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Neuroscience: News and Discussions.

Full History - 2012 - 02 - 19 - ID#px5zn
3
Neuroscience graduate school advice? (self.neuroscience)
submitted 11y ago by NeuroBadgerXX
Hey r/neuroscience!!

I'm in my 3rd year of my undergraduate degree, double majoring in psychology and neurobiology. My goal is to apply for neuroscience graduate programs this fall, so this is pretty much my last semester to do anything that will help me stand out.

So my question is - what is the one thing I should be sure to have done before I start applying? Is there one thing that I can do in the next few months that will really help me in my application process?

Any advice would be awesome :) Or just any grad school advice in general! Thanks guys!!
circuithunter 3 points
The single most important thing to get into grad school is to do research. I can guarantee you that you will not get into a single competitive grad program without at least six months of research experience (ideally you should have more than a year). The best predictor of success in grad school is not grades, classes, or anything to do with school -- it's having 18 months of research experience.

Given that you only have 10 months left, I would try to join a lab immediately. What type of neuroscience are you interested in?
NeuroBadgerXX [OP] 3 points
Ideally I want to study developmental neuroscience. I'm really interested in the neurodevelopmental processes in kids with developmental disorders and kids who were abused at a very young age.

As for research, I've done primate research (just as an undergraduate research assistant, but been very involved) for almost 2 years now. And I recently started in working in another lab under a neuro professor at my university.
circuithunter 3 points
Fantastic. Assuming you'll get good recs from the professors you've worked with, you should be fine. The next most important thing is that during interviews, you show enthusiasm and show that you understand the rationale behind the experiments and not just the methodology.

As for what you're interested in studying, you might not want to go for neuroscience graduate school. Studying abused kids is more in the range of psychology/cognitive science. For neurodevelopmental disorders, you can certainly study it from a hard-core neuroscience perspective, but expect to spend more time on the molecular or circuit mechanisms. Most developmental neuroscience is really focused on how circuits assemble and is very molecular. However, something that may interest you is early plasticity and critical period work, which nicely unites behavior and molecular/circuit analysis.
[deleted] 1 points
Well, it depends on where he goes for that...developmental at my school isn't molecular at all, that's always in the BCN area.
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