<p>Hi. I am senior, starting to think about graduate schools, Fall 2012 admissions (want to spend a year in a lab).
I note that many places such as Penn, Cornell, Columbia etc have bio phd programs affilliated with the hospital and others with the main campus.</p>
<p>Are there any general differences in the two settings? How did you chose one over the other? Is one setting generally considered superior to the other and in what way?
I have been told I have very good scores, research etc and should aim high.</p>
<p>I am interested in cell biology or maybe neuro.</p>
<p>How do you find out which programs are "best" in terms of quality of research, faculty etc.?
Thanks so much and good luck to you.</p>
<p>I’m in a health sciences program but not the “hard” sciences like bio. My school is affiliated with a medical center (I go to Columbia), but I am in an interdisciplinary program that takes places on both campuses and so I have a little insight into the differences.</p>
<p>The cultures between medical center programs and main-campus based programs are quite different. This is going to be different in the hard sciences because of the availability of training grants and such, but there’s more of an atmosphere of funding yourself by writing dissertation grants or fellowship proposals at a medical center based program because the professors themselves have to write grants in order to pay their salaries. I’ve noticed the students at main campus get more support institutionally. On the other hand, external awards are always great for the CV, and I might not have put as much time and energy into my NSF proposal had I known that it didn’t matter whether I got it.</p>
<p>From a research standpoint, IMO the medical center is superior. I’m an applied researcher who uses psychological methods to look at health behavior and social health problems. In the more traditional psychology department, there aren’t many people doing applied work. They are doing very basic science and a lot of it isn’t very innovative. It’s the same old working with 18 to 22 year old undergraduate subjects and then using them to generalize to entire populations of people. In my work I am encouraged to recruit in different populations, to do community-based studies, to use innovative methods in collecting and analyzing my data. I suspect this may also be the case with hard sciences programs, in that a lot of the “hot” and “sexy” research will be being done by the medical school/center affiliated programs. The professors up here also seem far more grant driven and more in touch with the very recent literature in their fields. The professors are more involved with the day to day work of their research even when they have large centers or labs - they can talk freely about the work on the ground, the actual process of collecting because they were involved. On the main campus, it seems like the professors (especially the tenured ones) leave most of the day to day work of their research to RAs, grad students and postdocs. Of course this will vary by advisor.</p>
<p>From a standard of living standpoint, a lot of time the medical center is in a less desirable area than the main campus and has fewer amenities, but because your university may think of them as separate, you may not be able to use some of the amenities of the main campus. Although I am technically enrolled in the main campus as a GSAS student (and thus most of my administrative stuff - financial aid, registration, etc. - is handled through there), I am considered a medical center student and the fees paid for facilities are to the MC. That means that I can’t use the main campus’s health services, their gym, and I’m not eligible for housing from the main campus. Being that housing up here sucks and there’s not enough of it, I had to find independent housing by myself in the city with little help from the housing office. Most of my graduate student friends in main campus programs live in university-subsidized housing in the Upper West Side, which is nice. My friends in med center programs either live in the not-so-nice neighborhoods that the med center is in or were priced out to Harlem, Brooklyn or Queens (where they sometimes face 45-90 minute commutes). The amount of housing that we DO have is pretty bad compared to the pretty apartments that the main campus owns in the Upper West Side. I’ll also note that our fitness center is depressing compared to the beautiful center the main campus has (our is in the basement of some small building and doesn’t even have bikes - it has just 7 treadmills, for one example. Think of all the programs on the med center campus) and that the health services are far smaller uptown than downtown, which sometimes contributes to longer wait times.</p>
<p>So there is some give and take. I’d ask individual students at the programs in which you’re interested what their take is on being a main campus student vs. a medical center campus student.</p>