<p>I'm currently starting my look into graduate schools for microbiology / biology. I graduated with distinction in 2010 with a biology and biochemistry double major from a top tier engineering school. My GPA was a 3.1, have ~2 years of lab experience (all academia), with several papers and projects of interest. Have some great letters of recommendation from some well known scientists who can personally speak to my performance and character. I have a few questions I was hoping someone assist me with.</p>
<p>1) Is it worth rushing to apply this year, or wait until next to apply? I have yet to take the GRE's, but feel that I could do fairly well without an intensive prep session. I have a stable job lined up in industry, available to me until I decide to leave for graduate school. Would the extra real world experience and potential accomplishments help to bolster my application next year, or is my application this year just as strong without it?</p>
<p>2) What schools should I be looking at? Right now, my potential list includes:
- Boston University
- UMass Medical
- Yale
- Harvard (Medical / Arts & Sciences)
- MIT
- Tufts
- Stanford
- UC Berkeley
- Johns Hopkins
- Princeton
- Cornell
- Scripps
- Brown
- Dartmouth
- Northeastern
- University of Vermont
- University of New Hampshire
- WPI
Any that I should cross off or add on? I would like a school near to Boston, but I'm willing to relocated. While I understand a number of these may be stretches, I am unsure by how much. From what I've been told, graduate schools look at grades significantly less than undergraduate schools, and as such, I'm having a difficult time gauging my chances.</p>
<p>Any advice or comments would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.</p>
<p>Depending on what is your field, but I think many field consider experience as > GPA (including yours)</p>
<p>I know someone with 2.4 GPA, 5 years of experience in his field, great LOR (from his bosses), higher-than-average GRE, got into top 5 PhD school of his field. Barely.</p>
<p>With around 2 years of research, papers, and great recommendations, you could get into a top graduate program now, if you wanted, especially if you’re coming from MIT. (A university with less stringent grading than MIT will make your results a little more unpredictable, given your GPA.) But there is no reason to rush if you want to take time off to work. If you do decide to work first, make sure you keep in touch with your professors. Keep in mind that you’ll be working this year (I assume), so you’ll have at least a year between undergraduate and graduate school.</p>
<p>Your Boston options are great – if you wanted to stay in a city as a graduate student, you picked one that has some of the best options. In fact, if you applied only to that group, I think it would be likely that you’d get into at least one, if not most.</p>
<p>You have too many schools on that list! From what you have said, I think that the experience/LORs will matter more than the GPA, and while you won’t get an interview at every school due to your GPA, you will get an interview at at least one or two of your top chioices. If you want to go to grad school next year, there is no reason to wait and you could apply this year. If you want to wait a year then thats okay too. </p>
<p>What field do you want to go into? I don’t really see a reason to have uvm, unh or rpi on your list. BU and Umass medical provide less competitive programs in the boston area that are still good. There is really no reason to apply to more than ~10 schools (maybe 10 plus BU and Umass if you really want to stay in the boston area). You might want to look into brandeis, they are better than northeastern, and in many areas better than tufts. </p>
<p>You should also ask your old professors for their recommendations as to where to apply. They know where you can get into and may have good suggestions about places that are strong in what you are interested in.</p>
I’m an undergrad senior at northeastern and I ditto this, I’m pretty… underwhelmed by most of the research going on here. There are a few groups doing really cool work, but as a whole I don’t think it’s going to compare to the other less-competitive programs around Boston like BU/Tufts/UMASS.</p>
<p>Several papers? If you’re serious about that then I don’t think you would need to worry about your competitiveness for graduate admissions. When I applied to grad schools, I had several publications (all second author) and was accepted to nearly every micro department I applied to. I would echo previous people’s comments about reducing the number of places you apply to to a manageable number (5 or so).</p>