<p>why do graduate programs in the biological sciences require interviews, while those in chemistry do not?</p>
<p>is this even correct? This is what someone told me.</p>
<p>Biological sciences grad programs generally require interviews; grad programs in most other disciplines generally do not require interviews. My take is that this is probably just due to historically different philosophies regarding the admissions process. Possibly this is also because biological sciences grad programs tend to receive more applications and tend to be larger than other grad programs.</p>
<p>In chemistry, I believe it's philosophy driven. I've heard that there is sometimes faculty-faculty communication instead of faculty-student communication; this scenario happened in my case.</p>
<p>I also heard that the Scripps Research Institute does interviews for chemistry.</p>
<p>Well, there are always exceptions, like engineering programs (HST, UWashington Bioengineering) that do interviews or biological sciences programs (Harvard BBS, Rockefeller) that don't interview.</p>
<p>Does it have to do with the end goal of most students? In the hard sciences, most students have aspirations for jobs that don't require a lot of social skills (interacting with people outside the field). Is this true for biological sciences? Could that play a role in the philosophy?</p>
<p>Scripps may be an exception because it is solely focused on biological chemistry.</p>
<p>It could also be an issue of competition. I'm not sure if biological sciences are statistically more competitive than chemistry, physics, or math.</p>
<p>FWIW, the only reason Harvard BBS doesn't do interviews is that the program is so large and that admissions are unitary rather than being by department (as Stanford Biosciences admissions are). The program administrators think it would be too much of a nightmare to try to get PIs from all over the med school to return interview reports in a reasonable amount of time.</p>
<p>on the note of harvard BBS, how competitive is it? the most competitive, considering it's harvard or is there something I don't know?</p>
<p>what do applicants typically have to have in order to get into harvard bbs?</p>
<p>My impression is that BBS is roughly as competitive as other top programs, perhaps slightly less so because BBS doesn't interview.</p>
<p>There's nothing special needed to get into BBS above and beyond other great programs -- outstanding LORs, a solid undergraduate research history, good grades, good GRE scores, a well-written statement of purpose.</p>