For background, I was a math major. One daughter is a biology major. She went to a very good but “not super selective” public university. She got to do quite a bit of biology-related research while an undergraduate student, and is currently getting a PhD in a biomedical field at a very good university without first getting a master’s degree. Of the other students in her PhD program, I would guess that maybe slightly less than half have a master’s degree, and slightly more than half do not.
How good your current university is for your major will matter some. How well you do and what research experience you get will matter a lot more. The overall ranking of the university you current attend really does not matter at all.
This is very good. Research experience is very important, probably critically important, for someone considering getting a PhD.
By the way, if many of your biology-major friends are in a hospital getting medical experience for hours and hours while you are in a lab getting research experience also for hours and hours, this is to your advantage when looking to continue in laboratory research after getting your bachelor’s degree.
I think that probability and statistics might be the most important math classes for someone majoring in biology. I think that my daughter took calculus, although I am not really sure and I doubt that she uses it in her current work. She did mention at some point that if she joined the particular lab that she did end up joining, then she would need to use a computer at some point to analyze the research results. Personally I thought that this would be a plus since at least some limited computer skills are valuable for a wide range of careers. Also, if you are using canned software programs to do statistical analysis of research results, having some personal understanding of the math behind the software can be helpful, but again this is more likely to involve statistics rather than calculus.
I wouldn’t worry about this. It is quite common for students to graduate slightly older than the minimum possible age. Also, a lot of graduate students (whether in master’s programs or PhD programs) take a gap between getting their bachelor’s degree and applying to graduate programs. In my family (including siblings), there are five of us who either got or are currently getting a graduate degree and four out of five took a gap and worked for two or three years before starting graduate school. Personally I think that this working gap helped me be a better graduate student.
You should discuss this with your academic advisor. You can continue with the statistics classes and see how they go. However, I doubt that taking more math classes after statistics is really all that important.
Yes. They will look at your transcripts and see what classes you have taken.
Applications to PhD programs can be very competitive. One thing that helped our daughter quite a bit was having a lot of research experience and lab experience. Another thing that helped a lot was that she knew what she wanted to study in her PhD program and why, and she had looked at the research that each professor at each university she considered was doing. Thus in her application, and in her interviews, she was able to discuss how the current work of each professor relates to the research she wanted to do. She had a high undergraduate GPA but I really do not know how important this was (I have heard that it is not all that important). Research experience and associated letters of reference are very important for PhD admissions.
In at least one case it looked like, if my daughter had not been admitted for a PhD, she would have been admitted for a master’s degree instead. You might want to think about what you would do if this happens. Master’s degrees are usually not fully funded and can be expensive, although they are of course quicker compared to a bachelor’s degree. One thing that I liked about getting a master’s was that every single course was in my major or a closely related field. This means that if you pick a major that you like and are good at, every class will be in a subject that you like and are good at.
PhD programs in sciences are generally fully funded. At this point it sort of seems like my daughter has a very interesting job that pays relatively badly, but it does pay just enough to live on, and if her research pans out then eventually they will give her a doctorate. Or at least that is one way to think about it.
By the way I have heard that a GPA below 3.0 makes graduate school admissions very tough. I honestly do not know whether a 3.5 versus a 4.0 matters. I would expect that an uptrend will help, and that grades in classes in your major are most likely more important than in other classes.
Personally I think that I would focus more on getting research experience in your major. You should however discuss this with your academic advisor.