Independent undergraduate research in the life sciences is essentially unheard of. Undergraduates would typically work in a professor’s lab and contribute to the group’s ongoing research efforts. The mini project is good, a thesis is good, but it would be great if you could go one step further and do something that’s not required for your degree. For example, do any groups at your university hire undergraduate research assistants?
Letters of recommendation from faculty are super important for American graduate admission. You’ll need 3. Plan accordingly. (“Did well in class” letters are considered inferior to letters from faculty who have worked with you directly outside of class.)
You won’t find a university that will charge you less than $15,000 for a Master’s degree.
You may be able to find funding for a stand-alone Master’s degree the same way that PhD students are funded: through research grants, TA positions and fellowships.
Thank you. So if I do an additional 10 week research placement (either at university or a science lab) I should be fine?
I have been looking for universities offering a Master’s degree and for example Grand Valley University offer in-state tuition ($22,500 for 2 years) to all students plus a possible scholarship of $5,000 and they also offer graduate assistantships which would waive 9 credit hours per semester which would make tuition basically free.
UCSB offers a graduate assistantship which would cover the total fees.
There’s even more uncertainty in graduate admissions than undergraduate admissions. A graduate program might receive 200 applications for 10 funded spots - nothing you do will guarantee you admission to any particular program, or even any program at all.
American undergraduates having their sight set on graduate school would do the best they can to strengthen every element of their application - coursework, lab work, letters of recommendation, GREs (general and subject test), other avenues of demonstrating research interest (e.g. attending seminars, summer workshops or conferences), personal statements, etc. Then they apply widely and hope for the best.
From what I have seen, applicants who demonstrate a particular research interest seem to fare best in the competition for funding. E.g. lining up your elective courses, thesis topic, lab experience, and conference attendance to all be related to stem cells. Bonus points if one of your professors in the UK has collaborators in the US whom they can personally recommend you to.
Brilliant, this is very helpful. I will try to get a placement for next summer as early as possible and I will try to choose it in a field related to what I might choose for the honours project. I am thinking about applying to Graduate Medicine which is why I might be volunteering at the hospital on a weekly basis from September and I have a lot of (medical) volunteering hours from a couple of years ago. Do US universities consider this as well or should I not mention it in an application?
That’s a tricky one. I think I would err on the side of not mentioning hospital volunteer hours on an application for an academic biomedical degree program (vs medical school). Most importantly, it doesn’t speak to your qualifications for the program or your usefulness as a research assistant, and it distracts the reader’s attention from things that matter.
It’s not obvious to me how the hospital volunteer hours would reflect on your motivations. They might illustrate that you are confident about the academic biomedical path, since you explored the medical career track and decided it wasn’t your cup of tea. The reader may also be worried that you are secretly having your heart set on a medical career, and biomedical sciences was just a backup plan. If I was a professor deciding which student to support on my research grant, I’d rather support the student who is 100% committed to my field.
Thank you b@r!m, that’s what I thought as well. Although I read that US universities do usually put some emphasis on their prospective students having some volunteer hours, however I’m not sure if this was meant for undergraduates only. I may be able to explain the transferable skills I got from volunteering such as improving my communication and teamwork skills while explaining the reason for volunteering with giving back to the community?
While I am mainly doing that because graduate medical schools in the UK and in Ireland require some work experience, this wouldn’t be untrue.
Do you by any chance know whether it is better to study in the UK or in Ireland for working in the US or does it not matter? I heard that the RCSI is well regarded but also that it doesn’t matter if you’re foreign.
MYOS1634, yes it is difficult but I really appreciate your help. I thought it would be hard because my degree isn’t as common in the US at undergraduate level.
UK or Ireland, it doesn’t matter if your goal is to become a doctor in the us. It’ll require extensive testing and a willingness to work in “medical deserts’”.
To work as something else than a doctor is extremely difficult since it means getting a graduate degree (often PhD) , doing OPT, then being one of the lucky few who wins a lottery for a visa called H1B.
Okay, thank you. I have read through all the requirements, I would have to take all of the USMLEs and agree to work in a rural area or VA facility for a couple of years.
Yes, I don’t have a problem with the testing, apparently it would be close to the UK contents. As for living in a rural area for a couple of years, I love living in urban areas but as long as it isn’t permanent I don’t have a problem with that either.
I will have to decide whether/when to take the GRE because I also need to study for the medical admissions test. Plus, some universities don’t require it. Does the GRE generally need a lot of studying? I took the Kaplan predictor and got above average for the quantitative part and a bit lower than average for the verbal part, so in total I scored about 300.
Great, thank you. I don’t think I have the time to study for the GRE at the moment as I need to do focus on other things. I will see if I can do that at a later time.
I don’t know if graduate schools’ emphasis on the GRE has changed since the test was redesigned. FWIW, graduate applicants in my college class (2011) across a variety of fields were counseled by our professors not to spend too much time preparing for the general GRE. That the test was really more about filtering out unprepared applicants than looking for the highest scorers.
Does it say anything about your readiness for a graduate program in the biomedical sciences if you don’t know what the word “prevaricate” means, or if you don’t recall how to compute the radius of a circle inscribed into a triangle? Probably not.
On the flip side, the GRE subject tests are important and are 100% worth studying for if you are applying to a program that requests them. You may not need a subject test if you stick to the biomedical sciences, since none of the available subject tests capture the biomedical curriculum well.
The general GRE is just a first weeder. You dont need to aim for a top 2% score.
The flip side is that scoring around the 50th percentile will get you weeded out.
The assumption is that you shouldn’t need to study much to score decently; if the program doesn’t require a subject GRE then that’s your only test score so you can’t assume whatever score will be ok. You need to target a score and once you’ve reached or, you’re good.
You two have been great help, thank you. Most programs I looked at didn’t require a subject GRE except for a few very competitive programmes. In fact, some programmes didn’t require the GRE at all. I am sure I could do much better than on the practice test with some practice but I actually think the smart thing to do would be not taking it at all and focusing on the other tests I need to take. In that case I would only apply to schools that don’t require the GRE.
Oh okay what I found was that the University of Michigan doesn’t require a PhD for their PhD in Biomedical Science and Grand Valley doesn’t either. I need to take the other tests which require quite a bit of preparation, so it is possibly the best to see what I’m going to do with the GRE at a later stage.
I think it makes perfect sense for you to focus on your Plan A testing for universities in the UK.
Should you decide to pursue the US biomedical path, I agree with MYOS1634 that you probably should be taking the GRE. Applying to grad school without GRE scores is a bit like applying to British universities without A-levels. Possible? Yes. But it’s an unnecessary handicap at every step of the process.