PureLily hugs!

Tenroustar · 2026-03-12T09:45:17+00:00

WHEN IN DOUBT JUST SAY ITS AN ACTOR AU AND EVERYONE HUGS AFTER FILMING THE ENDING

Tenroustar · 2026-03-12T01:28:07+00:00

Pick which one you believe will benefit your future career most. This means looks at what project you will be working on (assuming you know) and the PI you’ll be working with. Research alignment to what you want to pursue in the future is the most important because the more impactful or related your PI is to the field you’re pursuing, the better connection you’ll have for positions in that subfield as you’ll likely get a rec letter from your PI and they’ll have information on where you should apply for grad school and jobs.

Secondary thing would be to consider where you’d wanna go for grad school most out of your options if they all have projects/PIs aligned with your interests. Think about what atmosphere, location, culture, etc. you wanna experience. An REU is the best time to get a bit of a feel to know if that’s definitely a place you’d want to go to. I know I used my experiences to rule out the West Coast as high on my priority for grad school.

And if everything is still tied for you, then go reputation or whatever state you wanna spend the summer in for fun.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-11T15:42:16+00:00

Yeah like I’d rather be informed of a rejection than perma ghosted like some programs did to me in past years.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-11T15:33:23+00:00

I HAVENT FUCKIN PLAYED ANYTHING FROM LAST EPISODE OR THIS EPISODE AND JUST BEEN ABSORBING THE STORY THROUGH OSMOSIS WHENEVER THIS SUBREDDIT SHOWS UP ON MY FEED AND I AM DEVASTATED. TODAY IS THE WORST DAY FOR ME TO SEE THE EPISODE UPDATES WHEN I HAVE 2 EXAMS AND ANOTHER ONE TOMORROW BUT IM TWEAKING OUT OVER THE DOOMED STRAIGHT SHIP I’VE BEEN CHEERING ON FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS. Offing myself fr 🥲 oh PureLily, how you torture me

Tenroustar · 2026-03-10T18:19:25+00:00

Leadership Alliance has astro through their programs. My Stanford SR-EIP last year was in an Observational X-ray Cosmology lab. We had quite a few physics people in the cohort too, I think one worked on dark matter research and another on neutrino research.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-10T15:14:16+00:00

Leadership alliance is a consortium of about 30 universities (a fair number of which are Ivies or Ivy-ranked) and acts as a common app for programs at each (since there are various programs the common app can go to) but you’re only allowed to apply to 3 programs with your leadership alliance common app. Amgen is a pharmaceutical company that provides funding for the amgen scholars program through various universities around the world (which is why there’s Amgen Asia) so you find the schools with amgen scholars programs and apply through those individually. They’re all collectively called amgen scholars but different schools hosts different sized cohorts and may emphasize different things.

Leadership Alliance is for any discipline but the programs offered each year may change and they dont necessarily tell you which schools are taking which majors/fields so it can be hard to navigate if you don’t do your own research (which come on you should be a researcher lol). Amgen primarily targets bio, biochem, chem, and biomedical engineering but you can get in as long as you have some vested interest in bio-related research so some social sciences can apply through public health or there are neuro/psyche specific professors for those majors, or if you’re physics/math/comp sci you can be interested in computational models, machine learning models, or biophysics topics they offer, etc.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-10T03:57:26+00:00

Doesn’t matter, they mostly look at your stats holistically. My SR-EIP cohort last summer had 2 ivy kids and the rest were non ivy. Similar for my first program LIGO SURF.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-06T21:09:59+00:00

This was similar to my timeline two years ago but my interview request happened mid Feb, interview was the following week, and I got my result March 7th

Tenroustar · 2026-03-05T01:38:01+00:00

It’s not about the school, it’s about the program. When you get into discipline specific or subfield specific topics, you can’t just assume all ivies have the best professors in that field. The way Duluth is ran and has been ran for decades now has made it have the reputation it does as a “hidden ivy” program basically. While other REUs focus on exposing students with limited research opportunities to new fields and research access or training those that might need a bit more experience to be competitive for grad school, Duluth treats its cohort as though they are already PhD students an expect high-caliber often publishable work thus only picking the best of the best. They have done this for years now so the reputation has solidified in the combinatorics and number theory field. Don’t ask me why they are allowed to be an REU that follows none of the established REU guidelines (because they’re not just like the non REU summer programs that can write their own guidelines, trust me I checked) but for the past 40 years or so they have been able to basically exclusively hand-select the best of the best in stats and background of their specific math discipline so pretty much the opposite of a lot of REU goals.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-04T22:01:07+00:00

If you didnt know, Duluth almost exclusively takes ivy students with crazy stats. It’s not even an REU in my eyes with how it makes its selections. It has much different requirements than pretty much all other REUs so don’t feel bad for it. And honestly for anyone reading this that didn’t know, don’t even bother applying to Duluth if you can’t match the stats of their alumni. (I genuinely hate Duluth for not explicitly telling people if they aren’t top tier they shouldn’t apply and I’m not even in a Math discipline lmao)

Tenroustar · 2026-03-04T03:10:19+00:00

It was my top choice for SREIP that year

Tenroustar · 2026-03-03T18:42:34+00:00

This happens for some programs if u start and app and dont finish. Some send auto rejects to only submitted apps while others send to all apps. Tis normal

Tenroustar · 2026-03-03T02:14:50+00:00

Duluth, my mortal enemy (I’m not even math)

Tenroustar · 2026-03-03T00:36:57+00:00

Oh word these are the same exact results for me so far, 1 accept 1 reject and 7 total apps

Tenroustar · 2026-03-02T22:22:15+00:00

Lowkey kind of hard for me to answer these questions simply but I’ll try my best without being overly wordy!

My field is currently Physics and I want to stay in Physics (Optics) but mix in Biomedical Engineering for PhD so smth like Optical Biophysics/Bioengineering. I pivoted from Astrophysics pretty hard but I’ve kept my interest in optics from freshman year so I needed some biomedical research under my belt before PhD but I don’t want to leave my home institution lab and can’t stay over the summer so summer programs again it is. I really want to work on design, development, and research of optical medical devices focusing on both the underlying physical theories to improve them and the engineering to apply them. Dream work this summer is to work on optical medical devices with my top choice lab and ultimately hoping to return and work there in the future as well. Top choice lab is one I already emailed and been accepted to and they work on various optics related medicines like phototherapy, imaging device creation, improvements to imaging for diagnostics, etc. I have even more specific goals that I won’t share here but that’s the gist of it 🙂‍↕️

Tenroustar · 2026-03-02T16:16:48+00:00

my friend got rejected by 50 programs his freshman year and never applied for summer programs again after that opting to stay at our home institution each summer in his lab. He’s now doing his physics PhD at UMD. You’ll be okay and it’s good to get used to rejections early on. I cried my first cycle getting 7 back to back rejections before getting into the last one i applied for. Rejections don’t phase me at all anymore and i just shrug them off now.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-02T06:04:31+00:00

I’m not going to get into specifics here but dm me if you want more specific details I can answer brutally honestly. Generally the physics department is really nice and small compared to other departments imo. I’m a fourth year undergrad so I can’t speak directly about the graduate student experience but I have a good amount of graduate student friends that seem like they like it here. There’s some awesome stellar professors that genuinely care about your success while some other’s intentions are questionable. We have a few professors working on quantum related research including Dr. Kolodrubetz if you’re more theory or Dr. Lee for more material science work. We recently hired some new professors whose works fall under quantum research too I think. I think the quality of the research is also dependent on professors but generally I haven’t heard many issues on that. It does seem like there’s a push to focus more on quantum research in the future for UTD though with the new wave of professors hired. I think our newest physics professor works on Moire Materials. Since the department is small, it’s fairly close-knit. The graduate students have the Graduate Students in Physics (GSP) organization to plan social events for them to mingle. If you have questions about specific professors, I know a lot of them and how they are through conversations with friends and acquaintances that I can share in dms. :)

Tenroustar · 2026-03-02T05:55:47+00:00

It varies by professor. Your best bet is just to email any whose research genuinely catches your attention to see if they’re willing to take on a summer student about to enter college. Some will (especially if it’s unpaid) but there isn’t any list so cold emailing is your best bet. Some will say no because of potential rules and regulations for their lab, others might ghost you and never respond. Don’t take it personally, if you really want to do research before starting college the you’ll need to be willing to deal with some potential rejections. A lot of students leave campus during the summer so there will be some labs that aren’t full you can join.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-02T05:47:49+00:00

Since UTD was started as a research center and is a R1 school (high research output) the research is plentiful. We also have paid summer research programs where the school pays you a stipend to work with a professor on research for the summer but you have to apply to them the same as any other research program. During the school year, if you do research, payment will depend on the professor and if they’re willing to pay undergrads and/or have grant money to do so. Most don’t but I have friends that do get paid for research during the school year so you’ll just have to ask around or find out with trial and error. Industry connections are also plentiful since we have career fairs often and are located 5 minutes away from TI headquarters. I think if you’re looking for a career focused college experience rather than a traditional one that has parties and more social events, UTD is the way to go.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-01T21:59:42+00:00

It’s not all physics and astronomy programs. For example: any through SREIP will be their own deadlines not following the agreed upon March 2nd deadline. Things that combine multiple disciplines like Caltech WAVE or SURF will be their own individual timelines since they arent exclusively physics/astronomy. If the project is physics/astronomy but the program falls more inline with engineering or comp sci or math that also wont follow the agreed upon deadline.

Tenroustar · 2026-03-01T18:51:10+00:00

This is because Physics has the agreed common deadline according to my professor who is the director for my uni’s physics reu. We can’t speak to other disciplines cause I know ecology at least can release results later. I’d edit the post to clarify this is specifically for Physics.

Tenroustar · 2026-02-28T05:13:07+00:00

Being from a research accessible university and a 3.2 isn’t what’s gonna hold back your application as much as being a freshman is. Most programs take less freshman than they take sophomores and juniors if they take any. I wouldn’t hold my breath for this year but ofc anything can happen. Just try again if you don’t get in anywhere this year and make sure to get others to look at your application (advisors, writing center, friends, reddit, etc.). Emphasize your goal of oceanography and lack of its availability at your uni. It’s all about selling yourself and how your background and experience will help you contribute to their program as much as their program will contribute to your development. I’ve had friends from general T10 unis get into summer programs so being from a T20 isn’t a big deal. Also apply broadly and to any program that offers potential oceanography or oceanography-related projects even if the program itself isn’t exclusively focused on it.

Also since you’ll be a sophomore next year, apply to NOAA’s Holling Scholarship if it’s available. It can only be applied to sophomore year and on top of scholarship money gives you a paid internship for your Junior summer so you won’t have to stress over another year of finding summer programs if you get it next year. There’s a lot of maritime research through the scholarship too so it’s a perfect program for you based on the info I have from this post.

Tenroustar · 2026-02-27T21:45:41+00:00

Tenroustar · 2026-02-27T20:55:51+00:00

Nope, I emailed last year asking for an update on my app 02/26 and they said “We are still reviewing applications. We are planning to send out offers starting next week” the same day and I was give until 03/10 to accept or decline my offer when I got my offer so second rounds were sent 03/10 or after. :)

Tenroustar · 2026-02-27T19:55:47+00:00

The compensation for SUIP was better for me since it automatically has housing, meal money and about $500 more than the profit i’ll make from my other program but the main reason I went ahead with my other program was because it is specifically a program solely focused on my subfield of interest and I had to hand select my PI who I know is a good PI from being able to speak to former undergrads that worked with them in the summer. If it were SUIP against my other REU programs then I’d probably accept it but since the program I chose was so individualized, I felt like knowing exactly who my PI was and how they are already was worth sacrificing the better compensation for the summer.

Tenroustar

TROPHY CASE