Dopers with Grad School Experience, help!

Factual Questions
21

My advice only applies if you are going to business school for an MBA or similar degree.

Most of the stuff about GMATs, GPA, and application deadlines you can get from your college career services center.

Here’s the stuff they don’t tell you:

  1. Get a couple of years work experience. Two solid years on top of your Peace Corps stuff should do the trick.

  2. Figure out what part of the country you want to work. If you want to work in NYC, apply for schools in East. You get the idea. The reason for this is that more alumni tend to be close to where they went to school

  3. Apply to the best school you can get in to. A friend of mine who was interviewing for a job at Merrill Lynch was told “you went to a good school. Won’t help you here. We tend to hire mostly Ivy League.” he got the job anyway, but B-school credentials tend to be more important that undergrad. Basically go to these sites:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/bchome.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/index.html

And just start at the top and work your way down.

I know your supposed to look at all these intangibles and stuff. But if you can graduate with an MBA from Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton the opportunities are almost endless.

22

Find out the placement rate. And where people get “placed.”

There are plenty of good programs with placement rates under 50%.

This you don’t want.

23

Go to the best school you can get into. The hardest thing about most grad schools is getting in, and when you finish and start looking for a job, the reputation of your school and especially your adviser will carry much, much more weight than anything you yourself may have done. In fact, you should probably base your search around professors rather than schools - find someone well-known who is willing to take you as an advisee, then apply to his/her school.

Your adviser will have an overwhelming influence on whether you enjoy and profit from your grad school experience. There are three kinds of advisers:

  1. The adviser who is interested in you both as a human being and as a budding scholar, who makes sure you’re being challenged but understands the fact that you have a life outside school. This type only exists in graduate school brochures.

  2. The adviser who has more important things to do than advise you. Therefore, you can mostly take the classes you want, write the kinds of papers you want, and still have time to watch “The Simpsons” every day.

  3. The adviser who looks upon his students as cheap labor to help him get tenure or promotion, or worse yet, as a target of his trenchant intellect so that his colleagues can see how great he is. See Boris B’s post above for what happens if you wind up with one of these.

You want to find a #2 who has a good reputation. The best of all possible worlds would be a prestigious #2 who takes an extended visiting professorship and returns just in time to sign your thesis.

I recommend the book “Getting What You Came For” by Peters. Most everything in there helped me a great deal when I was getting my Ph.D. He doesn’t quite emphasize enough the importance of choosing the best school you can get into, though. You may think you want to teach high school or junior college now, but if you go to Bo-diddley State thinking it’ll be enough, and later change your mind and decide you want to teach at a university, you’ll have put yourself in a hole from which there is no escape.

24

When taking the GREs and other exams, make sure you pay attention to the details. You know, like putting the answers in the right place (questions too, for that matter). Also, such details as dates, context for the questions, etc., are also important…

25

First off, let me say congratulations on graduation. Second, let me say my compliments on Peace Corps. Third, Hi Opal!

Now let me say, as one who went into the Peace Corps, don’t make any unchangeable plans. The Peace Corps will change you. What you are thinking about now will have absolutely no applicability after two years in the Peace Corps. What you value now, will not be what you value in two years. You will change that much.

I did end up picking up a couple of graduate degrees, but not in what I had planned years earlier and not where I had planned on getting them.

Let me also add that some universities, programs and colleges give graduate credit for time spent in the Peace Corps, languages learned in the Peace Corps or projects completed in the Peace Corps. Peace Corps doesn’t advertise this because they don’t want you joining for that reason.

As you near the end of your term of service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, you will be sent some specifics from Peace Corps Washington. This should have much needed information regarding post-Peace Corps graduate school. Some of this information will include different graduate programs that actively recruit Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. There are a number of these. In addition, many host country universities also activly recruit RPCVs into their programs.

But as I said, don’t lock yourself into anything now. Peace Corps is going to change you.

TV

26

Since this thread is two years old, I’m going to assume that Kyla has gotten all the advice she needs, and close it.