<p>From Wikipedia:</p>
<p>"Doctor of Science (Latin: Scienti</p>
<p>Accepted by Weill Cornell BCMB by email today.</p>
<p>
As a current Harvard student, I think that’s incredibly narrow-minded.</p>
<p>The work you publish under your particular PhD advisor helps you get a job. The department in which you do it is important for impressing people in bars. Impressing people in bars is not particularly important to me, but to each his own.</p>
<p>I agree with Mollie’s very well put response. My personal philosophy for comparing programs is “name-blind”, that is I do not take into account the prestige or lack thereof of the school the program is at. There are many things people will look at when you apply for jobs or post-docs down the road, but the prestige of the school you did your work at is not hugely important.</p>
<p>On the flip side, school name can be important for impressing people in bars, relatives, and members of the general public. That can be important for some people and some career paths.</p>
<p>Of course, I am not saying that advisor & your work is not important. But if you can find a good advisor at a top university, that’s the best-thing that can ever happen! </p>
<p>If you choose JHU, you can still do well if you are productive. But given two graduates, one from JHU one from Harvard, with similar experience and similar publications, I would favor the graduate from Harvard. (This is what I meant to say.)</p>
<p>Depending on the country you are from, people will judge you. If you tell them you turn down Harvard and go to JHU, they will not understand you. medecin00, you have to think about this, since you are returning back to your country after PhD.</p>
<p>
You might. But a potential postdoc supervisor would not, even if the comparison were between a PhD from Harvard and a PhD from a truly subpar program, which JHU is assuredly not.</p>
<p>Ultimately, you have to do what’s best for you and for your career. I hate to pull the cranky third-year card, but I am a cranky third-year, so here it is: school choice is not nearly as important as most prospective G1s think it is. Advisor choice and project choice are far more important for your happiness as a graduate student and for your future career than school choice.</p>
<p>Thanks Mollie, there is something in what you said. I am reminded of what a prof told me during one of my visits: he said that I should consider going to a university only if I can find a good advisor and a good project there. I never thought that project could be so important, maybe I should think more about PI’s projects they introduced to me on my visit, before making a decision.</p>
<p>Prestige is somewhere between popularity and reputation.</p>
<p>Indirectly, prestige is a proxy for many other factors, including quality of faculty, quality of students, quality of research, and endowment. People or companies that are less capable of judging a candidate’s research might rely on reputation to make a decision.</p>
<p>That being said, most of us are probably interested in working somewhere that will be very interested in judging our research accomplishments, so prestige isn’t so important.</p>
<p>UCSF neuroscience sent out notifications today!!</p>
<p>Admission phone call today from UCSF Neuroscience. That was the last one for me. Hopefully I will be able to make a decision by the end of next week!</p>
<p>on which campus does UCSF Neuroscience do their first year classes?</p>
<p>Congrats brain_aging!! Maybe we’ll be classmates. What schools are you deciding between? I’m 90% sure I’m going to choose UCSF</p>
<p>I don’t think prestige of the school matters at all. It is your project and your publication record, your PI - because of the connects you make, because of the projects, the quality of them, the quality of the questions being asked, and so on. It just so happens that a lot of good labs are in ‘good’ schools. They have more money, more resources, more labs, they are research-oriented, and so on. But it is really not about the school.</p>
<p>Well, there goes “crunch week” (my terminology), the results:</p>
<p>Mayo - reject
UVM - phone interview!
UMichigan - reject
UVA - reject</p>
<p>Still no replies from UT Austin and Brandeis! Ridiculous, especially considering that UT Austin was the first school I applied to way back in mid November! However, I really want to go there so I don’t want to tempt fate by e-mailing/calling them and asking. I just want them to get it the hell over with. UVM would be a great place to do my PhD and I already know they do research I am interested in, perhaps more so than UT, but as a place to live you can’t really beat Austin.</p>
<p>rejected by weill cornell bcmb (post-interview)</p>
<p>interviewed at unc-ch last weekend- for anyone who interviewed there how long did they take to notify?</p>
<p>Have any international applicants heard from NYU sackler?</p>
<p>I was accepted by UMass Med and UConn Health Center last week but still waiting for others.</p>
<p>For those of you deciding among offers, what factors are you weighing at this point, and which do you think matter the most? I am having a really hard time at this point knowing what I should be thinking of, since I did all the research on the schools before I even applied. I know that they all do research I am interested in, and that there’s plenty of professors I would like to work with. So, post-interview, should we be weighing in on the environment (grad student happiness, atmosphere, etc), or should we go back to looking at what’s on the website (research, etc)? </p>
<p>For those of you who have made a decision already, how did you make it?</p>
<p>I heard back from UNC the following week (4 or 5 days after the interview). But since you hear back from a faculty member, I am sure they do it all at their own speed.</p>
<p>I think it’s important to consider all factors with appropriate weighting based on personal priorities. For me I think the visits were of great help in narrowing down where to go, because I think the culture & environment are definitely extremely important. Others may disagree, but I think that for a commitment of this magnitude and duration, I want to be someplace where I’ll be both happy and productive.</p>
<p>For me these are the top three factors I considered, not necessarily in the following order:</p>
<p>**Program culture/environment<a href=“Are%20students%20and%20faculty%20happy?%20collaborative?%20dedicated%20to%20research?%20Are%20the%20faculty%20friendly%20and%20genuinely%20supportive?%20Does%20the%20program%20genuinely%20care%20about%20each%20individual%20student’s%20success?%20Is%20there%20a%20lack%20of%20barriers%20between%20labs%20or%20departments?”>/b</a>
**Program cohesiveness<a href=“Is%20the%20program%20stable%20in%20terms%20of%20structure,%20organization,%20academic%20requirements?%20Do%20the%20students%20and%20faculty%20uniformly%20support%20the%20program%20and%20policies?”>/b</a>
**Research<a href=“Is%20the%20research%20exciting?%20Are%20there%20multiple%20faculty%20members%20who%20I%20could%20see%20myself%20working%20for?”>/b</a></p>
<p>Other less important factors I also thought about included the following:</p>
<p>Coursework requirements
Qualifying procedures
Location and cost of living</p>
<p>Update:</p>
<p>Accepted: Sloan-Kettering, Yale, Berkeley, UChicago, Stanford, MIT, Rockefeller
Declined: Columbia, Weill Cornell, NYU
Rejected: None</p>
<p>Now the agonizing decision-making process begins!</p>