contacted have h index above 20-25, which means that they are very productive and well-cited, so I think they are also getting tons of mail. Yet, they've find the time to answer.</p>
<p>
[quote]
And my undergrad PI advised me not to contact potential PIs when I was applying, because he said he would never answer an email from a student who wasn't even admitted to the program yet.
[/quote]
molliebatmit: But it won't hurt to do that, will it?</p>
<p>It likely won't do anything. A PI who's too busy to answer emails from prospective students is almost certainly too busy to remember their names when he or she is reading their applications.</p>
<p>That was the page that inspired me to email a bunch of PIs (no less than 20). </p>
<p>Most of the time their response, translated for brevity, was usually something along the lines of "I like your application, but you'll have to go through the official channel". </p>
<p>Was it worth it? Probably not. But if you have the time, it can't hurt. That's my opinion.</p>
<p>
[quote]
When the prof who is working on the interesting to you problem is the only one in the school, to get such response may become the question of principle.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In my opinion, this statement alone, regardless of whether or not the prof replied or in what manner would remove a school from my list.</p>
<p>If you have only one PI that you are at all interested in working with, especially in Mol Bio at a school, that school is not a good fit for you. Even if they ARE taking students and even if YOU are the student they decide to take that year, there are other issues involved with choosing a PI for your PhD. What if your personalities clash? What if for whatever reason you find you cannot work with them for 4-6 years? Now you have no where else to go.</p>
<p>You do rotations for a reason. If you do not find 3-5 faculty with whom you would be happy working it is not a school to which I would apply.</p>
<p>I have had the exact opposite experience as most have here.</p>
<p>I was advised to contact potential PIs ahead of time, 95% applied in a timely and courteous manner, and if it weren't for contacting faculty ahead of time I would not have received funding from Stanford. A good chunk of them actually requested phone interviews with me before I was accepted to the program. There were no admissions committee for the graduate schools and the applications were handle directly by the faculty in the department. If they cleared the initial screening they were then forwarded onto the faculty in the research related to what I was looking for. </p>
<p>And for reference the schools I'm referring to are MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, etc. for engineering. It is likely entirely different for every field in grad school and I also think it is highly dependent on personality of the person you are emailing.</p>
<p>In my opinion and experience, it can't hurt so if you've got time why not?</p>