You’ve given it some thought, and a neuroscience PhD could be in your future. So what do you need to get there? What should you major in? Do you need research experience?
In short: some research experience, almost anything, and very likely yes.
In theory, you could come from almost any academic background before coming into neuroscience, as long as you also have research experience. According to a recent Society for Neuroscience report, most students who matriculate into PhD programs in the United States have degrees in neuroscience, biology, or psychology. However, a huge chunk of applicants also come from chemistry and mathematics, and many students come in with dual degrees.1
Although undergraduate neuroscience degree programs are increasingly common, not every institution has one. As of 2018, about 221 institutions offered a neuroscience or equivalent major.2 Other colleges don’t even offer a neuroscience major—so where should you start? If we look across folks who are currently or have previously conducted neuroscience research, they have a host of undergraduate majors, from psychology to biochemistry.
7.1 Undergraduate majors of people who are currently or have previously conducted research in neuroscience. Bars represent different surveys: dark bars are the result of an unpublished research survey of current and former neuroscience researchers (n=395 responses). Light bars are the result of an informal Twitter survey (n=950).
Even still, not everyone in neuroscience comes from a purely science background. Neuroscientist and Journal of Neuroscience editor-in-chief Marina Piciotto was a biology and English double major. Famed neuroscientist David Eagleman has a degree in British and American literature.
Even students in official neuroscience majors take a mix of classes, some of which are labeled neuroscience but many of which are labeled in different fields. Interestingly, the variety of degrees here reflects the types of classes that neuroscience majors typically take—some mix of chemistry, biology, and psychology.3
In summary, neuroscientists come from a wide range of backgrounds, and you shouldn’t feel like there’s only one path into a career in neuroscience. Neuroscience is a wonderfully diverse field that touches on almost every other discipline — after all, it is fundamentally the study of how brains (and their owners) interact with the world. Our field is better off with perspectives from every intellectual angle as well as with people who have thought deeply about very specific subfields. In fact, some folks have worried that the neuroscience specialization in both undergraduate and graduate education might leave students without depth and understanding in the numerous fields that make up neuroscience.4
Regardless of your undergraduate major, you should be at the top of your game academically. For the academic year 2016–2017, the average acceptance rate for U.S. PhD programs was 19 percent.5 Although there are more applicants, most programs report that they’re accepting the same number of students, largely because of limited funding from training grants and space in faculty labs. So, it does seem to be getting more competitive, and it’s not clear that more positions for graduate students are going to be opening soon.
It’s not uncommon for folks to apply to ten or more programs, but this can be very expensive. If you need to, you can ask programs for a fee waiver, which they will often grant. Christine Liu, a PhD candidate at Berkeley, had a lot of luck with fee waivers:
Applying with a fee waiver should not affect your admissions decision. I applied to every school with a fee waiver and the only program I didn’t get into was a bad research fit.6
There are also programs to help you get fee waivers to multiple graduate programs through the Big Ten Academic Alliance.7 For GRE scores, you can get a 50 percent fee reduction if you meet the requirements for financial aid.8
Most graduate programs in the United States will evaluate you on four main categories:
1. Research experience
2. College GPA (or comparable score)
3. Letters of recommendation
4. GRE scores (Graduate Record Examinations, a commonly required standardized test in the United States, often optional)
The relative weight of those attributes will vary school to school, and they can even depend on the members of the admissions committee in your admissions year.
Some schools will set hard cutoffs for GPA and GRE scores, but they’re typically not disclosive about it. Applicants in 2016 had an average undergraduate GPA of 3.56 and average verbal as well as quantitative GRE scores of 158.9 More recently, several graduate programs are dropping the GRE requirement altogether.10 In some cases, you can still submit a GRE score if you’ve taken it (and you should if you think it will help your application).
Your best bet is to do as best as you can in each category. Of course, if you’re out of college, changing your GPA might be out of the question. You could consider earning an MS degree before a PhD—some admissions committees may take your master’s GPA into consideration, but it’s not guaranteed. If you have low GPA and GRE scores, the best way to improve your chances of getting into graduate school is by spending some time working in a lab.
A few years ago, Orion Weiner, cochair of the admissions committee for the University of California, San Francisco, Tetrad Graduate Program had a seemingly simple question: What factors predict whether incoming students will be successful? After interviewing faculty about students in the program, Orion divided the graduate students into two groups—high performing and low performing (keep in mind, this is entirely subjective, based on faculty ratings).
After looking at the grades, scores, and research experiences of these two groups, the single largest predictor of success was the amount of research experience students had before entering the program. It didn’t need to be an extensive amount of research—two to three years was sufficient, and there wasn’t a correlation beyond that.11
Other universities have noticed similar trends. The University of Minnesota’s graduate program in neuroscience noticed such a striking trend between previous research experience and success in their program that they no longer accept applicants without at least some research experience.12
While there isn’t usually a strict requirement for research experience, about 98 percent of graduate school applicants have some lab experience before grad school.13 Spending time in a lab also gives your supervisor some time to get to know you and write you a stronger letter of recommendation. Many programs put a lot of weight on these letters.
Still, you should get some research experience for more than just getting admitted into grad school; you should have research experience so that you have insight into whether or not you like doing research.
Research experience before graduate school comes in all shapes and sizes. Your research experience could be in one lab for a long time or short bursts in other labs. It could be in a structured program or simply by working as a technician for a few days a week.
Working at your college
If you’re at a college with research labs, find out if there is a place where labs post openings for undergraduate lab technicians. For example, at UC, San Diego, there is an online hub that connects students with opportunities on campus. Many research labs may also post openings through the typical campus job channels.
However, many positions for undergraduates are not advertised. Look through the faculty websites at your university and identify labs conducting research that interests you. Craft an email that demonstrates your knowledge about what their research is and why you’d like to work in their lab. Many labs take on undergraduate researchers through such cold (but thoughtful) emails.14
It also doesn’t hurt to voice to your course professors that you’re interested in research. Even if they don’t have positions in their labs, they might know people that do.
You can usually take such positions for either course credit or for pay. The pay probably won’t be great, but it should at least give you credit for the time you spend in the lab. Some research labs will try to hire undergraduates for free—to be frank, this isn’t fair, and you deserve either monetary or course credit for your work. There are very likely plenty of paid positions, and it’s unethical for research labs to demand free labor.
There are a couple of big upsides to doing research at your home university. For one, you can usually work it around your class schedule, so that you’re going into lab for a few hours or a couple days a week, depending on your agreement with your mentor. Secondly, it enables you to really dive into a project and possibly even get a publication out of it. You’ll be able to develop a close relationship with your mentor, which means they’ll be able to write you a strong, detailed letter of recommendation when it comes time for it.
Summer research programs
If you’re at a college that doesn’t have a ton of research, or if you’d like to get off campus for a summer, there are many summer research programs out there. These can be great opportunities to enjoy research life in a completely new context in a new place.
Personally, I found it really informative and eye-opening to seek research experiences beyond the brick walls of my small liberal arts school. My first summer of research (and really, my first exposure to research at all) was at Louisiana State University with an alumna from my college. I spent a glorious and insanely hot summer testing the effects of opioids on pain perception. It gave me a chance to see what research was like at a big university, as well as eat a real po’ boy.
Later on, I was an AMGEN scholar at Columbia University, where I learned that I didn’t like molecular biology. AMGEN is a biotechnology company that sponsors paid research internships at a variety of institutions each summer.15 This program also organizes talks on applying to graduate school, medical school, writing grants, and more.
Many universities and research institutes have summer programs where they invite students from other places to conduct research there for the summer. At Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, for example, there is an undergraduate research program that pays students to stay on campus and do research for the summer.16
Many summer programs are also specifically for underrepresented minorities, and most of them will pay you a stipend as well as cover room and board. If you’re willing to check out a new city for a summer, these are great opportunities. For me, I loved the chance to get a taste of different types of research (and food). The main downside of summer internships versus working at your home university is that you won’t be able to develop the same long-term relationship with a research lab and mentor like you would by conducting research at your home university.
Your first research experience
As in many careers, an entry-level position in a lab isn’t always exciting. It’s pretty rare as an undergraduate to be given the independence to really work on your own research project. In most cases, you’ll be helping out a grad student or postdoc in the lab or doing mundane chores.
Don’t fret.
If you find yourself not loving your first research experience, remember that the stages beyond your first research experience will likely provide much more intellectual freedom and interesting daily tasks than your very first research experience. The culture and environment of research labs is quite diverse, and the type of research you’re doing will also dramatically change your day to day. You might consider giving another lab a shot before you decide research isn’t for you.
Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist who studies the neural circuits underlying perceptual decision making, gives this advice:
At an early career stage, it can be hard to find an opportunity to do a really satisfying project. This can be discouraging, but it also opens up an opportunity to learn more about the field and to think about what the big questions are and which problems are really exciting. To put it another way, if you are an aspiring neuroscientist, think a lot about how you would answer this question: what are some interesting and surprising things you have learned about the brain so far? What have you learned that actually doesn’t make sense?17
Ultimately, your job will be to pull together all of the parts of your application—your academic record, your research experience, and your story about your research path. Remember that the admissions committee doesn’t have an hour to sit with your application. In the best-case scenario, a few members of the committee will look over it for about fifteen minutes and give it a quick rating. If your application strikes individual committee members differently, they might spend more time discussing it as a group. So your task is to provide a concise, digestible picture of who you are and why you want to go to graduate school.
Components of the application
Typically, applications have two statements (a personal statement and a research statement) as well as a curriculum vitae. Here, I’ll give you some tips that apply to most types of these statements, but it is always important to meticulously read the guidelines provided by the graduate program itself.
Your personal statement is a chance for you to paint a portrait of yourself in your application. Who are you, as a scientist? Why do you want to go to spend the next chapter of your life in an intense PhD program? It may help to think about your personal statement like the origin story for a superhero—what’s the driving force behind your passion for neuroscience? For some people, this may be their experience with mental illness in their family or friends. For others, it could be the fact that the brain is just overwhelmingly fascinating and yet poorly understood.18 If there’s a possible red flag in your application materials (low GPA, for example) this is your chance to explain it and put it in context.
The research statement should be a story about all of the research you’ve completed up until this point, with a connection to where you think your research path is heading. It’s a chance for you to tie together seemingly disparate types of research that you might have done at this point in your career—very few people have a straightforward research trajectory. For me, I had done three very different short research projects as an undergraduate. My research statement essentially tied these together by saying, “Here’s what I learned (technically) and here’s how this experience informed my subsequent choices.” End your research statement with a path forward: What scientific questions would you like to address now? How will this particular program and department fit your needs? Many people also list possible advisors in their statement, which can demonstrate that you’ve done your background research on the department and their faculty members.
The curriculum vitae (CV, sometimes vita) is this weird thing that only academics like to do. It’s essentially a long document describing everything you’ve done: your education, your publications, your research experience, and so on. Early in your career, this will just be about two pages long. It definitely helps to put this together as soon as possible and have an advisor look over it.19
Finally, almost every application will ask for reference letters. These should be from your previous research advisors and/or professors that you have interacted with. Choosing recommenders can be tricky. On one hand, it definitely helps to have people who know you well, but it also doesn’t hurt to have someone with a bigger name vouching for you. In an ideal scenario, you’ll have a selection of recommenders who know you in slightly different domains but can all support you as a potential researcher and scholar.
Writing a strong application
Be as concrete as possible throughout your application. Did your work lead to a poster or publication? Did you write code?20 Did you train other people? Many people stray from details thinking that it’s better to talk about themselves in big sweeping statements—“I have experience training others as well as writing code.” It is much more impactful to say, “I trained two undergraduates in in situ hybridization and wrote several code packages to perform image processing on the data.” This will give the committee a concrete grasp on what you’ve done as well as demonstrate that you understand these techniques and skills.
Most importantly, don’t put off your personal essays until the deadline. Most applications for biology, neuroscience, and psychology PhD programs are due toward the end of the calendar year. You should start writing your essays and identifying your recommenders in the previous spring or summer. These essays take work. Scientists need to be strong writers, and a well-written essay will be very impactful and respected by the admissions committee. Talk to your advisors about your goals, and ask them to look over your application materials. If you feel willing, have a few friends or classmates also read your essays. The more time you pour into these statements, the better they will be.
Contacting faculty in advance
For programs where you will do research rotations, it is not necessary to contact faculty when you apply. You may consider reaching out to faculty with whom you have some connection; for example, if they are a close collaborator of a lab you already work with, or if you’ve read many of their papers. However, because admissions are quite far from when you’d actually rotate and even farther from when you’d join the lab, most labs won’t know if they have space for you yet.
It doesn’t necessarily hurt to email people, but it’s unlikely to significantly help your application. Plus, most faculty (unless it is a very small program/department) won’t actually have any say in graduate admissions. If you have a directed interest in working in a particular lab, sometimes those faculty will actively advocate for you in the admissions process.
The case is different for programs without research rotations, including most psychology PhD programs. Before you apply to those programs, you should already have reached out to faculty members about possibly joining their labs when you begin graduate school.
My personal advice is this: Take the courses that keep you engaged and motivate you to learn. If your gut homunculus pulls you into cognitive science, follow that. If you find molecular models dreamy, by all means, build them all. Put in the time and effort to do well on your GREs. Apply for many research opportunities at your home institution and beyond. Take the time to reflect on your experiences and what you liked and disliked about them. You’ll excel when it becomes less about grades and more about the mysteries that the brain refuses to simply roll out on a red carpet for us. And ultimately, that’s what being a neuroscientist is about, anyway.