I finally finished my graduate school visits! Unfortunately, I waited a little bit too long to type up my thoughts about these and I’ve already committed to a program so this post may be a bit biased – but I’ll try to be as objective as possible!

 

The Harvard-MIT HST Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD program was awesome (and worth all of the acronyms I had to type out!). Here are my thoughts:

Pros:

• I would get to take medical courses at Harvard Medical School with MD students (5 courses + 2 clinical rotations)
  • The courses are a special track within the medical program and have a more quantitative/engineering focus than the regular MD classes
  • I would get to do a lot more hands-on experiences during the rotations than I had realized before my visit. One student told me she helped deliver a baby!
• I can choose engineering courses in any concentration area (4 total)
  • I am thinking of actually choosing the CS concentration to learn more about machine learning/AI, which I wouldn’t be able to really get anywhere else
• MEMP students can work with pretty much any research lab in the Boston area – most work at MIT, but many also work at Harvard or area hospitals
• Both the current and prospective students were fantastic. From a wide range of disciplines, but very passionate about what they did and with a common goal of improving medicine/human health. This visit was where I felt most challenged
• No written quals exam

Cons:

• The stipend is low compared to others in the area (~3-4k/yr below the next lowest offer I received, although it goes up by ~3k after quals in the end of 2nd year). I also wish they had been more upfront about this difference during the weekend
  • Also, you get an extra $300/month if you have an outside fellowship over 10k
• Although you can technically work with any faculty member in Boston, if the professor is outside of MIT you cost them considerably more, making this sometimes difficult to do in practice
• Since there isn’t a written exam, you have to get a 4.0 on 3/4 of your engineering courses to pass your quals

Other: 

• 10 courses, 4 semesters of seminars every other week, and 2 clinical rotations is a lot of work outside of research

 

MIT ChemE was also a really fun weekend. This was the only weekend I attended where all of the prospectives had the same undergrad major, making it a lot easier to bond from this shared starting point.

Pros:

• Very well-respected program. Great for jobs and keeps wide range of faculty positions open
• Practice school gives nice industry experience and any PhD student can easily join, even if they didn’t originally apply for the practice school
• Stipend was about 6k higher than HST (pre-quals) and I believe they give an extra 2.5k for fellowship recipients
• Apparently they allow you to work  for anyone at MIT, even outside of the department (but you have to go out of your way to ask about this)
  • Some people I met in ChemE were using this as a way to make the program very HST-like
• You bond with your class during your 1st year ChemE classes
• Very flexible minor (I think 3 classes) that can be pretty much anything you’re interested in, as long as they’re related to each other

Cons:

• The faculty were stellar and seemed very invested in the students; however, I did notice that they seemed to be a bit risk-averse in their research at times, which I think reflects a widespread attitude in the ChemE field
• Probably over half of my cohort would know very little about biology. Great opportunity to learn about other fields, but the range may be a bit too wide to be fruitful
• Not many options for faculty in the department with biological/immunological research. Although theoretically I could work with someone in another department, this seemed to be a somewhat unofficial policy and made me a bit nervous
• Having to take those core ChemE courses again O.O
  • The grad students seemed very collaborative rather than competitive, but this would still be a grueling process

 

After a lot of consideration of these programs and a couple more, I decided to choose HST! A big influence on my decision was receiving the Hertz fellowship, a generous 5-year award that resolved most of the cons on my list. Since I am pretty certain I want to be involved in research in medicine/immunology and maintain engineering, this seemed like the best fit with the fewest compromises.

As always, please comment or contact me with questions if you have any!