Biology PhD advice required??

molliebatmit
Thu, 26 Jul 2007 08:02:00 +0000

I really don’t have any clue, to be honest. Your best bet is to ask your professors which schools students like you applied and were accepted to – they will usually know better than anyone which schools you should be investigating. I think the general rule of thumb is that it’s much easier for international students to get into the second-tier-type schools, but I don’t have any intuition as to where that second tier starts.



For Biology PhD admission, is there such thing as a weed-out course, like organic chemistry for med school? Or do grad schools just look at overall science GPA?

A weed-out course isn’t a course that admissions officers look at particularly closely – in the case of organic, it’s a class that some aspiring pre-meds do badly in, and therefore decide not to pursue a pre-med path after all. It’s a weed-out on the applicant side, not on the admissions side.

Biology PhD programs will generally ask for your overall GPA, your major GPA, and sometimes your junior/senior GPA.