Non genius applicants

variola
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:15:56 +0000

To the OP: I think something you need to remember about this board is that it’s a self-selected sampling: almost by definition the people posting here are more ambitious and motivated about grad school than the majority of applicants. For instance, I know that 925 people applied to UChicago’s BMS cluster, but looking through the Biosciences thread maybe 10-20 people posted about applying there. So there’s a hundreds of people outside this forum with different statistics (perhaps some above and some below yours) and those people also got interviews.

It’s more important for you to seek out the average GPA/GRE of the programs you are interested in (although a lot of schools don’t release that data). What they do release is applied/admitted statistics, usually broken down by department. This won’t tell you anything about the stats of the people applying, but it will tell you the interview/applied ratio and the post interview acceptance rate. If you’re worried about your stats look for some schools with a high interview/applied rate (UChicago’s BMS only interview 7.7% of applicants and UW-Seattle Microbio interviewed 12% which are both very competitive) and decent post interview acceptance rate (UW Seattle microbio’s is about 65%, UChicago’s microbio’s is about 30-40%, while other clusters in BMS at UChicago are different, MPMM is about 80%). They’ll usually give you multiple years so you can see if there’s a decreasing or increasing trend. Unfortunately most schools are seeing a huge increase in applicants and due to the recession can’t admit as many people.

Note that I only have stats for UW and UofC because those were the schools I applied to and got interviews. If you do some digging through the admissions/registrar sites of your choice schools you should be able to find similar info. If you’re motivated and put in the effort to find schools that fit you (as well as do well in school and hopefully get in some undergrad research experience) I have no doubt that you’ll find a program that you are excited about and are accepted.

Also, and I don’t mean to be snide about this, but it’s pretty insulting to call people with high stats “not real.” I know you didn’t really mean it, but it comes off as very demeaning and dismissive of their accomplishments. They’re still “REAL people.”