Hello R/Neuro!
So I've been on Reddit for a couple of years and in the past two years I've finally mustered up the courage to follow what I want to do in life. This is so weird; I’ve never had the opportunity to speak exactly how I feel without self-monitoring, but because I created a new account to mask my identity (my other account had almost my entire name in it, and due to people I know in the neuro community, I was paranoid about risking people figuring me out) I can speak my mind completely. I’ve read a bunch of self-neuro pages about people wanting to go to grad school but I’ve never been in a situation where I needed advice on what do next, but now I am!
So. I’ll give you a quick run through of my college career so you know where I’m coming from. I initially went to a small-private school and hated it. I spent every waking hour in the library and came out of the university majoring in Psychobiology with a 3.9 GPA.
I then transferred to a pretty tough public university where I reside now. After spending wasted time as an Exercise Science and then Psychology major, I finally had the balls to become a Neuroscience major. I had always wanted to be a Neuroscience major, but I had always lacked the confidence to actually do anything about it. I still have a lot of trouble with confidence but I’m definitely in a better boat now then I was then. During my sophomore year I worked for a year in a language & cognition lab to understand what it is like to work in a lab. I loved the atmosphere and retrieving data, but I was always more interested in the methodology and results that a wet lab offered. During my junior year I joined such a lab where I’ve learned about how to make solutions, stain tissue, perfuse animals, and work on behavioral side-projects. I love this lab, and still work here. During this time I began to become very interested in sleep (particularly the connection between sleep and emotion). With this interest, I emailed a few professors to see where they were headed in their research and one of the professors hired me for the summer (where I am now). I’ll be learning all about diffusion tensor imaging, fMRI imaging, pupillary tracking, and different behavioral paradigms! Very exciting. SO! Whoever has made it through my rant, here is a little more so maybe you can help me. I’d love to continue researching neuroscience particularly in the field of behavioral neuroscience. My research interests include – molecular mechanisms behind memory consolidation during sleep; emotional regulation during sleep; and circadian rhythms, genes, and the biology of mood disorders. I have a 3.3 overall gpa, a 3.56 neuroscience major gpa, and obviously the 3.9 gpa from the first school that isn’t calculated into any of the aforementioned gpas. I have not taken the GRE yet but I will this coming fall.
SO! What do you think I should be doing this summer to prepare for applying? Are there any labs that anyone knows of that meets my interests? What are my chances of being accepted by these programs? General advice for me that you think would be beneficial. I will take it all and anything would be a huge help.
Thank you for your time, your input means the world to me.