<p>How important is a prestigious undergrad school when applying to grad school for biology? I think I might transfer out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign but it would be tough on me financially. Thanks for any answers, I really appreciate the help.</p>
<p>Why are you transferring out of U of I? It's one of the top schools in the nation.</p>
<p>I guess I don't feel its prestigious enough, I'm thinking top 20 schools. However, after reading some things on this forum it seems research experience and good letters of recommendation are more important than a super prestigious school.</p>
<p>In graduate school admissions, it is a lot more about the individual's accomplishments than the school he/she went to. They want the best and more passionate in their field, regardless of which school they went to. </p>
<p>I was scrolling down the list of Gates scholars the other day to see where these students who are going graduate work at Cambridge went for undergrad... I was surprised to see schools we generally don't respect being represented on that list (i.e. UC Riverside).</p>
<p>UIUC is prestigious in the sciences. Do research, get good grades, and you'll be set.</p>
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How important is a prestigious undergrad school when applying to grad school for biology?
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it seems research experience and good letters of recommendation are more important than a super prestigious school.
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In general, your research experience, recommendation letters, and GPA will be more important than the prestige of your undergrad...up to a certain point. If you're aiming for top 5 or top 10 programs, you have a much smaller margin of error, because almost all their applicants will be from top programs. For example, about a third of the grad EE students at Stanford are from top 5 programs (including UIUC), and the overwhelming majority are from the top 15, with a handful from lesser institutions like UC Davis and Maryland. Admissions directors have been repeatedly quoted in articles saying that they consider the strength of the undergraduate institution. I can't say if that's worth the hassle of transferring and spending lots more money, but it's certainly not something they ignore. Also keep in mind that more prestigious universities will tend to have more well-known faculty (exceptions include undergraduate-focused schools like Brown and Dartmouth), and good recommendations from them will hold more weight. My advice would be if you could transfer to a much better place like an Ivy, MIT, Stanford, or Caltech, it may be worth considering, but not somewhere like Northwestern or University of Chicago.</p>
<p>the key to good research is also having a good professor who can mentor you and provide good research opportunities. chances are, you'll find stronger research opportunities at the prestigious schools. that's why they emphasize the prestigious schools, but in the end, it's still the individual's accomplishments. someone doing average research at a prestigious school will still probably get passed over someone doing really good research at a lesser prestigious school.</p>
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someone doing average research at a prestigious school will still probably get passed over someone doing really good research at a lesser prestigious school.
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This is true for all except the very top programs, who have their pick of applicants who did really good research at prestigious schools. This is where less prestigious schools hurt you.</p>
<p>Probably a stupid question, but what would you define as "really good" vs "lame" research? Time spent (someone who did 3 yrs vs. someone who did 1 summer), quality of lab (Nobel laureate vs. junior faculty), quality of project (running a yeast two-hybrid screen vs. running the autoclave)... all of the above?</p>
<p>I would say it is dependent on both time spent and the quality of the project. You won't learn anything from doing the same monotonous lab procedure for 3 years straight. Also, spending 1 summer CAN be a good experience if you do something substantial. If you devote an entire summer and work 40+ hour weeks, it counts as a good experience. I don't think quality of the lab will help as much, although if you work for a Nobel laureate, you can get a recommendation from someone who is extremely famous in his field.</p>
<p>"good" research would probably be publishable (is this even a word?) research in a nationally recognized journal, like the journal of biological chemistry (which is where my lab publishes most of its articles)</p>
<p>"lame" research would be when you're in a lab and all you do is help out by running a few gels for one postdoc, purifying protein X for the biologist over there, fermenting bacteria B for the technician here... that's not research at all in fact, it's cheap labor.</p>
<p>Also, research should never be performed if it's already been done and published before</p>
<p>Umm... I would like to note that UChicago is not at all on the same plane as Northwestern in terms of grad school recognition. UChicago's undergrad reputation is better respected than a few of the ivy's</p>
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Also keep in mind that more prestigious universities will tend to have more well-known faculty (exceptions include undergraduate-focused schools like Brown and Dartmouth), and good recommendations from them will hold more weight.
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I don't think quality of the lab will help as much, although if you work for a Nobel laureate, you can get a recommendation from someone who is extremely famous in his field.
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<p>You know, I've been thinking about just how important it really is to get a rec from a truly famous prof from the field and/or to otherwise affiliate yourself with a highly prominent research department, particularly in the light of how successful graduates from the LAC's are in getting into and completing top doctoral programs. I have noticed how few if any of the LAC's have highly famous faculty nor do they have strong research departments, yet their students don't seem to have any problems with top doctoral admissions. </p>
<p>Case in point. Take the Caltech doctoral programs. This year, Caltech conferred 4 doctorates upon people who had previously done their undergrad at MIT. That's equal to the same number of people who had previously done their undergrads at Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore (the "AWS" trifecta). Yet I believe that MIT graduates far more science/engineering undergrads than do AWS combined. After all, MIT has 4000 undergrads, the overwhelming majority who are studying science/engineering, whereas AWS have a combined 5000 undergrads, but many of them are studying humanities or social sciences (and would thus not be interested in going to Caltech for graduate school). Furthermore, of the AWS trilogy, the only one that offers engineering as a major is Swarthmore. Add in those who graduated from other LAC's like Bowdoin, Middlebury, and the like, and you quickly see that the LAC's are doing quite well for themselves. </p>
<p>Now obviously Illinois was quite well represented among the Caltech doctoral set also. However, what I find striking is how well represented the elite LAC's are, given their tiny size and their generally non-tech oriented focus, at least compared to Illinois and certainly against MIT. Hence, the elite LAC's seem to be punching far higher than their weight class. </p>
<p>Which leads me to question just how important it really is to get rec's from highly prominent researchers. After all, it's hard to find highly prominent researchers at the LAC's, yet they somehow manage to succeed in getting their students into top doctoral programs anyway.</p>
<p>If you want to quote anecdotes, I've got one for you too. Out of 210 entering EE grad students at Stanford, maybe 100 of them are from the U.S. When asked at orientation if any of us were from a LAC, not a single person raised his hand. Perhaps they all happened to be absent that day? Also, I personally have not run into any students from any LAC, prestigious or otherwise, but I know plenty from schools like MIT, Berkeley, and Illinois.</p>
<p>Yeah, I think we all have to acknowledge the limits of anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>I would be interested in seeing really comprehensive data on this topic, although I doubt it's readily available.</p>
<p>can we conclude that LAC's are strong in sending students in terms of percentages, but overall, their numbers are still small compared to what universities send?</p>
<p>hence.. that one wsj feeder list, where berkeley is ranked so low despite sending more students to top grad schools than many of the other schools ranked above it simply because berkeley's percentage is low.</p>
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If you want to quote anecdotes, I've got one for you too. Out of 210 entering EE grad students at Stanford, maybe 100 of them are from the U.S. When asked at orientation if any of us were from a LAC, not a single person raised his hand. Perhaps they all happened to be absent that day? Also, I personally have not run into any students from any LAC, prestigious or otherwise, but I know plenty from schools like MIT, Berkeley, and Illinois.
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<p>No LAC has a good engineering program to the contrary of what many people here claim, so it's not surprising. If you went into a humanities or pure sciences department and asked the same question, you'd get a different answer.</p>
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No LAC has a good engineering program to the contrary of what many people here claim, so it's not surprising.
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<p>I think that anybody from HarveyMudd would emphatically disagree with you. </p>
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Also, I personally have not run into any students from any LAC, prestigious or otherwise, but I know plenty from schools like MIT, Berkeley, and Illinois.
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<p>Kfc4u has hit it spot on. Clearly, given the sheer size of Illinois and Berkeley, you obviously ought to expert far more of them than you would anybody from a LAC. Even MIT graduates far far more engineers than most LAC's do. </p>
<p>This is a 'percentage play'. You have to understand - LAC's are very small schools and except for a few (like Harvey Mudd), most of them produce very few engineers. However, the engineers that do get produced tend to be very good. </p>
<p>Put another way - how many new BS engineers does Illinois produce? Something over 1100 per year? That's literally twice the number of new graduates that most LAC's will produce, and very few of those engineers will be engineers. And of that 1100, how many of them have a serious chance of getting into a top PhD program? 100, maybe 150 at most? Whatever the number is, I think we can all agree that those who graduated in the bottom half of their class (hence the bottom 550 Illinois engineers) have no chance of getting into a top doctoral program. Hence, Illinois graduates more BS engineers who have no serious chance of getting into a top doctoral program than the total number of students (with any degree) graduating from almost any LAC. </p>
<p>You all ask for more comprehensive data? Fine. Here a bunch more Caltech commencement years. Go look at it, and then tell me that you don't think that the LAC's are punching far above their weight class. I see that in 2002, more newly minted Caltech PhD's did their undergrad at Harvey Mudd than did it at MIT. Now one might say that Harvey Mudd has a 'geographic' advantage because it's near Caltech, but still, when you consider that MIT has almost 6 times the number of total students (4000 vs. 700), I think it's safe to say that Mudd has been doing quite respectably. </p>
<p>But again, like I said, the point is you have to compensate for the sheer sizes of various programs. If you just have lots and lots of engineering students, you would obviously expect a great deal of representation among the top graduate programs, just because you had a lot of students in the first place. That doesn't make you necessarily a 'good' school, it just makes you a 'big' school, and more to the point, it doesn't mean that an individual student at that school is going to get good opportunities. Like I said, I would submit that the bottom half of all newly minted BS engineers out of Illinois, or 550 graduates, don't have any serious chance of getting into a top doctoral program. </p>
<p>And the REAL point is that I am asking why is it that if evals from famous profs are so important in getting into graduate school, then how do the guys from the LAC's ever get in? I would point to Harvey Mudd. Mudd is a LAC. Mudd doesn't have any highly prominent research faculty members, because it's a LAC. So how is it that Mudd alumni can be so successful in getting into graduate school? Like I said, looks like Mudd is doing just fine in matching MIT on a pound-for-pound basis, at least where Caltech doctoral programs are concerned. </p>
<p>"More than 40 percent of Harvey Mudd alumni hold Ph.D.'s, the highest percentage in the country."</p>
<p>What the hell, I was going to transfer TO U of I for it being a more prestigous undergrad business school.</p>
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I would be interested in seeing really comprehensive data on this topic, although I doubt it's readily available.
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<p>I'll try to do the best I can.</p>
<p>Since 2000, the number of newly minted Caltech doctorates who did their undergrads at MIT, for the years from 2000-20005, is 6+4+3+2+3+4 = 22</p>
<p>In that same time, the number who came from Williams College was
1+0+0+0+1+1=3</p>
<p>Amherst
1+0+1+2+0+2=6</p>
<p>So MIT is represented about 2.5 times more than Williams and Amherst. MIT has about 4000 undergrads, whereas Williams and Amherst combined have about 3500. On the other hand, almost all MIT graduates are graduates of technical subjects, whereas only a fraction of Williams and Amherst graduates come from technical subjects, and these schools don't produce any engineering students for the obvious reason that they don't even offer engineering. </p>
<p>Or consider the statement made by Harvey Mudd about how 40% of Mudd alumni hold doctorates. You might contend that maybe they are all just going to scrub doctoral programs. I think the following statement belies that assertion.</p>
<p>"Graduate schools most often attended by recent graduates: Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC, the University of Texas at Austin, and Yale"</p>
<p><a href="http://www.hmc.edu/highlights/%5B/url%5D">http://www.hmc.edu/highlights/</a></p>
<p>Not a scrub in the bunch. </p>
<p>Now look. I'm not trying to say that the LAC's are better than MIT or any other research university or vice versa. I think it's far more fair to say that LAC's are better for certain people. Research universities and LAC's have different strengths and weaknesses and therefore cater to different people. </p>
<p>However, I will definitely assert that I think people need to have more respect for the LAC's. Furthermore, the LAC's prove that you can deliver a fine education without having famous researchers as profs or without having large-scale research infrastructures. I believe that LAC's are getting a quite respectable percentage of their students into top-notch doctoral programs despite not being able to offer major-league research facilities to them.</p>