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It’s that time again… Let’s open the mailbag and see what you, our listeners and friends, have sent in!
Read MoreTag: GRE
102: HelloPhD Guide to Grad School Applications – Crafting the Perfect Personal Statement with Dr. Brian Rybarczyk
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Please recount your life story, all of your future plans, and why this graduate program is uniquely suited to fulfill those dreams. Limit your answer to 140 characters.
Okay, okay, the typical “Personal Statement” prompt on your grad school application is probably not that outrageous, but they CAN feel both cryptic and overwhelming.
Here’s a real prompt from a real grad school application at a major university:
In 1-2 pages, describe your career goals, research interests, past and present research experience, and why you’ve chosen the [Name Redacted] Program for your graduate studies.
This prompt can induce instant writer’s block in even the most prepared applicants. So where do you begin?
This week on the show, we share tips for crafting the perfect personal statement that will highlight your grad-school-readiness and potential for greatness in a career beyond the degree.
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084: The 4 Keys to an Effective Grad School Application
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In every episode of Hello PhD, we explore science training and life in the lab. But for every scientist, that saga begins with a grad school application.
Whether you’re ready to apply today, or would like to apply to a graduate program ‘some day,’ we share a few tips and tricks that will make the application process simpler and more effective.
083: Preprint First, Peer-Review Later
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Publishing your research in a peer-reviewed academic journal is an exercise in patience. You write and edit, wait for feedback from your PI, wrangle the figures into some esoteric format, and then submit. That’s when the real patience begins.
From submission to publication, the peer review process can take more than a year. Meanwhile, you’re moving on to other work, and hoping a competing lab doesn’t scoop the science you showed at the last conference.
Enter the preprint. Though it sounds unassuming, it’s a source of real controversy in the biomedical sciences.
065: Does the GRE Predict Which Students Will Succeed?
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Though most of us have never served on a graduate program admissions committee, we can still appreciate the difficulty of their task: Given a stack qualified applicants, choose the few that you believe will succeed.
Where do you start? Perhaps you check on each applicant’s GPA, or focus just on the GPA in their science classes.
Or maybe you trust the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). After all, it’s designed to measure a student’s readiness for graduate school, right?
Because reviewers differ on which metrics they trust most, it’s worth considering a scientific approach to admissions. Are there any predictor variables that actually correlate with student outcomes?