Grad School Admission Tips: Picking the right program

Grad school programs can vary quite a bit.  Each program has their own set of course requirements, guidelines for how qualifying exams are run, funding considerations, etc.  Here are some things to think about:

Coursework

There is a lot of variation between programs in how many courses students are required to take and what kinds of courses fulfill these requirements. It may not seem like a big deal to have to sit through a bunch of courses, but significant amounts of coursework can mean that you don’t get to your research project off the ground until your third year of graduate school. That’s a long time to wait if you’re ready to get started when you first arrive. On the other hand, some students benefit greatly from what they learn in class.

If you’re more of a self-learner or feel that you are already sufficiently familiar with the subject material, consider looking for a program with less coursework.

Program Size

Small program:

Pro’s:

1) In a small program you’re far less likely to get lost in the crowd.  It’ll be easier for the program directors to keep track of your progress and funding situation if you’re one of only a handful of students.

2) You get to know the other students in your program really well. Strong bonds formed during graduate school can be important for years to come as the students going through school with you will also be your future colleagues.  These bonds will make graduate school a more pleasant experience and will provide an important support system.

3) You have greater access to professors and their advice by being in a smaller group. If you think you’ll want a lot of input while designing and executing your dissertation project, this may end up being very important to you.

Cons:

1) You get to know other students in your program really well.  If it turns out that you don’t get along well with a handful of people in your program, this could be a big problem.  I’ve heard about cohorts of incoming students containing a few people who bumped heads and this made life pretty miserable for the group as a whole.

2) Small programs often don’t have a lot of money laying around.  This means that they might not be able to help you should you somehow lose your funding and it might mean that they can provide fewer fellowships.

Large program:

Pro’s:

1) Large programs tend to have lots of resources.  They’ll generally have more money for funding students, more money for funding projects, more equipment for running projects and more professors.  The program in which I’m enrolled (the Graduate Group in Ecology at the University of California Davis)  is large enough that we were able to cobble together funds to cover students when the California budget crisis resulted in a loss of funding for several student projects.  I don’t believe that a smaller program would have been able to accomplish this feat.

2) Large programs have lots of people in them. Socially, this means that there is a greater diversity of people with whom you might choose to be friends.  Academically, this means that there are lots of professors and staff available to you.  Having access to a great diversity of professors means it’s more likely that someone will have an answer to whatever question you end up having while working on your project.

Con’s:

1) You can easily get lost in the crowd. You’ll get less attention and because people will be checking in less often, you’ll have to learn how to speak up and be proactive about getting help when you need it.  If you worry about your ability to be pushy to get attention, then maybe you shouldn’t be in a large program.

2) You’ll be competing with all of the other students in the program for time with professors.  Again, you’ll need to be pushy and will need to learn to start asking for help long before a deadline because professors often can’t meet with you right after you contact them.

Qualifying Exams and Exit Exams

Programs can have every different requirements for qualifying and exit examinations, but I personally don’t think that you should pick a program based on these differences.  Unless, of course, a program is particularly well-known for having really unreasonable exams in which most of the students fail even after months of hard studying and preparation.  In general, most programs having fairly reasonable requirements on this front and you’ll just have to jump through the hoops when the time comes.

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Other considerations will be important as well, including whether or not you can envision yourself spending 6 years living in whichever city the program is found.

To get information on a particular program, scour the program’s website and then talk to the graduate students in the program about their experience so far.  As I mentioned in the post on picking an advisor, graduate students will be a very important resource and you should pump them for information every chance you get.

Grad school admission tips: Picking the right advisor

I’m assuming you’ve done your research and now have a list of professors who study things that interest you.  You now face a massively important decision.  Your choice of an advisor can easily make or break your graduate school experience. A good advisor will challenge you, support you and generally make your life live-able while a bad advisor will make graduate school a truly miserable experience.  The situation is complicated by the fact that the “right” advisor for one person may not be the “right” advisor for someone else.

The most important tip I can give you is to talk to the graduate students already in the lab to which you’re applying. Don’t just chat with them, really grill them for information.  Try to get them to go out to lunch with you or to go out for a drink, just make sure that they’re in an environment where they feel like they can talk about their advisor without him/her overhearing.

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When you have the grad student’s attention, here are some questions that you should ask:

1) How involved does their advisor get in student projects? Some incoming students have never conducted research before and quite honestly require some hand-holding.  Other students are more independent and would prefer to have a professor that lets them do their own thing.  Be honest to yourself about what kind of student you’re likely to be and make sure you match yourself with a professor who can meet your needs.

Some advisors are so busy that they might as well be living on another planet!

2) How often is their advisor around? Some hot shot professors spend a lot of time traveling the globe to give seminars and aren’t around much if at all.  Others are physically on campus, but might as well be on Mars because they have so many things going on they simply aren’t available to you.  Others seem to have so much free time on their hands that they end up micromanaging your project.  Figure out how much time you think you’ll need from an advisor. Do you want an advisor who is always down the hallway with their door open, ready to answer your questions at a moments notice?  Or are you OK with an advisor who you need to schedule an appointment with a few days in advance?

Importantly, find out when potential advisors are planning on taking their next sabbatical.  If you’re looking into a 2-year Master’s program, it’ll be difficult for you to finish on time if your advisor is on another campus for half of your stay in their lab.

3) What is their advisor’s funding situation like? It’s great if you can find an advisor who just received NSF or NIH funding and can afford to fund you on their project.  In general, life is significantly easier when you’re in a lab that has some money floating around.  Especially in programs that don’t guarantee TA positions, being in a funded lab can relieve a lot of stress.   That being said, it would be a bad idea to turn a lab down based solely on a lack of recent funding if the lab has a history of getting funded or if you already have funding yourself.

4) Is their advisor a nice guy/gal? This may sound like a really ridiculous question, but it’s important.  My biggest mistake when applying to graduate schools the first time around was to not grill the graduate students about their advisor’s character.  I ended up changing Master’s programs part-way through because it was clear that I could get a lot more out of my grad school experience elsewhere.  Fortunately, I did things right the next time around and found a pair of professors who made excellent co-advisors.

5) How good is their advisor about getting them connected to the community? Does their advisor go with them to conferences and introduce them to the big names in the field?  Has their advisor helped students in the past get positions after they graduate?  What kind of positions?  Some professors will be better at getting their students government jobs while others will be good at getting their students placed in research labs.  Figure out where you want to end up after you get your degree and find a professor who helps their students reach that goal.

With the right advisor, grad school can be a blast!

6) Does their advisor generally seem to watch out for his/her students? It’s really great to find an advisor who is genuinely invested in their student’s academic lives and research.  Finding a professor who stays on top of your funding situation and helps you find TA positions or fellowships for which you’re eligible is a great catch.  It’s also great to find a professor who helps their students write grant applications, reads their fellowship applications, etc..  There is a lot of variability in how much time and energy a professor will put towards these types of activities, but life runs a lot more smoothly when your advisor wants to help you out.

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If you don’t feel like the graduate students are being honest with you when they’re answering your questions face-to-face, feel free to e-mail them with more questions later on.  This way they can answer at their own leisure and during a time when they’re not worrying about other people overhearing.  I find a good ice breaker is to say something like, “OK, everyone has their weaknesses.  If there were one thing about Dr. X that you would change, what would it be? The guy/gal can’t be perfect!”

I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that you need to be honest with yourself.  If you think you’re going to need a lot of advice and attention from your advisor, then don’t join the lab of an over-extended professor.  Knowing what you want and finding an advisor to match it will make your experience far more pleasant.

Grad school admissions tips: G.P.A.s and GREs

When I decided years ago that I wanted to go to graduate school I had no idea how to go about getting into a good program.  Now that I’ve been through the process more than once (I have my Master’s degree and am currently in a PhD program), I’d like to share some tips.

Why take advice from me?

I really botched things the first time around by not researching the program that I applied to well enough, so I can tell you what to avoid.  Also, I eventually got into one of the top programs in the nation for my field of study (ecology), so I suppose that makes me a good source of information on how to do things correctly as well.

But don’t just take my word for it, check other reference out as well.  For example, I thought the book Getting What You Came For was an informative and well written overview of the admissions process and how to succeed in grad school.  I actually enjoyed reading it, though I suppose any book read on a beach in Costa Rica is probably inherently enjoyable owing mostly to the scenery. 

G.P.A. and GRE tips:

1) G.P.A.:  No surprises here.  A good G.P.A. shows that you work hard and you take your education seriously.  In competitive program, the first round through the application stack is focused on G.P.A. and GRE scores. That being said, you’re not out of luck if you have a bad G.P.A.!  

If your G.P.A. is looking a little wimpy (wimpy generally means less than 3.0) you have a few options.  

First you can fix your G.P.A.  Sign up for courses related to the field that you’re interested in and make sure you do well in these courses.  After you get your A’s, you can argue to the admissions committee that you’ve learned how to focus, have identified what’s important to you, blah blah blah.  Point is, you can show that you’re capable of buckling down.  

Your next solution is to dazzle the committee with other parts of your application so they’ll gloss over your G.P.A. A good way to do this is to have an awesome GRE score.

2) General GRE: The General GRE (Graduate Records Examination) is the graduate school equivalent of the ACT or the SAT. I’ll be honest with you, this test kind of sucks.  

The  quantitative reasoning section is filled with math stuff that you haven’t used or even seen since high school.  Don’t get me wrong, it is NOT difficult math, it’s just that you probably don’t remember much of it since it’s been about 5 years since it was last encountered.

The verbal reasoning section was the hardest part for me.  Think back to the ACT and SAT questions that looked like this:

SHEARING: WOOL::

a) shredding: paper

b) breathing: wine

c) trimming: hedge

d) reaping: grain

e) weaving: silk

When I took the ACT and the SAT these types of questions where a breeze.  When I took the GRE, I frequently found myself looking at questions in which every word was new to me.  I thought I had an amazing vocabulary, but it simply wasn’t good enough!

Ghandi studying. Be like Ghandi!

The best advice I can give you is this: STUDY FOR THE GRE.  A good GRE score will make it easier to get past the admissions committee and will make you more likely to get fellowships (and who wants to be teaching when you could get paid to do your own research instead, right?!).  

Buy a study guide and spend a few hours with it every day for at least the month before the test.  I used the Princeton Review’s GRE study guide and supplemented it with a book on commonly used GRE vocabulary words.  I copied the GRE vocabulary lists onto notecards and took those darn things with me everywhere I went.  Turns out you spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for stuff to happen (standing in line at the a store, waiting for the bus, etc.).  If you take out your notecards whenever you’re waiting for something else to happen, you can learn a LOT of good vocabulary words.  This little trick increased my verbal reasoning score by 150 points.  

Not all study guides are created equally, so do your research and make sure you have a good one.  This probably isn’t the best time to go for a bargain deal.  

Make sure you understand the format of the test and have taken at least 2 practice tests.  You’ll thank yourself later. 

As it turns out, the test really isn’t so bad if you’ve studied hard enough.  The math is a breeze if you’ve seen it recently and remember how to do it.  There isn’t even any calculus on the exam!  The vocabulary section isn’t so bad if you’re at least vaguely familiar with the words appearing in the questions.  The essay section also isn’t too bad as long as you’re keeping in mind the tips that the guides offer for how to make a good argument and how to deconstructing a bad one.

Also, the test costs $140 to take, so you don’t want to be taking it more than once. 

3. Subject GRE tests:  Some schools require subject tests.  For example, I had to take the Biology Subject GRE test, which had three sections (cellular and molecular biology, organismal biology, and ecology and evolution).  These tests are tough too and definitely require some studying.  Check online study guide reviews to be sure that you’re getting a good one.  

Not all programs require GRE Subject tests, so figure out which schools you’re interested in applying to and determine what their admission requirements are way ahead of time.  

Even if your program doesn’t require a GRE Subject test, you may want to consider taking one if you have a low G.P.A. The test requires a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the field in question, so doing well on this test says a lot.  So if you don’t want to pay to take more classes to bolster your G.P.A., buy a GRE subject test study guide and work on getting a great score.  

More tips coming soon!