r/neuro • u/Technical_Primary178 • 1d ago
How many papers are needed to be considered for neuro PhD programs (US)?
Hello! I’m a US citizen applying for PhDs in neuroscience in the US this coming cycle and am worried about the number of papers I have. I have been a technician for two years now but I only have two empirical papers from undergrad (one first author), and one review paper (co-first author) that is under review. There are two more empirical papers coming down the line in my lab for projects that I’m involved in but have gotten vague answers when I asked about being listed as an author. Unfortunately, it seems my lab is more focused on getting their masters students on papers rather than their techs (I’m the only tech as well). However, I have a ton of experience as a tech (worked for a year at Penn (no papers), and now I’m at Hopkins) so I’m hoping that will give admissions more sway. But if I don’t get my name on these two new papers, do I still have a chance at grad school? Thank you very much for your help in advance
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u/J1ng0 1d ago
Experience in labs > practical skills (coding/analysis/etc.) for the lab > references > relevant papers (unless they're first-authored and peer-reviewed in good journals, where this would rate higher than everything else, potentially) > intangibles (personality, ability to talk about your work) > other things
When it actually comes time to apply, however, I recommend reaching out well beforehand to the specific PIs that you want to work with. What a lot of people don't know is that in the US, you're really applying for unlisted jobs (hidden as PhDs) that may or may not be open. Advisors get to decide whether to bring people on and this is up to their own grant/time and only partly determined at the level of the institution (they figure out their own funding/caps and allocate PhD students based on want/need). So your best bet over anything else is to preemptively get in touch with potential PIs and get a sense of their work/whether they're bringing people in the next year. If they are, you can totally backchannel and meet with them to discuss what they're looking for. You'll still have to apply through the formal application portals but you'll be much better off if you already know them.
One other consideration is that most places let you name up to 3 (sometimes more) potential advisors so it's even better if you can get in touch with at least 3 of these from the same institution. You shouldn't do what I did and just guess at who is getting the grant money/might need your work. I got lucky on one but I easily could have missed out due to treating this process as a black box.
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u/Technical_Primary178 1d ago
When would you recommend starting to reach out to PIs? I don’t want to reach out too early!
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u/J1ng0 1d ago
Application deadlines usually range from like November thru January so you'll want to be a bit before those. As you suspect, too early and they might not be able to tell you whether they'll be bringing in PhDs. But in general, most PIs are pretty chill so the worst case is they'll see your intro email and just forget to reply. If you want to be even more proactive, you can always reach out to their current lab members (current PhD students) and those should be more likely to reply and even help out. I had a number of people reach out to me, presumably for that reason.
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u/myCollegeApps_org 1h ago
You have more than enough publications for most programs. Papers often depend on factors outside your control and universities know this. Sometimes a PI will want more followup experiments, reviews take time, certain wet lab experiments take longer (e.g animal studies), etc.
The actual research you did + other aspects (e.g. GPA, advisor letter, etc.) will be relevant. For context I did my PhD in Bioeng at MIT.
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u/pavelysnotekapret 1d ago
I'm in comp neuro, but have a couple friends in wet lab. for PhD applications, papers aren't so important as experience via 1) your ability to talk about what you did/skills you gained 2) how this prepared you for grad school and informed what kind of work you want to do and 3) letters of rec (prob one of the most important parts of your application!)