<p>Well, summarising what you need to be accepted in a graduate school:</p>
<p>a) GRE
b) letters of Recommendation
c) grades
d) essay
e) papers </p>
<p>I have some specific questions about the level and impact of each in order to be accepted for a phd in a school as good as Harvard or MIT: </p>
<p>c) grades: are there any chances to get in if you are at the top 10% of your class? What about 5% and what is the usually accepted percentage?
e) papers: what is the impact of having published a paper </p>
<p>I think I can finish my 5-year university (counts as a master's degree too) at top 7-8% and I think that it is not high enough (I expect you to tell me that).
My plans are to stay at my university 1 more year after graduation in order to have 2-3 papers published (and hopefully some being first author) in order to make my application better. Is this going to get me into a school like Harvard? </p>
<p>Any comments will be very helpful! Thank you very much in advance!</p>
<p>What field are your applying for? Because admission requirements/expectation can be different for different fields.</p>
<p>c) there is no clear-cut answer for this. It depends on your other application materials and also the competitiveness of your undergraduate/masters university. I would say the top 10% is generally good enough to be considered, and other factors will weigh in more heavily (such as reco letters) as long as your grades meet their cutoff.</p>
<p>e) this is relative on the type of publication and its quality. Also the journal that it appears in. Don’t worry so much about getting publications, but instead focus on doing good research that will impress your professors.</p>
<p>These are very general response; again it varies for different fields.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for your immediate response, </p>
<p>I am applying for Bioengineering and Systems Biology and my graduate school will be Mechanical Engineering.
Of course, my current lab research is on bioengineering & systems biology. I really like the specific field and I am glad to have the opportunity to do research on that. So naturally I am interested in the quality of the research and I fully understand your point of not just getting publications. My question is, given that you have 2 or 3 good papers -not random at all- and maybe with co-authors of the same institute that I’m going to apply to, is this going to help, even for grades that do not meet their cutoff?
In other words, what is the impact of presenting a very good research background over grades that do not meet the cutoff?
Consider that Im aplying for a phd, not a master’s degree (if it makes any difference)</p>
<p>Thank you very much!</p>
<p>Remember that the grades in subjects related to your field count, not those totally unrelated breadth or purely elective courses (eg- history course grade won’t count for math…)</p>
<p>Thank you for your reply.
Of course related courses are very important. However, I think that the university takes into account the grade of your diploma too.
My school (mechanical engineering) has only 2 out of 65 courses related to biology. Of course my grade is 10/10 for these two. I’m anxious about the rest.</p>