/sci/ - Science & Math

>>4448519
>>4448520
Extracurricular activities. Go work in labs, go intern in the uni hospital, go become a student leader. The bulk of your time should not be spent on classwork, but should be spent doing your extracurriculars.

Ask a guy going to an ivy league neuroscience Ph.D program this fall anything.

Protip: I can tell you how to be a successful undergraduate at any institution.

>>4412429
Masters programs typically don't provide a stipend, so you will have to work a job while you do it or take out loans. Not a good idea unless your masters is going to pay itself off in a reasonable amount of time (engineering, physical science, etc). Ph.D programs provide a stipend that is around 30,000 annually.

As for diversity in degree, as you move higher up the ladder then your degree becomes more specialized. Your B.S. in Biology might be a Masters in bioethics or bioinformatics.

>>4412426
What kinda research is being presented this very moment?

>>4412418
Top 30 for their programs. My claim about interviews applies only to Ph.D programs, not Master's.

A high level language like Python or Matlab is perfect. Of the two labs I work in, one does all its work in Python and Matlab, the other does all its work in R and Matlab. Sounds like that scientific programming elective is perfect.

Am a pythonphile myself; scipy 2good.

>>4412309
most Ph.D (read: good Ph.D) programs require an interview prior to admission. Masters programs typically don't require interviews.

>>4412319
Correct. I also go to a state school and got an ivy offer (neuroscience). It's just about using your undergrad school's resources to do the best work you can.

do we have any budding scientists? anyone get any Ph.D grad interviews yet?

graduate admissions/higher education general

>>4289442
>The model is definitely based on simulations of spiking neurons.
Glad to hear it. Using continuous variables to represent discrete processes is silly, especially in a sufficiently complex network.

Can you explain how your model represents the gestalt of an object with neuronal activity? You can be as qualitative as you like, as long as you aren't vague.

>>4289366
What kind of hypotheses does this model make about the function of the cortex in terms of sensory processing or generation of behavior? How can you experimentally test these hypotheses using any level of analysis (aside from imaging)?

Finally, do your computational models use differential equations, or are they simulations using spiking neurons?

Generating alternate systems of logic is easy. Choose your logical operators and a handful of symbolic operands (e.g., "if and only if" is an operator and "A" is an operand). Feed them to a program that jumbles them together and spits out syntactically meaningful operand-operator relationships (e.g., (A <=> B) = ((A->B) and (B->A)). Begin deducing principles from the generated logical axioms.

However, If you're aiming to use something that uses a different set of logical operators, then this method won't work.

Bioinformatics is the way to go. It's a subfield of biology that uses algorithmic/statistical approaches to characterize genomic data. You know all those phylogenetic trees you see in ecology literature, and many (not all) of the 3D protein structures you see in biochemistry textbooks? You can thank bioinformatics for that.

Unfortunately, some of the common hypotheses generated by bioinformatics are untestable (e.g., evolutionary relationships). Other hypotheses, such as the positions of genes in genomes or ligand binding sites in amino acid sequences, are highly testable.

>>4222141
My three letters came from my honors thesis/research advisor, the faculty advisor for a club that I'm vice president of, and a course instructor that I had. I've known all three individuals for at least 3 years. My research advisor knows me best (he better, as I see him at least twice a week), whereas the other two have seen only the results of my work and not the work itself (e.g., club event turnouts and grades). It also helps that many faculty in my department know my name/face/research involvements.

The best thing you can do for letters is to get involved outside the classroom and to talk to the people you're involved with.

>>4222057
Medical schools want to see that you've been exposed to biochemistry, as that comprises a large portion of your first year M.D. coursework. Any sort of major with a large emphasis on organic chemistry (biology, chemistry) is best.

More important than a double major is research experience. Many of the individuals I know who successfully got interviews/into medical school were vanilla biology majors with a minor in whatever and plenty of extracurricular lab work.

Hello future /sci/entists.

To those of us pursuing higher education: how is the graduate school application process going? Have any of the Ph.D applicants among us heard back from any programs yet?

Alternatively, as I just submitted all my applications, does anyone have any questions pertaining to the application process?

So you guys say there's no math in biology. What about electrophysiology's nernst equation? mean arterial pressure equation? what about evolutionary game theory? what about protein alignment and phylogeny prediction? what about watson and crick's feat, and all subsequent biomolecule structure prediction?

Not enough calculus? what about electrophysiology's diffusional force equations? what about replicator dynamics? although its more AI than bio, what about neural computation?

I don't understand this ridiculous dogma you guys hold that the life sciences are without mathematics. It's not even true, and hasn't been true since before the 60s.

>>3479176
What sort of paper are you drafting up? Do you have any journals in mind?

whoopsy forgot my trip

>read primary sources regularly
>doesn't read uncited media
>undergraduate honors student
>funded research project, first author

too tryhard to just be a fan.

>>2884160
Don't know about job opportunities. I'm an honor's student graduate school pre-Ph.D tryhard.

It's definitely very interesting. The brain is very complicated and there are a number of different fields with different views of it. Its quite an organ.

i'll just leave this here.

>>2884074
Episodic memory is high order cognition. H.M. showed us that lesioning of a lot of the limbic area INCLUDING the hippocampus will destroy the ability to form episodic memory, but studies with rats show us that spatial memory is most affected when ONLY the hippocampus is lesioned.

didn't know this was intro_psych.thread

>>2884067
see OP image. At least in the glutamatergic cells of the cortex, coincident firing of a pre and post synaptic neuron causes (through a series of events described by the image) the insertion of more post synaptic ion channels in the postsynaptic membrane of synapse i at time t. This increases depolarization of the postsynaptic neuron and therefore the probability of an action potential as a result of activity at synapse i at time t'.

NMDA calcium permeability AMPA non-selective calcium impermeable blah blah CaMKIV CaMKII blah PKA blah blah vesicle endocytosis

>>2884053
Yeah. There are gnostic theists everywhere.

I still say they're more tolerable than the gnostic atheists.