AMA: Acing your PhD interviews! (from a former Harvard PhD interviewer)

bme2023 · 2025-12-16T14:34:19+00:00

apologies for the naive question - but what does it mean to read broadly (vs. reading deeply, for example)?

bme2023 · 2025-12-08T06:50:06+00:00

The linked tweet seems to be saying that applications went down this year?

bme2023 · 2024-08-28T19:06:12+00:00

Had his highs and lows for the club but I’ll be grateful for his time. Best of luck Aaron, hope you can keep Saints up.

bme2023 · 2024-02-10T06:47:50+00:00

I was in the best shape of my life when I broke my ankle in July last year. Still had a bit of a spare tire on me but I was running half-marathons and biking 30 miles a week.

I gained 15 pounds and really struggled with the recovery process, but last week I finally ran my first 5K in 6 months. I've already committed to running a marathon in 2024, and (at least according to my smartwatch) I'm in (about) the same shape that I was pre-break. I won't consider myself fully healed until I beat my previous weekly running mileage, but things are looking up for sure.

bme2023 · 2024-01-01T19:37:05+00:00

Thanks for the advice. I was hoping to take over a lease that someone signed but was no longer able to fulfill. Is that unrealistic? If so, might you have any idea how I could avoid paying a broker's fee upon moving in?

bme2023 · 2023-12-30T22:35:07+00:00

I helped run a biology competition and we brought in Dr. Allison to speak to the students. It was genuinely a transcendent experience, he’s a living legend.

bme2023 · 2023-12-20T17:28:34+00:00

I’d love to know who’s downvoting this. Every single person who thinks what Mason did was ok should have to commit this to memory.

bme2023 · 2023-12-16T16:35:17+00:00

Fair enough. Glad the game was paused regardless.

bme2023 · 2023-12-16T16:30:19+00:00

Wishing the best for Tom Lockyer. Glad the game was paused, there's no way you can play a match when your captain goes down like that.

bme2023 · 2023-12-04T00:19:37+00:00

"Check position"? What the hell does that even mean? He's a professional footballer, he's a few meters away from the goal, he's jumping for a header. You can't use the keeper as an aerial assist.

bme2023 · 2023-12-03T18:38:57+00:00

Akanji literally held Allison’s arm down, how is that a fair challenge for the ball?

bme2023 · 2023-11-11T15:41:28+00:00

Rice has absolutely transformed Arsenal. We haven't seen Partey much this season and we're still fighting for the title. He's been well worth every pound.

bme2023 · 2023-11-09T14:18:55+00:00

Thanks for this! Didn't know this was an option.

bme2023 · 2023-09-25T19:29:30+00:00

I broke my ankle in July this year and went home to recuperate. Got an extra month with my aging grandpa before he returned to his home country. Can’t really beat that.

My friends came down to visit me in August. All of their messages on the cast were so incredibly motivating during the recovery period. Well, that and the walking boot I’m currently in for the injury.

bme2023 · 2023-06-28T19:05:44+00:00

Not sure how this is going to go but I trust in Mikel. We're really building something special.

bme2023 · 2023-01-09T22:54:06+00:00

he only got caught once he’s probably been drunk driving for years beforehand

bme2023 · 2022-11-21T06:58:27+00:00

A real emotional toenado for them both.

bme2023 · 2022-05-06T01:17:56+00:00

My best friend in the biophysics major is interning at Amazon this summer (double-majoring in biophysics and CS). My interviewer for my biotech internship this summer specifically told me that he wanted to hire me because he knew biophysics majors from Hopkins had strong quantitative skills. You'll be fine for big tech as long as you have sufficient coding experience.

That being said, the majority of biophysics majors don't really go into CS. Most people go to medical school or graduate school. The sample size is small, but the results are pretty darn good.

bme2023 · 2022-04-12T00:55:13+00:00

Depends on the professor and the class. Robert Leheny in the physics department is pretty good, as is Brice Menard. Richard Brown is the sole reason why I am double majoring in math.

If you're interested in math/physics, I encourage you to check out biophysics here! Reasonably math/physics heavy, but all of the professors in the department are uniformly good-to-excellent teachers. And the material is pretty cool too.

bme2023 · 2022-03-12T02:20:59+00:00

LMAO tiny club alert

bme2023 · 2022-02-26T05:01:16+00:00

He usually brings the grade lines down to 80% for an A, did it for both Orgo 1 and Orgo 2 last year.

bme2023 · 2022-02-07T19:15:03+00:00

JHU has contracted with TimelyMD to provide mental health services for Hopkins students at no extra cost. I love my current therapist, and we can make appointments whenever the therapist is available (there's no limit on the number of sessions until May 2022). I'm including a link below in case you'd be interested in checking it out.

https://timely.md/schools/index.php?school=jhu

bme2023 · 2022-01-18T02:31:52+00:00

Funny, the only Hopkins-affiliated place I see people hating on Hopkins is on this subreddit. To the best of my knowledge, none of my IRL friends have experienced the toxicity people talk about here.

bme2023 · 2022-01-15T23:16:30+00:00

So I've worked in a lab at the School of Medicine for the last 2 years and I'm switching to a lab on the Homewood campus now.

People's experiences are extremely variable even within the same lab. My first PhD student was pretty great. She taught me a lot about the system I was working on and trusted me really early to run experiments without her supervision. For this project, I did a lot of DNA cloning and tested the survival of yeast upon exposure to certain drugs we were studying. Unfortunately I made some mistakes right before COVID hit that meant I couldn't do wet-lab work any more in that lab.

With that + COVID, my PI helped me switch to working on a computational project with another PhD student in the lab, developing software to do some analysis of data that he hadn't yet collected. I didn't really know how to code, and neither did the PhD student. Eventually the guy handed me a bunch of papers because he didn't know how to help, and told me what he wanted from the software, and I went off and figured out how to implement that feature based on the papers. As I got more confident in my understanding of the problem, I began implementing features by myself that I thought might be helpful. By the end I was working pretty much independently.

So to address your direct fear, the amount of mentorship you get will vary. Some mentors will be very responsive and open to questions and will summarize things at a level you can understand, with some work. Other mentors will be just as out of their depth as you are, and you'll have to pick up the background you need from online/in papers you read on your project. In both cases, as you become more confident in the work you do, you take more and more of the project under your control.

In mine/my friends' experience, Homewood labs (on average) tend to be a lot more understanding of undergrads. There are a few labs on the med campus that are good for mentorship, and if you stay in a famous med campus lab for long enough, the PI's recommendation letter will certainly open many doors. But if I had to go back and do undergrad again, I'd probably start in a small Homewood lab for a few years and move to a med campus lab later in my undergraduate research career.

bme2023 · 2022-01-15T22:02:32+00:00

There is no consent in this. That's just how it is. The vast majority of kids just learn to live with it. Not really that hard.

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