I’m a junior neuroscience major, and plan to pursue a Ph.D. in neuroscience after I graduate. By next May (when I graduate), I will have 2 years and 7 months of research experience. Do you think it’s worthwhile to participate in a postbaccalaureate program to gain more experience? Initially, I wanted to start graduate school immediately after completing my B.S., but I realized that a year spent participating in research (without worrying about classwork), might better prepare me for the rigor of graduate school. Are these programs regarded highly by admissions committees? I would appreciate any advice!
Its better to plan on going straight into a PhD program, where you will get plenty of real research experience.
The only exception to this would be if you got a job where you participated in research directly after graduation, and then applied to PhD programs after some time in the real world.
Your LOR’s from profs are of critical importance in applying to PhD programs, and it may be much harder to get great LOR’s from them after you have graduated and are long gone from campus.
Eh, I somewhat disagree with the above advice, although I think it depends on how you go about obtaining the additional experience. The bottom line is that lots and lots of people in psychology and neuroscience do a year (or two or three) of post-bacc research before graduate school, either because they need the additional experience or because they just want to.
I’m assuming that you started doing research sometime in your sophomore year (maybe freshman year depending on how you’re counting the months). That’s plenty enough to make you competitive for neuroscience programs assuming that the rest of your portfolio (grades, test scores, letters, statement) is outstanding. However, you are right in that a post-bacc year or two can definitely 1) make you more competitive and 2) prepare you better for the rigor of grad school, particularly if you work on more independent projects. As you get more invested, you’ll get more experience doing the independent work (presenting, advanced data analysis, maybe co-authoring papers) and more experience learning to navigate the research process. You’ll also probably have a better idea of your interests and what you want to do your dissertation on; that might mean that you can hit the ground running in Year 1 of your PhD program and potentially be more productive during it.
So you definitely don’t have to, but you could. Getting letters has the potential to be more difficult but I doubt it will be. As long as you stay in the U.S. I doubt that your recommenders will forget you in the span of a year or two, especially if you are asking research advisors and professors you took more than one class with. I’m currently writing recommendations for students I had in class or supervised 1-2 years ago and I still remember them. (In fact, this week I am working on a recommendation for a student I supervised and taught 3 years ago, in the summer of 2012. I remember him very clearly, and he’ll get an excellent recommendation from me.)
If you’re unsure, what I might do in your place is apply to a select handful of programs that you are really, really excited about - that are excellent fits for your research, have great PIs, and are well-reputed in your field. Maybe about 4-5 of them. At the same time, explore the potential for post-baccalaureate research with different people/labs (you might be interested in the NIH’s IRTA program). If you get into one of your pie-in-the-sky PhD programs - great, you don’t need to do the post-bacc! But if you don’t then you can secure the post-bacc and apply more widely in the first few months of the post-bacc. Remember though that if you only do one year of post-bacc, your post-bacc experience won’t really be counted when you apply because you’ll have only been there for a few months by the time you start applying. You need to do at laest 2 years to get any benefit out of the post-bacc on your application. But if you are mostly doing the post-bacc to give yourself a “break” before the PhD and figure yourself out professionally, then that doesn’t matter so much.
Thank you, I really appreciate your time and insight! I think I’ll follow your suggestion and apply to both PhD and post-bacc programs – like you mentioned, I’ll have more options, and either route will facilitate me in pursuing my career goals.