Share your experiences: getting into a graduate school

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hello,

Currently a junior at a liberal college, I will be applying to graduate schools next year. Hopefully, I will get into a desired school. I just wonder how did dopers preprare for the process. Is it too late or too early for me to think of it at this time ?

A bit about my background:

  • I have been in the Dean’s List for every single semester. My GPAs are good.
  • I am one of the top students in my departments.
  • I have involved in two summer researches with my professors.
  • I am trying to get an internship for this summer in order to get a taste of what it woul be like working in the industry.
  • I don’t do a lot of extra activities.
    Everybit of advice is appreciated.

Aquafina

2

It would help if you told us what field you want to go to graduate school in. It’s very different for the sciences compared with the humanities, for example.

In my case, I went to graduate school in physics. The key factors to acceptance were grades, strong letters of recommendation from professors who actually know you, how good the school you were coming from was, and Physics GRE scores (although mine sucked, so they obviously weren’t that important). Having had research experience as an undergrad also helped quite a lot. I’m fairly sure they didn’t give a crap about my essays/Statement of Purpose, except perhaps to skim for keywords (i.e. what did I want to study).

3

I study Math and Computer Science and I want to get into a Ivy school. My favorite place in the future is Google, so Stanford is my first choice.

By being close to those people who get to decide whom they will take, are there any insights or myths that you know ? And to Stanford Dopers, do you think you are really different from others ?

It is quite a surprise when you say the SOP isn’t important ? Any theory ?

4

Stanford is a good school. I’d consider U.C. Berkeley as well, which has excellent graduate Math and CS programs and is just across the bay. My guess is that you’ll need very strong letters, good internships/research experience, grades and test scores to get into Stanford or other top graduate programs.

Well, don’t do a bad job on it or anything. It’s just that in physics if your grades and letters of recommendation are already poor, your SOP isn’t going to save you. Similarly, if they’re stellar, a bland SOP isn’t likely to hurt you. It may make a difference in a borderline decision, which is why one should still write an excellent SOP. Just don’t count on an excellent SOP to make up for much, in my experience.

5

Well, don’t tell them you think Stanford is an Ivy school.

I relied heavily on good GREs and recommendations to get into grad school for Geology. My undergrad grades were crapola.

When I went to Michigan for an MBA, I again did well on the standardized test (GMAT), and I had professional and academic recommendations. The worst part was writing the stupid essays.

Frankly, I’d see how much mileage you can get out of your bachelors first. And you should be able to get an employer to foot the bill for grad school later on.

6

First, I’ll give you my standard advice: do you want to do research in computer science so much that you can taste it? (It tastes like chicken) Are you 110% devoted to doing research in computer science? If you answered no, you shouldn’t go to grad school. There are very few people more miserable than people who go to grad school to avoid the real world, or to continue living the way they did as an undergrad. It just isn’t the same.

You should be looking at the reputations of the schools you apply to, but give 90% of the weight to their reputation in computer science, 10% to their reputation in general. You probably won’t be taking many (if any) classes outside of computer science and maybe electrical engineering, so the quality of the other departments doesn’t really matter. Here is a good site for finding out which schools you should be looking at.

Narrow the list down (to at most 5-7 schools) by looking up the departments online and finding out what kind of research the professors do. You should identify a few professors at each school you apply to that you could see having as your advisor. This will also help you tailor your statement of purpose to each school.

Most important: before deciding on a school, visit it and meet your prospective advisors. Ideally, meet some of their students, and make sure you’d be able to work with the professor. You really don’t want to get stuck with an advisor you can’t work with. Changing advisors midstream can add years to your time to degree, and changing schools is even worse.

All good. You will want to ask the professors you are doing summer research with for letters of recommendation, at least if it goes well. I don’t know how much they’ll care about your having worked in the industry or not.

You should probably be looking at how many letters of recommendation each school wants, and thinking about who you will ask, though you could wait till fall to do that.

Won’t matter. They don’t expect grad students to have lives, especially in the sciences.

7

Just so you know this forever, the Ivy League isn’t a subjective classification of how good a school is. It is an association of old, private, East Coast colleges that formed an league mainly to play sports without sports scholarships.

The members are:

  1. Harvard
  2. Princeton
  3. Yale
  4. Dartmouth
  5. University of Pennsylvania
  6. Columbia
  7. Cornell
  8. Brown

That is the schools in the Ivy League and all there will ever be. While schools like Stanford, MIT, and others are excellent schools, they are not part of the Ivy League.

(Editing disabled while spellchecking)
Stop spell checking

8

Bits of advice:

Start the application process as soon as possible, preferrably during the summer prior to your senior year. Get the application forms (most good school make them available online), and fill out as much information as you can.

Figure out who you’ll ask for letters of recommendation. Make the requests at the start of senior year. For each professor who’s writing you a letter, give them a folder that includes the forms from each university, your transcript, and a copy of your personal statement. Speaking of which…

Work on your personal statement early. When you have a draft, have it reviewed by a professor or work on it with your college’s writing center (or both).

Look for regional or nationwide competitions to enter. In math there’s the Putnam competition, and I know there are several computer science competitions.

9

I thought I might be able to help here, but as many have mentioned, grad school admissions are so specific to a certain field. I’m in education at an Ivy League school. It used to be fairly unusual in our field to see someone applying to school right after undergrad but that’s the norm in the natural and applied sciences.

Anne Neville is 1000 percent correct. Go to a school where you feel the faculty, especially your advisor, supports your work and seem to be genuinely interested in you as a person as well as a scholar. I know way too many people at my institution who came because of the name, and didn’t really think about the fact that there were few people in their area of interest, or that the chair of their desired department was a dick, and lived to regret it. Your faculty relationships will really dictate the quality of your grad school experience. I think your classmates might be second, or may even trump those relationships. I spend most of my time (pre-dissertation stage) with other doctoral students and I find my peers to be giving, intelligent, and inspiring. Another department at my school is known for the competitive nature of the student body, which would make me miserable.

I’ve sat on admissions committees for masters-level candidates. In our school prospectus one can find out the median GRE scores, etc. If an applicant is in the ballpark we spend less time worrying about those things and more about their SOP - is it tailored specifically for our school and does it describe questions that our institution can help them answer? Will this person come and contribute to the academic community? Is our institution a good fit for their research interests?

Letters of rec - trust me, ask your profs point-blank if they can write you a STRONG recommendation. If they hesitate, find someone else. I’ve seen excellent candidates sandbagged by shitty recs - either stating the candidate isn’t all that, or pumping out that generic bilge that everyone tends to write about the B+ students. You want people who will say you are in the top 10 or highest echelon of students they’ve ever encountered. I asked a prof from my masters program for a letter and he was excited about writing for me, and even sent me a copy of the letter (I wouldn’t ask for it, but if someone volunteers it, it’s likely that they like you a great deal).

Grades and so forth are very important. The best insurance is to make sure that an admissions committee can’t find a reason to reject you for grades and test scores. Make sure you’re in the thick or high end of the distribution in that area. If you aren’t, make sure you explain why you aren’t. If your grades dropped one semester because you were working two jobs, say that. Don’t let the admissions committee connect dots - explain all of the things that you think might be a liability. At the same time, be sure to discuss or at least mention the things that make you unique (special talents and whatnot).

Last, make sure someone with a super-critical eye reviews your materials. One professor on the committee used to circle every typo or spelling error on an application. It’s just a way to weed people out, though usually it’s expressed as “this person didn’t take much time on their application.”

10

Do you have to submit some kind of project or sample of written work? If so, work hard on that. I started working on my writing sample 2 or 3 months before applying for grad schools, and was told by the Director of Graduate Studies at the place I ended up earning my PhD that it was ultimately my writing sample that got me accepted. (I was a bit of a slackass as an undergrad, so my letters of recommendation weren’t strong enough by themselves).

I ditto visiting places you are interested in. I visited a place where I got wait-listed, and told them to take me off the wait-list after my visit because I didn’t like the feel of the place. Had I not visited this place, I may well have chosen to go there as it was a higher-ranked department than the one I ended up attending. But I made the right choice. It is really important to go somewhere you feel comfortable. Grad school is stressful enough without being in a department that is not compatible with you.

11

Thanks for all the useful responds.

I am trying to publish or at least to get giving a presentation at a conference this spring. Should be hearing from them by now :dubious:

I plan to take the GRE Subject Test this April, but many, even my professors have told me it is not that important and I don’t really have to dedicate my time too much. Please convince me that it is true.

Speaking of visiting the school. This might be a dumb question but how do I get to be invited ? Should the committee look at my application first then decide to ask me visit ? Or should I just contact them and come ?

If I do my homework about one person at a particular school, then contact him before submitting the application, what do you think the professor would think ? I am passionate or just malicious ?

The SOP, is there a specific requirement for it ? Or it just depends on who read it ? Did Dopers write one SOP for every schools you applied ?

Aquafina

12

Update: I just have been notified that my abstract is accepted for an oral presentation at a national conference.

Is my profile good enough by now ?

13

I went to a pretty crappy college, a state tech school that was a university in name only. However, I have a 3.95 GPA, good GRE scores, had several grants, was published and present at several regional conferences and a national one in my field (chemistry). I applied to four schools and got into all of them, including the top in my field, UC Berkeley. They all invited me to visit. I turned down Berkeley for Davis, which was one of my better choices. Don’t get sold on the name, it isn’t everything. I looked at Stanford, and the only group that I wasnted to join had 40+ people in it, which I think is rather ridiculous. Mine only has 8-10, depending, which makes me much happier. Berkeley had that same mass produced feel to it. Go where you’ll be happy.

14

Just contact them and go; that’s what I did. In one case, they hooked me up with a grad student, with whom I stayed, and who showed me around, introduced me to people, etc. In the other case, the school was within driving distance so I had lunch with the chair and another professor, met yet another professor and a couple of grad students, and so forth. Again, I really strongly encourage you to visit, at least the places where you are accepted (if you need any encouragement).

15

The only way to really answer this question is to look at the schools to which you are applying. Are there students there that you know? Ask them. At my institution, I’m pretty sure any student would tell you that if you’re the greatest student ever in every other category but you have crappy GRE scores, that might not be a big deal. But I would really encourage you to at least get your scores in the normal range of what the schools list as their average. You don’t have to best it by 100 points, but again, you don’t want to give admissions committee members reasons to kick you to the curb.

Contact the admissions department of the school. Sometimes they have recruitment weekends, and other times they will deal with you individually. Personally I think the latter is better.

In this day and age, if it’s on the internet, it’s there for you to discover and use. At my school, if you were to visit a prof and know nothing about their work, you’d leave a bad impression. I don’t think it’s possible to freak a prof out by knowing their work, publications, etc. If you know their license plate number, well, then you might be trending toward malicious…

First, make sure you know what the school is asking for. A statement of purpose is different than a personal statement. Second, you would ideally write an individual SOP for each program, but that’s probably not possible. I would recommend that you ensure that the statement you write for each individual school refers to the programs by their correct name, and the other terminology specific to the school. Case in point: it’s a pet peeve of many committee members at my school to read an SOP that talks about earning an MA - our institution doesn’t offer an MA. It’s that attention to detail thing I mentioned earlier.

Third, I think you should ask the questions you’re asking here to people at the institutions you’re interested in. Admissions staff are prepared to answer those kinds of questions, they can be specific, and quite honest (in my experience). Really good admissions people will connect you to students who are brutally honest. As critical as most students here are, they’ll be honest and tell you whether coming to school here was worthwhile… or not.

Oh, and congrats Aquafina on being accepted to the conference to present!

16

This is what my experience was w/applying for chemistry grad school (Ph.D. programs only.) Things that made potential chem students (so they may not be useful for you) look good in order of importance were:

[ul]
[li]Work you’ve done and where. If you’ve published hot stuff, that’s good. If you’ve worked w/someone famous, that’s good. The better the school you’re at now the better all this, your recommendations, and your grades will look.[/li][li]Recommendations. These better be superb. Mine were from two research advisors and from a prof whose class I was taking at the time.[/li][li]Grades. This can supercede the 1st two I listed if they aren’t super hot.[/li][li]General GRE scores. Don’t bomb this.[/li][li]SOP. Don’t bomb this either. You can write a form letter where you replace a few key paragraphs. In my SOP, I described the research that I’d done and tried to show how I was capable of working on my own. I then wrote why I wanted to attend that particular program. I mentioned three profs and why I was interested in their research.[/li][li]Subject GRE scores. These don’t count for much, but it’s going to look bad if you get like 10th percentile. Many of the people who take this are foreign students who already have more education in this area. For chemistry, below 50th percentile starts causing some problems depending on where you’re going. Keep in mind that people generally don’t take this unless they think they’ll do well (otherwise they probably just skip the whole grad school thing.)[/li][/ul]

Your grades are good, and so are the two summer researches and future work. I strongly recommend doing some sort of research (can you do this for credit?) starting now or the summer and continueing through next year.

Make sure you research the department, not the name. Famous schools do not excel in everything. The average person may be impressed by the name, but the savy business person knows where the good employees come from. For instance, Yale’s chemistry program is crap. It was good some 20 years ago, but not now. There are better programs at schools that people don’t know so well, especially as you get out of the country. If you’re looking for a job overseas, then maybe a big name will help. Make sure that there are profs there who you can work for and that it’s a good environment.
I didn’t visit schools until after I was accepted. Chem grad schools pay for these trips :D. Other areas are different. I understand that bio students have to interview on site before being accepted. Check w/the programs to see when/how you can visit. I strongly suggest you not decide to go to a place w/o visiting first. They may mention something about a “visiting weekend” in the spring. Trying to coordinate all those visits can really kill your weekends that spring (I got into 7 programs).

As for contacting the prof, it depends on how you do it and it depends on the prof. Some are like, “you are presumptuous, let’s talk after you’ve been accepted…if that happens :dubious:” (there are some jerks out there). Some are more than happy to talk about their work. Just make sure you know everything first. Read their papers, etc. You should ask about information that is not obviously available elsewhere. I don’t know how your field works, but for chemistry, interesting things to know are:

[ol]
[li]What is it like working for you? How do you run your group? How do you feel this is different from other groups and why do you think this works best? This includes how much interaction they have w/students.[/li][li]What do begining students typically work on?[/li][li]How long before they get their Ph.Ds? (4 yrs? cool :cool:. 6+yrs? uh nice talking w/you)[/li][li]What do your students do when they enter the Real World?[/li][li]Do you supply beer during group meetings?[/li][li]Do you like pie?[/li][/ol]Maybe I wouldn’t ask the last two. What you asks depends on the situation. If it’s pre-application, then more detailed questions about the research are appropriate. I wouldn’t ask #s 3, 5, and 6 in that case.

I’ve written too much, and much of this has already been addressed. Time for lunch…