University of New England: Post Baccaulearete Sequence

This program falls under the pre-requisites category.  Here, you can take a number of pre-reqs for graduate school.  Although they say that it is intended for those who want to enter the health sciences, I don't see why it wouldn't work for anyone else.  They recommend checking with programs you want to apply to beforehand to make sure the courses will be accepted, although many health programs will accept them.  So you should probably check with any non-health graduate program you're interested in too.  The biggest pluses for me are Organic Chemistry I & II and Microbiology.

All courses are designed to be completed in 16 weeks.  And they do have labs!  The labs are virtual, using a software program, so you don't have to live anywhere near Maine in order to take the lab part, and you don't have to work with anyone else (including the instructor!) to do your labs!  Each course is pretty expensive, but if you were to attend a regular school, you'd have to take filler courses just to get financial aid in order to be a full-time student.  These other schools would also charge more than base tuition and fees so that you'd be looking at $11,000 and up just to get your pre-reqs for grad school.  (And of course, that's only for one year.)  That's the other great thing about these courses--they are completely self-paced, so you can take up to a year to complete them.  Total costs for each course comes out to around $1340.

Illinois Institute of Technology: Biology (Online)

This program doesn't sound too bad, but without on-campus labs or a thesis project, I don't see how it could be all that useful, especially at the high cost of attendance.


Application Deadline: Dec. 15 , May 10, Aug. 1
Application Cost: $40
Degrees Offered:  PSM (Professional Science Masters)
Min. GPA:  3.0  
Min. GRE:  required of international students, students with GPA between 2.5 and 3.0, or at request of admissions committee; in any of the aforementioned cases a min. score of 1100 combined is required.
Subject GRE:  Not required
Pre-requisites:
Bachelor's in Biology
Recommendend courses:  genetics, cell biology, and biochemistry
Interesting Courses:  Medical Microbiology, Virology, Toxicology, Advanced Microbiology
Areas of Emphasis:  Microbiology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Cell and Molecular Biology
Total Cost of Attendance:  $32,013  (This is for full-time, on-campus; I couldn't find anything about the cost of just the online program, but maybe it's the same.)

Comprehensive exam required at the end, which may mean having to go to Chicago to do it.  There is no thesis option available.

Required to take some stupid business, communication, etc. ("professional" courses--a major drawback of the program.)

California State University-Chico: Environmental Science

Potential Advisors: None!  All but one of these people is not a geologist (and he's an ornithologist).  Sounds like the program must be geology based since it is combined with geology and has so many geologists on staff.