I completed my doctorate this year at Northwestern University, and am proof that you don’t need an excellent GPA or amazing GRE scores to get into a good graduate school and enjoy your studies. In college I ended up with a cumulative GPA of probably about 3.4 or so; I can’t recall exactly. I certainly didn’t have amazing grades, having nearly failed an introductory biology course my freshman year and scrabbling about in required language classes. My GPA in my major–English–really brought it up, thankfully. Your GPA seems nothing to worry about at all. As someone above said, it’s usually a whole package a department’s seeking in the selection process. If I had to conjecture about it, I’d say my writing sample was probably more persuasive than my GPA. My recommendation letters didn’t hurt, either.
As far as the GRE goes, I did minimal preparation. I ran some practice tests just to become familiar with the format, which can save you lots of time during the actual test. I got the bare minimum score I needed to apply (600, possibly?), which was enough for me.
I’d also advocate going to visit your prospective schools if you can when you hear back from them; I see you’ve said it’s a great distance to travel, but it’s really worth it. I didn’t do this, and wish I had so I could have gained some perspective on the programs from people who were actually in them, as well as general dirt on things like advisors, professors, and housing. Is there a department assistant you can contact? In my experience, the department assistant holds all the keys of knowledge and can be an incredible resource; ours held the entire department together. Are there alumni associations or the like in your area where you could also talk to recent and local graduates about the respective programs?
Try to talk to at least one of your prospective advisor’s current grad students by either phone or email, and get a frank opinion of their advisor’s good and bad qualities. Bear in mind, though, that what they think is a good quality might be a bad one for you, and vice versa.
If your prospective advisor doesn’t have any current grad students, it’s probably not a good sign. Either your specialty isn’t popular at that school (in which case, if your advisor turns out to be bad, you’ll be stuck with them), or there is something about your advisor that makes grad students avoid them.
Where are you interested in in the UK? I could do some finding out of reputations and stuff.
And certainly I agree with monstro - you should certainly be able to talk to the prospective tutors. If they can’t find time in their busy schedules for that, they won’t find time for you to study properly, either. And they should be able to be quite honest about what requirements will be for you to get onto the course.
You might want to see if your undergrad advisor or another professor you know well would be willing to help you with them. I had no clue how to write a statement of purpose when I started applying, and my advisor helped me to figure it out and later critiqued drafts of my statement.
Well, there’s another reason. The potential advisor may be young but brilliant, new to the department, and praying desparately for graduate students so that they can get tenure. It takes time for a new professor to attract graduate students. For a professor to survive, somebody has to be brave and let herself be the first graduate student.
So…that means you should also consider if the advisor is an assistant or associate professor. If they haven’t gotten tenure yet, they may be so busy and stressed-out that they might be unpleasant to work with. They may not have established a good management style yet, and may be out of the loop as far as department politics go (like, they may not know the rules of the qualifying/comprehensive exam and may unintentionally give you bad advice about what to study). Also, if they don’t get tenure, their graduate students are screwed. On the other hand, young professors are up-and-coming and full of ideas. They may be more understanding and sympathetic to their grad students, and treat them more like colleagues. They also tend to be more technologically savvy than the older folks (which probably isn’t that a big a deal in the humanities, but is very important in the sciences).
One good thing about being the first is that the professor will always remember you (especially if you’re good). My advisor loved to bore us to death with tales about her first grad students. Sometimes it seemed like she sorta compared all of her later graduate students with the older ones.
Don’t believe everything you read, and that goes double for college catalogs.
Whether you get in or not might depend on a lot of things you don’t really have any control over:
How many people are applying to that program in the year that you are
Who you want as an advisor, and whether or not they have money for a grad student
How well your statement of purpose dovetails with research that professors at that school do
What the people on the admissions committee think about the relative importance of GPA, major GPA, general GREs, subject GREs, statement of purpose, etc.
The reputation of the school you come from. This goes well beyond “good school or bad school”- if your school has a reputation for giving low grades in microbiology courses, or has a reputation for low scores on the subject GRE, etc, etc.
At a state school, whether or not you are a resident of that state. If the school gives tuition assistance, they have to pay the extra out-of-state tuition for at least one year for an out-of-state resident.
Tsarina, I’ve got an MPH in epidemiology, though my specialty is not international health or nasty buggies. In my experience, schools of Public Health, especially international health programs, are looking for relevant work or volunteer expereince. In international health, that means international experience or work with an agency that addresses international health issues. Microbiology as a major won’t hurt at all if you’re interested in parasitology or tropical diseases. If you get an interview, be prepared to discuss the nosedive in your senior year grades (… disolusioned with laboratory science, desire for more hands-on work, want to be able to see how your work helps others, yadda yadda…) Good GRE scores will help balance lower GPA, especially math if you want to do an epidemiology program. Hope that helps.
LaurAnge, sorry for the hijack. It sounds to me like you may be worrying too much. Study for the GREs. At the very least identify a professor or two you’d like to work with at each University and speak with them before you make any decisions. Ask them or the admissions person in the department if there are any students working with that professor who would be willing to speak with you. Make sure you ask the students about good points and bad point about working with the professor, if you don’t ask they might not tell you. Good luck!
Another good source of information about whether a professor will be a decent advisor or not is the department secretary. Of course, they can have personality conflicts or power struggles with professors, just like anybody else can, but professors who are abusive to department secretaries are likely not to be very nice to others they see as inferiors, like graduate students. Also, department secretaries usually hear about it if someone in the department is unhappy with their advisor.
In my experience, schools of Public Health, especially international health programs, are looking for relevant work or volunteer expereince. In international health, that means international experience or work with an agency that addresses international health issues. Microbiology as a major won’t hurt at all if you’re interested in parasitology or tropical diseases. If you get an interview, be prepared to discuss the nosedive in your senior year grades (… disolusioned with laboratory science, desire for more hands-on work, want to be able to see how your work helps others, yadda yadda…) Good GRE scores will help balance lower GPA, especially math if you want to do an epidemiology program. Hope that helps.