Suggestons for biomedical engineering safety schools?

Graduate School
1

<p>I’m rising senior planning on applying to PhD programs in biomedical engineering/chemical engineering. My broad research interests include gene/drug delivery, biomaterials, tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and stem cells. I’m not too concerned with applying to prestigious programs. Rather, I’ve been trying to select schools that have at least a few professors with whom I’d be interested in working. Unfortunately, my list has come out pretty top heavy anyway. Does anyone have any suggestions for “safety” schools that might be a good match for my research interests?</p>

<p>Here are my stats and my current list of schools:</p>

<p>School: top 20 private
Major: Biomedical Engineering
Minor: Global Health</p>

<p>Overall GPA: 3.97
GRE: 800Q / 730V / waiting on AW, hopefully 4.0+</p>

<p>Length of Degree: 4 years
Type of Student: domestic, Asian female</p>

<p>Research Experience:

  • summer after freshman year to March of soph year: Research in my school’s BME dept on HIV diagnostics for developing countries. Unrelated to what I’m doing now, but it was a good introduction to research and I got to work on my own independent project for a while. I’m still interested in global health but decided I wanted to do more biology-oriented research.
  • summer after soph year: Summer REU program. Research on non-viral gene delivery vehicles. I started off doing one project but was forced to switch projects with about 3-4 weeks left because my peptide synthesis wasn’t working. My final project ended up being relatively trivial, but it was something to present at the closing symposium, I suppose.
  • beginning of jr year to present: Research in my school’s chemE dept on gene delivery and applications in regenerative medicine. I started working on an independent project at the beginning of the summer; it’s not panning out too well so far, but I’m going to keep working on it through this school year.</p>

<p>Rec letters:

  1. Professor whose lab I currently work in and who is fairly established in my field. I’ve actually had very few interactions with him but am confident that my grad student will tell him good things about me. I also took one of his grad-level classes as a junior and got an A. The basis of the class was reading and discussing papers, and the final was a group NIH-style oral/written research proposal.
  2. Professor of a lab-based class on how to design and analyze experiments. This was a junior-level class that I took as a sophomore. I only got an A-, but I worked harder for it than for any other class, asked lots of questions, and hopefully showed myself to be a very competent and detail-oriented researcher.
  3. Summer REU professor. As I mentioned above, my original project was kind of a fail and my second project was trivial. I interacted with her on only a few occasions, but she was actually the one to offer me “a strong rec if I ever need one.”</p>

<p>Papers: will be 3rd author on a paper that will hopefully be submitted soon. also got an acknowledgment on another paper.
Awards/Honors/Recognitions: honors program, summer undergraduate research grant, Tau Beta Pi, Dean’s List, nothing spectacular…</p>

<p>Schools (all PhD programs):

  • University of Washington - bioengineering (did my REU here)
  • MIT - biological engineering, may also apply to HST-MEMP
  • UPenn - bioengineering
  • Berkeley-UCSF - bioengineering
  • Colorado-Boulder - chemical and biological engineering
  • Pittsburgh - bioengineering</p>

<p>still considering:

  • Vanderbilt - biomedical engineering (I hear they are very selective?)
  • Rutgers - biomedical engineering (seems like it could be a safety school based on ranking, but their website says they only have 5-10 PhD students per entering class)
  • Rochester - biomedical engineering (no idea how selective they are)
  • Virginia Tech-Wake Forest - biomedical engineering (no idea how selective they are)</p>

<p>So, what safety schools should I add? (Or top schools that would be perfect matches that are obviously missing?) Which schools should I move from my “maybe” list to my “definitely” list? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
And if you want to chance me while you’re at it, that would be great, too. But not as important.</p>

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<p>gpa high- female- research good- all set</p>

3

<p>Your profile looks good, you’re looking at good schools. Why do you want to add safety schools? Only apply to schools that you actually want to attend.</p>

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<p>What about Hopkins or Duke? Aren’t those the #1 and #2 ranked for BME?</p>

5

<p>LAC operon (nice username btw) - Well, I realize that PhD admissions are pretty competitive even with good stats. I mean, Berkeley regularly rejects people with multiple publications, and I don’t even officially have 1 paper yet. I don’t think I want to go into industry (at least not at this point), so there really isn’t a back-up plan, and I want to maximize my chances of getting into at least one program. I don’t want to just add arbitrary safety schools, though - I’m perfectly happy to attend a “safety” school as long as they have research I’m interested in. Alas, there seems to be a bit of a shortage of mid- to lower-tier schools doing gene delivery/biomaterials research.</p>

<p>As for Hopkins and Duke, I got into and decided against both for undergrad. Not a huge fan of either location. :\ Also, I should probably try to avoid adding too many more top programs to my list.</p>