It's about that time when thoughts about grad school start ambushing your mind... just wanted to see if I could get some peace of mind on here. I've been looking at a lot of really impressive profiles and am getting a bit worried, since I sort of more recently started focusing on physics. I wanted to gauge my chances at getting into at least one of the following schools (listed sort of in order of preference): Princeton/Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, UCSB
Here are my stats:
Undergraduate institution: UChicago
Major: Math
Minor: Physics
Relevant grad courses: GR, QFT, Particle Physics, Cosmology, planning on taking others. Have most of the undergrad curriculum down
Major/minor gpa: 4.0
Overall GPA: ~3.98
GRE: Haven't taken yet, but hopefully should score reasonably high
Honors: Dean's list, phi beta kappa
Research experience:
~1 quarter so far, but expecting to dedicate a lot of time this summer and in the fall: Project with a pretty renowned theorist on monstrous moonshine. If everything goes well, might result in a paper, but am not expecting it. He'll probably write me a pretty good recommendation.
~3 years in computational neuroscience lab. PI knows me well and should write me a stellar recommendation. Couple of talks and a paper in the making.
~1 year doing a project in computational topology with a grad student in the math department. Paper in the making, should be released by the time I apply.
Summer 2014: Doing an internship at Argonne in accelerator physics (might result in a small technical paper)
Summer 2013: REU in computational neuroscience at home institution.
Summer 2012: Worked at IBM in the magnetic devices group
Leadership: ~3 years: Cofounder, vice president, and director of committee on development of education in a pretty big neuroscience RSO. Then worked for a non-profit on education (teach high school students lesson plans that I developed with my club on neuroscience)
Senior class president in high school
Hobbies: Played piano competitively in college, amongst other things that I can't really put on an application.
My main concern is that I started physics too late, and don't have enough research experience under my belt. I'm primarily interested in theory (HEP, gravitation/cosmology, quantum gravity, condensed matter) but also experiment (condensed matter/plasma physics/quantum information). My dream is to be in the same building as Leonard Susskind, but I'm not too hopeful.
