<p>Which of these schools have the best (ie. readily available, not grunt work, etc.) research opportunities, particularly in fields like biophysics, biomed, etc.?</p>
<p>Brown, Cal, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, UPenn, Rice, WUSL</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>bump10char</p>
<p>Don’t have many details, but WUSTL seems to me to have readily available research opportunities. One of my friends attends (biomed engineer), and all she had to do was email a professor to get a lab job.</p>
<p>Rice has great (and easy to find) research opportunities in many fields, with a number of majors actually requiring research experience in order to graduate, and the presence of the largest medical center in the world literally across the street from campus means that the biosciences in particular have outstanding research opportunities easily available.</p>
<p>Thanks guys.
Would you say that Berkeley has the worst opportunities for bioscience research among these schools because it’s the only one without a medical school? Or does it have other factors that make up for that?</p>
<p>Well, Rice doesn’t have its own medical school, but I don’t think that really holds it back. I can’t really comment on opportunities at Cal or the other schools because I’ve only attended Rice.</p>
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<p>Whoops…I was thinking of Baylor Med’s program with Rice…forgot that Rice didn’t have its own medical school.</p>
<p>Brown does well with research. I don’t know of a single person who wanted research badly enough to ask professors about it in their 3rd semester without having something secured by 4th.</p>
<p>the most common summer grant, the UTRA, requires that you be doing research that is unique/that you helped design, so a professor can’t use it as a means of getting free lab techs. And mostly, professors seem to WANT students doing meaningful work, though there are a some grunt-ish research jobs available.</p>
<p>There is more variation from lab to lab in the quality and availability of projects for undergraduates than there is variation from university to university.</p>
<p>When we visited Rice, it seemed everyone was doing undergrad research. One guy said his prof stopped him in the hall and asked if he wanted to join his team! I can’t narrow it down specifically by field, though.</p>
<p>Based on some of the criteria that you gave there’s no real way to compare between those schools because as belevitt said, these types of things differ depending how the PI runs the lab. </p>
<p>If you’re looking for a place that provides lots of options to pursue the research that you want, then I’d have say Cal, hands down. There are a lot of professors in many departments at Berkeley (MCB, bioengineering, etc) that work on a variety of projects for you to choose, and some of them are affiliated with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As far as not having a med school, I don’t think this is a problem at all because you have UCSF across the Bay Bridge. UCSF is one of the top medical schools in the country and is a powerhouse in biological/medical research. Although they don’t have undergraduates there, there are definitely PIs who would be open to having some from other institutions. Between these two, you can hop around to find exactly what you’re interested in.</p>