Greetings,

We are always honored to have students consider our department for potential graduate studies. It is nice to know that we are becoming famous around the world. I have put together some answers to some common questions regarding our program and funding, and am including them below. I hope this addresses your biggest concerns. Questions more specific to the application process itself should probably go to Donna Porcelli (click here to email her), the department's admissions administrator. Feel free to email me any additional questions or thoughts you might have. Good luck with the application process and all your future studies.

Funding:

As with pretty much all decent BME PhD graduate programs in the US, all students who get into our PhD program are pretty much guaranteed funding throughout their entire graduate student career. The policy at the UofR is that the department has guaranteed funding for all students during their first 15 months. After 15 months, it is expected that the student will have found a lab that they are at least considering and that lab will help cover their funding. I would think it unlikely that the department would not find a way to support a student should their chosen lab not have sufficient funds or somehow their first lab choice falls through. Funding includes complete coverage of all tuition costs, health care, plus a living stipend each year. The stipend seems to increase each year. For the year 2007 the tuition scholarship came to around $25,800, health care coverage ~$1,800 and the stipend was ~$24,000. Teaching assistantships for 1-2 semesters is included/required as part of your training. You should be able to find a very similar arrangement at any decent BME PhD program in the U.S. Frankly, if I were you and were looking a school that did not virtually guarantee funding for all students, I would find another school to consider. Funding for masters-only students is not (yet) guaranteed here, although there is some funding available. Often, individual labs will have funds set aside for MS-level students. There are schools out there that guarantee complete funding for all master's students (for example, I know that Johns Hopkins Univ. does), so you might want to look around. BME masters students here get a 50% tuition waiver (75% for UofR alumni). Currently at the UofR we have only 3-4 MS students who are not part of the UofR's combined 5-year BS-MS program, i.e. 3-4 students pursuing a 2 year MS degree having come from outside the UofR. Two of these students happen to be working in my lab and their reseach projects fall withing the bounds of already-funded projects within my lab, so I am covering the other 50% of their tuition but they do not receive a stipend. Consider also generating your own funding by applying for graduate student research fellowhips from any of several sources, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA , the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to name a few. I'll cheat here and grab a link to Cornell's Student Info site which posts an exhaustive list of these and other fellowship opportunities.

Selecting a Lab:

The guaranteed 15 months of funding is intended to give all students an opportunity to experience the different variety of research work and labs that are available to them for their thesis work. Our PhD program requires at least 3 rotations be done be each student during their first year here. Thus, it is not expected (or even advised necessarily) that the students find or solidify a particular lab before they arrive here. In fact, my personal experience was that I went to grad school with a certain project area (orthopedics) in mind, but once I got there I found that I liked much better the field of MRI research so that is what I went into. I could not have foreseen myself working in MR research upon entering grad school since I had never even seen an MRI scanner until I did a rotation with the MR group my second year. So my advice is that if you have a plan already, feel free to use it to help select your schools of choice, but to try to keep your options open until you get a chance to see what is available here as you might find something that even better suits your interests and abilities.

Application Tips:

I have never been on the BME graduate admissions committee here, so I really don't know exactly what they look for or how they go about the process of selecting from the applicant pool. I also have really no input to the committee, so I can't help you much there. [Translation: don't bother sending me cookies in an attempt to improve your application score as it will have no real effect. This is not to say though that if you are planning to send cookies to other people and you need a test subject for your latest recipe, I would not be interested in helping out.] Supposedly, whether or not you have already selected a lab and whether or not that lab has already funding to cover you have no bearing on the admissions selection process. Overall, though, I recommend that you write in your personal statement something that uniquely identifies yourself. With over 100 applications, they are bound to see many people with the same course backgrounds and similar general interests in research and teaching, so above those things is there anything that tells us about you in particular? In my application, I mentioned that the first time I had been introduced to the field of BME (it was not a well-established field at the time) was on a visit at a chiropractic college that my brother was attending. During my interviews people would identify me as the one "whose brother was a chiropractor". I'm not certain that that was even a positive connection for all the interviewers, but at least they had something that identified me from the other applicants.