<p>I'm going to be applying to neuroscience PhD programs next fall. My concern is not about my grades or GREs or research or letters of recommendation; I'm confident that I can get into at least one of the PhD programs I want to apply to. My concern is about how these programs treat their students.</p>
<p>What do you know about:</p>
<ul>
<li>University of Chicago</li>
<li>Harvard (I see a lot of labs with what appears to be WAY too many graduate students here)</li>
<li>MIT (this one's a big one; I hear that they have a habit of admitting more students than they can reasonably fund for five years and then structuring their classes so they push most of them out of the program)</li>
<li>Brown</li>
<li>NYU</li>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Rockefeller</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins</li>
<li>UC Irvine</li>
<li>UNC - Chapel Hill</li>
<li>UPenn</li>
<li>Princeton</li>
<li>University of Washington</li>
<li>University of Arizona</li>
<li>University of Oregon</li>
</ul>
How many do you think is too many? The Harvard Program in Neuroscience is pretty small – only about 15 students per year. Of course, there are non-PIN students in neuroscience labs (I’m one myself), but I can’t think immediately of a neuro lab here that has a ton of grad students. In general, the labs at Harvard tend to be sort of postdoc-heavy, actually.</p>
<p>I’m happy to talk about grad student life at Harvard, and the neuroscience community here – I’m in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program, but I’m in a neuroscience lab for my PhD and I’ll be starting a postdoc at another Harvard neuroscience lab in the spring. Any specific questions?</p>
<p>
I did my undergrad in the MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences program, and I can’t say I’ve ever heard this particular rumor. In most programs, you’re only funded by the department (usually on a training grant) for your first and second years, then you’re funded by your advisor afterward.</p>
<p>Labs with more than about three or four graduate students make me wonder if the PI actually cares about their grad students, but then that’s my arbitrary benchmark. I can’t fathom being able to keep on top of too many more grad students. It’s probably an indication of their advising style - more grad students probably means they’re more hands-off. Am I right in this conjecture?</p>
<p>Honestly, I think I heard the rumor about MIT from my boyfriend whose best male friend is a grad student there; then again, I don’t think he was talking about the neuroscience program!</p>
<p>Sol Snyder is at Hopkins. What more information do you need than THAT?! </p>
<p>But seriously, Dr. Snyder met me as a Hopkins freshman and continued to contact me over the five years I was at Hopkins, explaining basic neuroscience questions to me, showing me how his lab worked, and even inviting me to his home. He is wonderful. He also once walked entirely off the stage while presenting at a huge conference. He has the highest h-index of any living biologist. Doooo it. </p>
<p>Hopkins will get you a stellar education; how you will be treated varies by lab (as I would assume any school does). The organization is not great (i.e. sorting out loans, registering for classes, figuring out what you actually, like, need to graduate can be a huge pain/legislative tangle), but the teaching is usually top-notch, particularly in the departments they are better in, like neuro. You will be in classes with medical students and PhD/MD students, who, let’s be honest, can be insufferable, but most PhD students are surprisingly friendly/collaborative at Hopkins.</p>
<p>I have a masters’ degree from Hopkins (and worked in a lab at the Bloomberg school for 5 years), and my mom has a neuroscience PhD from Hopkins, so I can answer specific questions myself or relay them to her.</p>
<p>So my lab currently has six PhD students, although two of us are defending this fall, so soon there will be four. I certainly feel like I get enough attention from my PI, although everybody’s needs are different, and I’m fairly independent – I work in equal collaboration with another grad student, and we wouldn’t want to meet with our PI more often than we do now. Our PI sets aside Wednesday afternoon every week for meetings with lab members, but most Wednesdays we choose not to meet with him. Other students in our lab choose to meet with him more frequently. In general, I think a lot of grad students at places like Harvard are pretty independent and don’t need or want a lot of close supervision by their PIs.</p>
<p>Personally, I like the energy in big labs, and I chose this lab deliberately despite another rotation in a very small (five-person!) lab as a first-year. I certainly feel that my PI cares about my career and professional development, even though there are six students in my lab. Functionally, I guess I don’t see the difference between my lab (6 students/5 postdocs) and a lab with the same number of researchers but proportionally more postdocs.</p>