- #1
PrinceWalnut
- 13
- 4
Hi all,
It's a few short months before grad school applications are due, and I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. Prior to my junior year, I knew what I wanted to do is physics research for my career, and I'm particularly interested in biological and condensed matter physics. My skills are more computational than experimental, although I'm not opposed to any particular type of work.
However, in the summer before my junior year (and possibly long before that) I started having symptoms of depression, and after seeing a few therapists and doctors, received a diagnosis of Persistent Depressive Disorder and appropriate medication (which has been HUGELY helpful) the summer after my junior year. But in between the manifestation of the symptoms and my treatment for them was two of the most important semesters in my undergrad career, and they were an enormous disappointment as a result of higher level classes and the general symptoms depression tends to give.
Prior to my junior year, my cumulative GPA was a 3.63 with my major GPA a little higher than that (I'm from Arizona State Univ for context). But after the two semesters (with term GPAs of 2.88 and 2.36) it was dragged all the way down to 3.35. Amazingly, I passed all of my classes (only because Cs are somehow considered a passing grade), but this has the effect of rendering my GPA totally noncompetitive for a reasonably good school. I've yet to take the GRE/PGRE (will be doing those later this semester), but I have been working in an x-ray crystallography lab on the data analysis/simulation side of things for almost 2 years now, with an associated internship through BioXFEL one summer and will be going to SLAC next month for an experiment. No publications have come yet (although there are two current projects which might be publishable, but probably not until PhD admits have been made for the most part).
I wanted to know precisely how competitive I am for various programs, as I'm painfully aware that my low GPA and lack of something really good to make up for it frankly eliminates me as a candidate many places. I've been considering alternate routes (working in a lab for a few years, getting a master's degree in maths or nanoscience to replace undergrad work, etc.), but my ideal was to go straight into a PhD program. I've listed a few of the programs I'm interested in below (in no particular order). I know some of these I'm not competitive for, but I've included everything on my radar so far for completeness.
PhD Programs in Biological/Condensed Matter Physics:
Arizona State University
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
Rice University
UCSD
Cornell
UCSF
Berkeley
Johns Hopkins (Jenkins Biophysics Program)
Stanford
University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign
Princeton
MIT
If there's any advice on my competitiveness for any of these schools, as well as other schools I might be interested in and more reasonably suited for, that would be hugely helpful. Thanks in advance.
It's a few short months before grad school applications are due, and I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. Prior to my junior year, I knew what I wanted to do is physics research for my career, and I'm particularly interested in biological and condensed matter physics. My skills are more computational than experimental, although I'm not opposed to any particular type of work.
However, in the summer before my junior year (and possibly long before that) I started having symptoms of depression, and after seeing a few therapists and doctors, received a diagnosis of Persistent Depressive Disorder and appropriate medication (which has been HUGELY helpful) the summer after my junior year. But in between the manifestation of the symptoms and my treatment for them was two of the most important semesters in my undergrad career, and they were an enormous disappointment as a result of higher level classes and the general symptoms depression tends to give.
Prior to my junior year, my cumulative GPA was a 3.63 with my major GPA a little higher than that (I'm from Arizona State Univ for context). But after the two semesters (with term GPAs of 2.88 and 2.36) it was dragged all the way down to 3.35. Amazingly, I passed all of my classes (only because Cs are somehow considered a passing grade), but this has the effect of rendering my GPA totally noncompetitive for a reasonably good school. I've yet to take the GRE/PGRE (will be doing those later this semester), but I have been working in an x-ray crystallography lab on the data analysis/simulation side of things for almost 2 years now, with an associated internship through BioXFEL one summer and will be going to SLAC next month for an experiment. No publications have come yet (although there are two current projects which might be publishable, but probably not until PhD admits have been made for the most part).
I wanted to know precisely how competitive I am for various programs, as I'm painfully aware that my low GPA and lack of something really good to make up for it frankly eliminates me as a candidate many places. I've been considering alternate routes (working in a lab for a few years, getting a master's degree in maths or nanoscience to replace undergrad work, etc.), but my ideal was to go straight into a PhD program. I've listed a few of the programs I'm interested in below (in no particular order). I know some of these I'm not competitive for, but I've included everything on my radar so far for completeness.
PhD Programs in Biological/Condensed Matter Physics:
Arizona State University
University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
Rice University
UCSD
Cornell
UCSF
Berkeley
Johns Hopkins (Jenkins Biophysics Program)
Stanford
University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign
Princeton
MIT
If there's any advice on my competitiveness for any of these schools, as well as other schools I might be interested in and more reasonably suited for, that would be hugely helpful. Thanks in advance.
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