GPA: B.S.: 3.7/4.0; M.S.: 3.9/4.0
GRE: V: 155 Q: 165 W: 5
I have 2 years of undergrad research exp and 1.5 years of M.S. research exp (early B.S. and M.S. graduations)
I also have two publications as main author for journals Advanced Materials and ACS Nano. I also have several co-author publications from top 5% research journals.
my LOR will be from professors with post. doc. experiences from Stanford, Harvard, and top engineering schools.
What are my chances in getting accepted to Harvard BBS or Stanford/Caltech/UC Berkeley Bioengineering PH.D programs for the upcoming applications?
Obviously, these are wildly competitive programs. Equally obviously, you have strong credentials, and applying with a Masters & 2 strong lead author pubs puts you ahead of most undergrad applicants (assuming that the Masters is related!).
But: “chancing” doesn’t really work for PhD programs- there are too many variables. It depends a lot on what crop of applications they get, how many spots they have (which can vary by year, depending in part on what funding hsa come through / ebbs and flows in grad student numbers / how obvious a fit you are to the department / etc.)
So, some questions: how well do your research interests mesh with the research focus at each place? Are your LoRs from classroom profs, research supervisors or both? (iirc, Harvard particularly wants at least 1 from a research supervisor). Do you have the recommended coursework? (I think Stanford has a longish list).
And, pointing out some soft spots in your profile: your GREs are a hair under CalTechs stipulated scores (162/166). and both your GPA & GRE are a little below last year’s average for UC-B.
Finally an observation: ime, with LoRs, the name of the institution of the recommender is much less important than the reputation of the writer and the degree to which they can speak to your work.
The upshot: of course apply- but hedge your bets & apply to at least 4 others where you will be a standout.
Thanks for your remarks!
Although both my majors in B.S. and M.S. are chemical engineering, my M.S. research has been focused in material science and engineering, specifically wearable and skin/organ-attachable devices for healthcare applications.
My LoRs will be from both classroom profs and my principal investigator. All of them have strong backgrounds in medical fields.
I have also devoted most of my coursework during M.S. in biosciences and biomedical engineering, while my B.S. was more generalized in semiconductor/display processing and chemical engineering (process control, heat and mass transfer, fluid mechanics).
I’m definitely planning to take the GRE again since application deadlines are still far away. I am not sure how many more papers I will be publishing in such a short time interval though…
That all sounds good. The weight of the GRE varies a lot by program- CalTech is unusual in indicating a threshold. I wouldn’t worry about getting more papers done in the next 6 months (unless you have something strong ready to go, ofc).
Your background coursework looks good also, and you should get credit for the MS work from many of the programs. Note that policies vary wildly between programs- Stanford will theoretically exempt you from as much as all the MS coursework part, but Harvard emphasizes that it is exceptional to get credit at all for previous work). Be sure to line up your bio (not bioengineering or biochem) coursework against each program that you apply to- if it looks thin compared to what they indicate a preference for (again, it varies a lot), think about how you will address that.
Learning more about each program- and picking out the elements that are most important to you- will help with writing your SoP. It will also help you identify other programs that will be happy options for you besides the headline names. From here the programs you list seen to have a lot of differences, and their main commonality is that they are famous names (esp for engineering) and that (except Harvard) they are in CA. But you don’t list UCSD which has a superb BE program, and you don’t list a bunch of the other BE/BME usual suspects. Given that those programs probably take fewer than 10% of their applicants, where else are you applying?