Prestige of Undergraduate College and Grad School Admission

[AnTiFreeze3]

... Too bad we don't have a thumbs up button. Maybe this should be pasted onto the top of the AA sub-forum.

There's a "Thanks" button, that is more or less a virtual thumbs up. For instance, if someone responds to you with an exceptionally helpful or insightful post (such as this one; it even has examples!), then you should feel no hesitation to press the "Thanks" button on the bottom left corner of his or her post.

Well, go on.

 

[gsmith]

So since this thread seems to have been raised from the dead, I thought I might reply with how my college search worked out for the benefit of those now in the position I was a few months ago.
After being deferred at Chicago and getting accepted to Pitt, Penn State, and Case early in the game, I just had to wait until March to hear from the Ivy Leagues and the final decision from Chicago. I was rejected from Cornell, Yale, and Chicago, but accepted to UPenn. Upenn offered me a position in their Vagelos Program for Molecular Life Sciences to work for a stipend in a Biophyics laboratory. Penn State then offered me a sizable merit scholarship and the promise of laboratory work in their Braddock Scholars program. So, Pitt and Case did not turn out to be contenders based on what Penn State and UPenn offered. I ultimately chose to go to Penn State because of the incredible research opportunities they offered, and the fact that they recruited me pretty heavily. Additionally, my ability to pay for UPenn was contingent upon my ability to keep up with the Vagelos Program which has a dropout rate of over 70%. Thank you to all those who responded to this and other threads helping us nervous undergrads out.

Regards.

 

[WannabeNewton]

Good luck with your studies gsmith! Hope you do well at Penn State; have fun with biophysics and enjoy the rest of your summer.

 

[gsmith]

Good luck with your studies gsmith! Hope you do well at Penn State; have fun with biophysics and enjoy the rest of your summer.

Thank you!
I neglected to mention that another reason I turned down UPenn was because Biophysics isn't really my thing! More of a Condensed Matter guy, myself.

 

[AnTiFreeze3]

Thank you!
I neglected to mention that another reason I turned down UPenn was because Biophysics isn't really my thing! More of a Condensed Matter guy, myself.

How's research in biophysics? As far as job prospects and pay go, I've heard it's a fairly good field to choose for physics research.

 

[WannabeNewton]

More of a Condensed Matter guy, myself.

Finally someone interested in Condensed Matter right off the get go! Well I hope you have fun with CM theory xD. All the best friend.

 

[gsmith]

How's research in biophysics? As far as job prospects and pay go, I've heard it's a fairly good field to choose for physics research.

That is my understanding as well. Biophysicists, I believe, work in a similar capacity to Molecular Biologists. Then there is the field of Medical Physics which deals more with imaging and treatment options (i.e. MRI or Gamma Knife development).

 

[AnTiFreeze3]

That is my understanding as well. Biophysicist, I believe, work on a similar capacity to molecular biologists. The there is e field if medical physics which deals more with imaging and treatment options (ie MRI or gamma knife development)

Alright, thanks for the info.

 

[Arsenic&Lace]

I work in a computational biophysics lab.

My impression talking to the PI is that the prospects in biophysics are pretty good, but getting worse. One major avenue for employment was doing R&D for a drug company; however, this option has vanished in recent years as industrial R&D budgets have been squeezed into nothing.

However, as a computational laboratory, and since you are working on problems closely related to medicine (one of my projects deals direction with a protein involved in the Aspirin drug mechanism, and another project was working on part of the anti-depressant mechanism), I've heard that there are strong programming job prospects/financial mathematics job prospects, and still good research opportunities given the amount of money surging into biology and medicine.