<p>My credentials are good, I think.</p>
<p>DATA:</p>
<p>Major: Biology.</p>
<p>GPA: 3.6, expected (looking at my transcript) to rise to approximately a 3.75 to a 3.8 by the time I start applying to grad school.</p>
<p>Practice GREs (I haven't taken the GRE yet): 162 Q, 162 V (equivalent on the old scale, I am told, to a 770 Q and 630 V). I expect to do well on the Analytical writing portion.</p>
<p>LoRs: Excellent. One from the Smithsonian, one from the MBL.</p>
<p>Research: Two summers' worth; one of them is expected to produce one second-author paper and one first-author paper.</p>
<p>Neuroscience programs I'm thinking of applying to:</p>
<p>University of Chicago
MIT
NIH-Cambridge-Oxford GPP
Harvard</p>
<p>and quite frankly those are the only ones I have nailed down; the other ones are UC-Davis, UCLA, UPenn, Florida, and UWashington, and I want to try to accumulate a preliminary pool of about 15 schools before narrowing them down to about 10.</p>
<p>Can I please the admissions committees to these places sufficiently?</p>