Information for prospective students interested in applying to the graduate program at CSULB to work with Dr. Lowe

The terminal degree at CSULB is a Master’s degree in Biology. CSULB offers an excellent graduate education and our graduates have a high rate of placement in Ph.D. programs and jobs nationwide.

If you are interested in coming to CSULB and work towards a Master’s degree in my lab, I request that you supply me with several pieces of information before I will offer my sponsorship of your application. I request that prospective students send me a detailed Curriculum Vitae (including their GPA and GRE scores and a list of three references). In addition, I would like a preproposal of some project you would be interested in working on if you were to come to CSULB. This preproposal is a short 2-3 page description of a potential project that includes a question or hypothesis, rationale for the research, and information on how the project will be accomplished (methods).

This requires several things from the student

you must do your homework, develop a finely-honed question and find out what species are available here,

your question or hypothesis MUST be reasonable and stay within the focus of the lab’s research interests (forget about a tagging or a behavior study of white sharks – not good MS project material!). This preproposal will help me assess your ability to formulate a testable hypothesis and your writing ability.

The preproposal will help you to focus your ideas, and if accepted, could allow you to “hit the ground running” on a MS project. You will not be held to your preproposed project, if you later decide on something else, it is mainly an exercise that will allow me to assess your compatibility with the lab and our research focus. If you have any questions about these items, please feel free to contact me.

To obtain an application packet for CSULB Dept. of Biological Sciences Masters Program contact Kay Belletti (kbellett@csulb.edu). She will provide you with information on how to apply to the University and the Department.