9 ms·

Biomedical engineer with a 2.977GPA. Lots of extra curriculars, volunteered in labs, 160 credit hours of mostly STEM classes, lots of grad-level courses, releva

• dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
  > Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are still ways to do research. I am very interested in this concept. Are you thinking of any in particular? I really wish people invested in public spaces people could go do science, particularly chemistry.
  • idrios 6y ago
    I joined one called "BioCurious"[1] in the SF Bay area to work on a project making a fluorescence microscope. The project was advertised on Meetup.com which is how I found it, and there were other similar projects that met up weekly. If you paid a membership fee though you got 24/hr access so I met a person there outside of academia who was using the lab's resources to continue the neuroscience research he had done for his PhD. In the bay area I also know of CounterCulture [2] which I've only heard high praise of but I've never visited. I've since moved to Baltimore and found some places I wanted to check out but unfortunately because of Covid I've been stuck at home. [1] https://biocurious.org/ https://biocurious.org/ [2] https://www.counterculturelabs.org/ https://www.counterculturelabs.org/
    • gww 6y ago
      If you haven't seen it Lior Pachter at CalTech has been sharing open source / 3d printable designs for lab equipment [1]. [1] https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1354955229532360707 https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1354955229532360707
      • dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
        Thank you!
    • dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      Thanks for sharing. I'm in Baltimore, too. Please post these places if you have a chance. Would love to check them out when possible. Searching the web, I have found https://bugssonline.org/ https://bugssonline.org/.
      • idrios 6y ago
        Hey, sorry for taking so long to respond to this. When I moved here I made a list of hacker spaces that were both general and biology-focused. I thought I had found more that were focused on bio but unfortunately I think you're right, for biosciences it's only Baltimore Underground Science Space.
  • acomjean 6y ago
    In Cambridge MA there is Bos Lab: (microbiology). https://www.boslab.org/ https://www.boslab.org/
    • dmitryminkovsky 6y ago
      Thank you!
• slumdev 6y ago
  > GPA was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters Your application was most likely reviewed by real people, not just automated filters. People with GPAs below 3 do get into competitive grad programs (and med school). An upward trend is the key.
  • huijzer 6y ago
    Maybe indeed. Maybe not. It‘s probably more nuanced and random than that.
  • lumost 6y ago
    I'm sure this happens to some people with the right combination of luck, perseverance, and recommendations. It's probably far more likely at your current institution as you already have relationships with professors who sit on the admissions committee. Particularly if you are already productive in a lab and the principal researcher goes to bat for you. That doesn't change the OPs point that this is an uphill battle. If they didn't have the above, or they could only get into the right program then it still leaves them with better alternatives elsewhere. Harvard almost certainly filters all candidates with a GPA less than 3.0. Unfortunately academic grades have a poor correlation with future career or research performance.
  • idrios 6y ago
    Ah.. I don't think this comment deserved to be downvoted. I did actually have one place reach out -- a lab at U of Toronto. But they asked if I was international and when I said yes (USA) they apologized and said they didn't have funding to sponsor an international student. But yeah, all the other schools were faceless rejections
• phobosanomaly 6y ago
  It's unfortunate to see people disadvantaged by pursuing a truly difficult major. A 2.97 in bioengineering could represent someone who simply took more challenging courses, and got lower grades because the courses were truly difficult. A straight bio major might have a 3.8, but never had to work through a year-long Pchem sequence, instead padding with softer, more grade-inflated courses.
  • fma 6y ago
    The GPA is an interesting system when you sit down to think about it. I came into college with almost 30 general education credit hours. I received the International Baccalaureate diploma in high school. I only needed 1 more gen ed course to fulfill my requirements. So imagine me, a 18 year old jumping immediately into fairly difficult courses my freshman year...adapting to college. Whilst my peers are taking English 101 and inflating their GPA. I did not receive internships offers my early years in college and I feel this had a big part of it.
• ginger_beer_m 6y ago
  Could you share what are these bio hacker spaces, for example?
• fma 6y ago
  There's many issues in our science system, but it may be a blessing that you got rejected. I'm a senior software engineer. My wife has a PhD in biochemistry from a top university. When she graduated she could not get a job anywhere. We both agreed she should choose a different path and she started a business in a totally unrelated field. Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews. I have no doubt she'd be able to be success in the IT industry amongst the many roles offered if she had chosen the path. And many of her peers have self studied, dropped their grad programs and get hired by the likes of Facebook, Microsoft. Pragmatically, the smartest one would never get into fields with limited jobs and pay. I'd rather pick a field so I can feed my family, than to save the world. The US will get leapfrogged in R&D as the brain drain goes towards generating ad revenue (For the record I do not work for a company that relies on generating ads)
  • throwaway_gerts 6y ago
    > Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews. How do you manage that? I've been a software developer for over 20 years now, and every time I lose my job it's a SLOG to find another one, with anywhere from a few months to a year in between. I can't even remember the last time a recruiter contacted me (perhaps 5-6 times in my entire career). It's not like my technical skills are lacking. I've worked professionally with most popular languages and technologies, have dozens of popular open source projects under my belt, many of which you're probably even using at work in some fashion. I've even been called a "miracle worker" a few times for the projects I've saved from ruin, or terrible processes I've optimized. I'm friendly with everyone, not badmouthing, staying out of politics, treating everyone professionally and expecting the same. But then whenever there are layoffs or there's an opportunity to push someone out, I'm in the first wave to go (they never say why). I've even been fired for "not stepping up enough." And then I spend another few months slinging resumes all over, spending my days doing coding challenges in the hopes of getting an interview. Then another year of employment and the cycle starts all over again. I have to constantly prove myself again and again, as if I were fresh out of college or something.
    • stocknoob 6y ago
• gruez 6y ago
  >Also, the Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight. That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right? Many discoveries during that time and in the centuries before were done by individuals rather than institutions.
  • icelancer 6y ago
    >> That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right? There's plenty of low hanging fruit as the industry grows wide. While any given industry is subject to the asymptotic curve of progress, innovations in human biology have been incredibly slow due to bureaucracy and IRB slowdowns + grant model. Human-powered flight wasn't considered a really good idea at the time of the Wright Brothers either, and many people died in the decades following it. It's only in hindsight these ideas seem obvious.
  • deepnotderp 6y ago
    “Everything has already been invented” -1921 and 2021, some things don’t change ;)
• GlennS 6y ago
  So I'm no in the US so not familiar with your GPA system, but couldn't you just take one more class which you knew you'd do well at to push that over the line?
  • idrios 6y ago
    Yup, and I did consider it. But another semester of college just to boost my GPA would've been expensive. I don't have regrets how things turned out, but point is my story is common
    • im3w1l 6y ago
      Sounds like you weren't that motivated in the first place. Could have been a blessing in disguise to meet at hurdle sooner rather than later.
      • Larrikin 6y ago
        Not having financial means to waste more time in college has no bearing on the person's motivation.
      • idrios 6y ago
        Hah, I'm still motivated but I was also pretty aware of the other comments being made here about higher education at the time (excessively political, funding sparse, job search difficulties for bio fields). I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for 4 years of undergrad and graduated with low debt. The extra semester would have doubled my debt with no guarantee I'd be better off after. I know things I could've done or could do now if I wanted to go back, but I think I'm more interested at the moment in how to make the research I want to do more accessible.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  This is not a judgment on you. It sounds like you really challenged yourself, and may have done well in such a program. This is just an explanation of how admissions offices work: Bio programs of any flavor at most halfway decent schools are so over-subscribed that there are far more people who exceed the minimum requirements than there are spots for them. Admissions offices have very limited resources to review enormous #'s of applications. 3.0 is a pretty good low-pass filter that eliminates a lot of those applications while still retaining applications from students who, from a probability standpoint, are most likely to succeed in the programs. Extra curriculars & volunteer work at labs show that you're willing to work hard, but not the quality of that work, so those become distinguishing factors only for students that already jumped the GPA hurdle. Academic success from someone with < 3.0 GPA would represent an outlier, and there are no good ways identify who those outliers are, and finding them isn't important when there are plenty of qualified applicants who are easier to identify. There's probably lots of students in your boat who would have contributed well to the body of scientific knowledge. But for every one of them-- and I have literally seen these students-- there are dozens upon dozens that are let into more lenient programs, unable to do the work & burdened with $100k+ in debt & nothing to show for it.
• dehrmann 6y ago
  I had a 2.97 cumulative GPA. I never did this, but someone told be to put 3.0, and if anyone ever challenges me on it, say "significant figures."
• Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  Not for you obviously, but in case someone else that is still in the situation of applying for grad school is reading this. Have you checked outside the US? In the EU there are plenty of universities that offer grad programs without the crazy access requirements of US universities. Tuition is free or at a token price in many countries. And it's reasonably easy to get a paid PhD studentship where you get paid a real salary, not slave wages (probably this is not that easy to get when you're straight out of your Master's with a mediocre GPA, but once you have shown ability to do research successfully and have a couple of papers under your belt, it shouldn't be hard in most places). Sure, EU universities don't give you the clout of Ivy League, but many do perfectly fine research, you may even learn more as the 3rd PhD student of a professor than as the 27th PhD student of a superstar professor that talks to you five minutes once a month, and can advance your career path just fine. I'm talking about the EU because it's where I am and can talk more or less confidently about, but this is probably true of many other countries and regions outside the US. It's crazy to see how many people don't even consider this. I remember an Iranian researcher I was going to hire for a PhD position, she ended up going to the US because you know, it's the US... she faced the Trump ban and the PhD student tax hikes (here she would have a salary allowing her a middle-class lifestyle and without all those threats), and to this day she has significantly fewer papers than the person who had the second best CV and interview and I hired instead. Seriously, there is life outside the US!
  • alwahi 6y ago
    Which institutes would you recommend for Engineering research?
    • Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
      I think your question is too general. For example, there may be institutions that have e.g. a great civil engineering lab while being mediocre at electrical engineering. And the same can be true of subfields of each engineering discipline (for example, I'm in CS, and it's common to see institutions that have a powerful group in one specific area of CS - say computer vision, robotics, NLP, theoretical CS - and aren't anything special in others). I think you should look at what specific research you want to do and then check what labs are publishing interesting papers on that specific thing.