December 19th, 2008
A few friends of mine are applying to graduate school. This was without a doubt one of the most stressful and chaotic things I’ve ever done. Now that I’ve been in grad school for a while, I have a small understanding of how the application process works. My experience is limited, of course, to the programs to which I applied, so your mileage may vary. Also, I applied to ten(!) different graduate programs, so some of these solutions might not apply to you if you’re only applying to one or two.
Getting Organized
One of the most challenging parts of the grad school application process is knowing what everybody wants and keeping it all straight. Just about everybody wants a statement of purpose, but they have different guidelines as to what they want to see (at most X words vs. at most Y pages, single-spaced vs. double-spaced etc). Everyone wants recommendation letters, but they differ as to what sorts of recommendations they expect; do they accept recommendations from people you’ve worked with in an industrial setting, or do they want recommendations strictly from faculty members? The list goes on.
The very first thing I did when applying to graduate programs was to look at their programs’ websites and their application forms and try to answer a few questions:
- How much is the application fee?
- What do they say they want in a statement of purpose? (I wrote down exactly what they required there)
- How many letters of recommendation, and from whom? Do they want them mailed or filed digitally? If mailed, where should I mail them?
- Do they take GRE scores? If so, do they require a subject GRE? Which one? What are their GRE institution codes? (This last bit is important so you can tell The Testing Mafia where to send your scores)
- How many copies of my transcript do they need? Do they want it mailed or filed digitally? If mailed, where should I mail them?
- With which professors would I want to work? What projects have they done or are they doing that I find interesting? (If you can’t answer both of these questions, reconsider applying to this school)
Once I was done making that list (it took me an afternoon, round numbers) I made a folder on my computer called “Graduate School”. Inside that folder, I made two folders, “General Purpose” and “Schools”. The “General Purpose” folder would hold all the information that all schools seemed to want in some form or another – statement of purpose, resume, transcript, extracurricular activities list, work experience, and so on. The “Schools” folder contained a subfolder for each school, and housed not only the application materials for that school but also copies of any confirmation e-mails or webpages I received after completing the application (in case I needed to produce them later for some reason). This über-folder was backed up periodically to a server across town to protect against any major disasters.
The Statement of Purpose
This is the big one. This is the portion of the application that the people for whom you want to do research are likely to read – think of it as your “elevator pitch” for yourself.
Some people say that you should tailor your statement of purpose for each university to which you apply – since I was applying to ten different universities, this tactic didn’t seem feasible. You can say “Oh, a graduate degree from Stanford is the reason I was brought into this world; I will remake the world in Leland Stanford’s image with the help of Professor So-and-so, who I worship as a god among men!” but the people reading your letter won’t buy it. If you’re applying to a program because you’re really interested in X, and a professor in that program is a leader in the field on X, and you’ve had prior research experience in X, then mention it. Otherwise, leave it out because it does you no good.
Be honest, both with yourself and with the university to which you’re applying. I didn’t consider graduate school seriously until my junior year in college, and a lot of the places to which I was applying expected lots of prior research experience from their applicants that I honestly didn’t have. I knew they would notice it, so I came right out and said in my statement (not in so many words, you understand), “Look, I know that I haven’t published anything and that my research experience is kind of slim, but I’m really excited about this stuff and I know that I’ll be able to meet and exceed your expectations”.
Remember that this is not like college applications; your materials are not, by and large, going to be read by some faceless bunch of professional college application readers. The people reading your application are probably among the people whose classes you will take and whose research you will do. More importantly, they will be the ones who will fund you and they want to know that they’ll be getting their money’s worth.
Recommendation Letters
So many “how to get into graduate school” websites say that the key with recommendation letters is to get the ball rolling early, and I agree with them. One thing they don’t tell you often enough (and that they should tell you) is that your college’s letter service is your friend. Professors, especially at “research universities”, usually don’t like being bothered about letters of recommendation by undergraduates. It means that, in addition to writing the letter itself, they have to fill out forms and get envelopes and stamps and it takes time away from their work. Your goal is to be as unobtrusive as possible, and the campus letter service helps tremendously with that.
Letter services offer your recommenders the ability to write their letter once and send it to the letter service office along with some identifying information. The letter service then keeps these letters and (for a nominal fee) ships them off to whomever you want without any further involvement from the recommenders. Another plus of this method is that you don’t have to worry about getting all of your recommenders to send everything in on time – just fill out a form online and you’re good to go.
In short, start early, and if your university has a letter service then use it.
Keeping Track of Deadlines
You may be the most diligent person on Earth and have all your applications done well in advance of the deadline. If you’re like most of us, applying for graduate school isn’t the only thing you’re doing – you’re busy. I wrote down all the deadlines for my applications (which fell in a six week window between the middle of December and the beginning of February) and put countdown timers on my Google homepage. Every time I opened a browser, there they were, a grid of about a dozen numbers that kept getting smaller. If that won’t keep you on track, nothing will.
I hope that my experiences with this horrible, tedious process will prove useful to someone. Godspeed, applicants.
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