Neuroscience: Chances and Opportunies

Rice0Cake
Fri, 16 Jul 2010 01:53:52 +0000

Hello everyone, I’m new to the board. However, this forum has helped me a bunch in attaining information on the graduate school admission process so I’d like to thank everyone who reads and/or responds to this post.

I’m a 2010 University of Chicago graduate who majored in biology and had attained an overall GPA of 3.4 and a major GPA of about 3.63 upon graduation. I’ve also taken the GRE last year and had gotten a score of 570/800/5.5(Verb/Math/Essay). Earlier this year I’ve obtained a score of 880 for the Biology GRE test. The big disappointment, which I can obviously blame no one else but myself for, is that I do not have any research experience on my application.

I know what I want to do and I know that I have the skills and dedication to achieve it. I’ve always had a deep interest in the plasticity of neurons, neural regeneration, and the pathfinding abilities of axons. However, knowing that research is such an important part of my application, I blew my chances and feel that I’m out of the game in terms of applying for a graduate school.

Nevertheless, I’m not an expert in this, so my first question is that do I really have no chances of being accepted to a decent graduate school (preferably local in CA) with no research experience?

Hoping alone won’t help, so I do intend to remedy this problem; I am still young and have plenty of time and energy. I’ve been looking at the NIH post-bac programs, which, if anything, shows that I’m willing to put forth 1, 2, or even more years of time in research in order to strengthen my graduate school application. I’m wondering if this is a good way to go and if not, what other ways could I go?

I’m sorry if anything I’ve said seem obvious or ignorant, and again, thanks for reading.