<p>I’ve struggled with depression since end of second year (along with schizoaffective psychosis) and it came to a head last fall, causing me to withdraw at the end of the year. So my last recorded grades are 4W’s. Not only that, but the semester before that wasn’t good either (GPA of 2.6) Now I’m back on track (with some hiccups). My plan has generally been to clock in a good semester, then start applying so I can show that I’m back on track, but there are some really cool companies recruiting this fall. Interdisciplinary companies-- I thrive on interdisciplinary – interdisciplinary describes me. </p>
<p>During my time away from classes, I made good progress on my research, where I designed my own novel experiments and protocols (building upon previous methods from the literature and past work in my lab), taught myself signal/pattern processing, and wrote a multitude of different MATLAB scripts to mathematically and statistically analyse (from all sorts of angles) the time series trajectories of Drosophila under the influence of different drugs.</p>
<p>However, I don’t really know how to explain my situation in an application which doesn’t ask for any letters of recommendation, and isn’t it kind of awkward to explain a deficiency in a cover letter? Should I just wait till next year?</p>