Case Western Secondary

[laboholic]

Hey All,
I am writing my essay for the Case secondary and was curious how technical people have been for the research question. It asks what question you were trying to answer and how you went about solving it. ...

so... I was trying to discern whether there is a direct interaction between proteinX and proteinY because a specific surface down regulation assay showed that a certain mutant was behaving oddly.. and the mutant site was at an area of suspected binding to another protein.. I did some more mutations at the expected binding site and did some in vitro (GST pulldown) and some IPs as well.. bla bla bla.

DO you think this is what they are looking for (written better of course)or something more or less in depth? this doesnt sound like something an admission committee would want to read.
Thanks for any feedback!

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[QofQuimica]

Hey All,
I am writing my essay for the Case secondary and was curious how technical people have been for the research question. It asks what question you were trying to answer and how you went about solving it. ...

so... I was trying to discern whether there is a direct interaction between proteinX and proteinY because a specific surface down regulation assay showed that a certain mutant was behaving oddly.. and the mutant site was at an area of suspected binding to another protein.. I did some more mutations at the expected binding site and did some in vitro (GST pulldown) and some IPs as well.. bla bla bla.

DO you think this is what they are looking for (written better of course)or something more or less in depth? this doesnt sound like something an admission committee would want to read.
Thanks for any feedback!

I would guess that you are supposed to answer that question for someone who probably does not work in your field, so you should explain any technical terms, or else avoid using them altogether. However, you can probably assume that the reader is an MD or PhD and has studied basic biochemistry and cell biology, so you don't have to explain really basic concepts like what a protein is, for example. FWIW, I'm a non-biologist, and I could follow your explanation up to the last line, so I'd suggest that you explain what a GST pulldown is and write out whatever IP stands for as well.

 

[xanthines]

The new dean here is very committed to making Case a top-notch institution, which basically means putting more focus on research. All medical students will be required to write some kind of thesis after the second year (MD/PhD, and thesis-based MPH students already fulfill this requirement through their second degree).

Based on that, I would imagine your response should be in-depth, but technical as needed. Don't include a protocol, but if you've done something fairly uncommon or novel, some technical description would be in order.

Good luck!

-X

Hey All,
I am writing my essay for the Case secondary and was curious how technical people have been for the research question. It asks what question you were trying to answer and how you went about solving it. ...

so... I was trying to discern whether there is a direct interaction between proteinX and proteinY because a specific surface down regulation assay showed that a certain mutant was behaving oddly.. and the mutant site was at an area of suspected binding to another protein.. I did some more mutations at the expected binding site and did some in vitro (GST pulldown) and some IPs as well.. bla bla bla.

DO you think this is what they are looking for (written better of course)or something more or less in depth? this doesnt sound like something an admission committee would want to read.
Thanks for any feedback!

 

[xanthines]

I don't think it's necessary to explain how you do GST-pulldowns or IP's. Those are pretty standard biological techniques that most biomedical scientists (ie adcom members) would have done or at least know how it's done. It's still good to spell out immunoprecipitation (IP) the first time, though.

-X

I would guess that you are supposed to answer that question for someone who probably does not work in your field, so you should explain any technical terms, or else avoid using them altogether. However, you can probably assume that the reader is an MD or PhD and has studied basic biochemistry and cell biology, so you don't have to explain really basic concepts like what a protein is, for example. FWIW, I'm a non-biologist, and I could follow your explanation up to the last line, so I'd suggest that you explain what a GST pulldown is and write out whatever IP stands for as well.

 

[QofQuimica]

I don't think it's necessary to explain how you do GST-pulldowns or IP's. Those are pretty standard biological techniques that most biomedical scientists (ie adcom members) would have done or at least know how it's done. It's still good to spell out immunoprecipitation (IP) the first time, though.

-X

I wasn't suggesting explaining how to do GST pulldowns necessarily, but I don't even know what a GST pulldown *is.* I've never done one (I don't think!), never even heard the term before. I think it is totally appropriate to say something like, "To test my hypothesis, I performed a GST pulldown, which is a standard cell biology assay that is used to show...." Then you can say what the results were in your particular set of experiments.

You can't count on your interviewers or adcom members all being cell/molecular biologists; many are clinicians or clinical scientists, and they should still be able to follow the basic idea of what your research was about. Heck, plenty of schools even have med students as adcom members or as interviewers (I have no idea if Case does this, but some schools do). Basically, I would want to ensure that anyone on the adcom could understand two things: what I had done on a conceptual level, and what the results were of my work. I would write the essay so that someone with a college background in molecular biology would be able to follow it, not to the level of someone who had earned a graduate degree or had worked in the field. If you get an interviewer from your field, you can always dig into the nitty gritty specifics, although I think that might feel a bit like a defense.