<p>Not so fast, professor. What is this area between the coasts you mention?!? I have been on this forum board for almost a year now and this is the first I have heard of such a place.</p>
<p>Astrina,</p>
<p>Neither of the places are rural (home town is a medium-large city), but there are not direct flight between my home town and the places I have lived . With time in the airports, it usually takes me 11-14 hours to fly home. With the return trip that is two days of any vacation I take.</p>
<p>
Oh, belevitt, they probably haven’t told you – there aren’t any universities in that area, so it’s actually impossible to go to grad school anywhere but the coasts.</p>
<p>(…before anybody gets mad, please note that I grew up in the Midwest! :))</p>
<p>leukemia: i’m international too and also accepted to umass med, nice to meet u here</p>
<p>deniel, have you made up your final decision going there?</p>
<p>hey leukemia, I remember you asked a while back about Stony Brook Genetics…have you found out about their admissions status yet?</p>
<p>Hi Mollie, you said a few days ago that you were going to tell about your Harvard impression, but I am not sure if I have seen that. I’m interested in your opinion since I am planning to join BBS this fall as well.</p>
<p>Brain_aging, I look forward to seeing you at Harvard BBS!</p>
<p>Hi BioX. I look forward to meeting you too. If you are on facebook, there is a Harvard BBS 2009 group you should join.</p>
<p>Univ_Student, </p>
<p>Yes. They have accepted me, although my application was from Watson School at CSHL.
I feel pretty lucky about this :)</p>
<p>
No, you caught me. :)</p>
<p>I really like BBS, and I’m glad I’m here. The program has a huge number of affiliated PIs (and you can rotate with anybody who’s not in BBS but is affiliated with HILS [Harvard Integrated Life Sciences]). Because there are so many more professors than graduate students, professors tend to seek out graduate students – many professors volunteer to teach the required fall paper-reading course (which is done in small groups) so they can advertise their labs and convince students to rotate with them.</p>
<p>Many students take the big first-year courses (molecular biology and genetics in the fall, cell biology in the spring), but there’s a lot of flexibility in course choice and the only required course is the paper-reading course I just mentioned. If lecture classes aren’t your thing (and/or you’re burned out on classes coming straight from undergrad ;)), you can take six-week “quarter courses” or two-day “nanocourses” for class credit. Quarter courses and nanocourses are on focused topics and often deal heavily with primary literature; 2 quarter courses are equal to one normal class, as are 6 nanocourses.</p>
<p>We’re required to teach one semester, which can be fulfilled by TAing a grad class or a med school class, or by TAing undergrads up in Cambridge. Many people (me included) choose to fulfill their TA requirement another way, by performing community service teaching. There are several eligible programs; in the one I did, eighth-graders from the Boston public schools come to HMS one day a week, and we do experiments with them and teach them about biology one-on-one. I am still planning to TA an undergraduate course (they pay $5000 per section!), but the community service TA experience was really fun and fulfilling.</p>
<p>Most BBS students do three rotations. The minimum is two. You can do a summer rotation, if you’re interested in getting a jump start on your graduate work. Most students pick a lab sometime during the summer after first year.</p>
<p>Our qualifying exam is held early in second year (earlier than many other programs) and consists of a 20-page proposal for your thesis work, which you defend a few weeks later to a committee of three BBS professors. It was very useful to me to write the proposal, as it helped me narrow the topic of my thesis and to dream up a set of experiments that continues to be useful to me. You’re not required to actually complete the experiments you propose in your qualifying exam, but it’s relevant enough that you can and might.</p>
<p>The first-year class tends to get pretty close (especially because many students live in Trilogy, an apartment building near the medical area), and during first year you’ll get constant emails over the student email list about parties and clubhopping and such. After first year, I joined a lab at Mass General Hospital, so although that sort of thing might still be going on, I don’t know about it – I feel more like a member of my lab than of my grad school cohort. That’s probably just me, though.</p>
<p>Does that help? The question was really, really broad, so I don’t know if I’m addressing actual G1 points of concern. Feel free to ask me more specific questions – I promise it won’t take a week to respond this time.</p>
<p>leukemia, not yet for me, how about u?</p>
<p>me either…it’s hard for me…
do you have any suggestions among the 3 schools?</p>
<p>well congrats! i’m still waiting on Stony Brook, Penn State, UMaryland, UConn, and UIllinois. I’m guessing I didn’t get in…what a waste of money :(</p>
<p>Hmm I wonder if there is a Rockefeller facebook group</p>
<p>I’m an international as well. How will other internationals be choosing between offers? I am trying to choose between two schools and of course i don’t have any feelings about the two programs since i was only phone interviewd by the DGS in both programs. Do you think it is ok to email graduate students that you have not met or been introduced to? I am a little ashamed.</p>
<p>Two schools I applied to encouraged me to get in touch with current graduate students so I could hear their thoughts about the program first-hand. So it’s probably an okay thing to do.</p>
<p>Also, I imagine if I were a grad student, I wouldn’t mind answering a few questions from a candidate, so you don’t need to feel it’s inappropriate to talk to current students without meeting them beforehand.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why would you be ashamed? If you have been accepted to the school it is only natural that you would have questions and might need the perspective of current students to help you make up your mind. I am a little surprised that the schools did not give you a list of student’s e-mails for this purpose (unless they did and you feel “ashamed” to use it). </p>
<p>I say it is more than just probably an ok thing to do, as long as you understand that any random student might be very busy that week and may not write you back immediately.</p>
<p>Univ_student,</p>
<p>Are you waiting for Stony Brook Genetics? I think they send out offers in several waves. Some people got offers in late March last year.</p>
<p>Hi Mollie, thank you very much for sharing your BBS experience. It is very informative and helpful! I am interested in finding out more about the quarter courses and nanocourses. Besides the course format and the length, what is the major difference between these 2 and the usual lecture-type courses, in terms of course coverage and material? I mean since both nano and quarter are topic foucused and heavily primary literature based, what makes them differ so much regarding the course length? How about the lecture-type, will they be textbook based instead? Besides, will we get the full list of all available courses at the beginning of G1, or will they come up slowly in the queue?</p>
<p>Then about the TA, will we be provided with different community service teaching options, or we have to search out ourselves? TAing an undergraduate course looks really attractive. Will there be any qualification or other kinds? The pay just looks too good to be true for me…</p>
<p>Brain_aging, I didn’t realize there is the Harvard BBS 2009 on facebook. Thanks for the invitation. I have sent in my request already. I really hope we could dress it up soon in the future. 
Btw, which welcome weekend did you go? Did I meet you there? I went for the March one.</p>
<p>Does anyone know if Einstein sent the response card along with the admission letter? I searched every corner in my room, couldn’t find it…</p>
<p>Thanks a lot~</p>