How to Get into Graduate School

Daniel McGown

August 16, 2004

 

 

So is that everything?

 

One last thing. Really think about what it is you’re going to do with your PhD (or whatever). Your specific research, the research you do your dissertation work on, likely isn’t what will occupy you for the rest of time. Most of the PhDs I know do research in areas nothing like what they studied in graduate school. Grad school is a stepping stone and not a career, so outside of just a topic you think is cool, consider where you’re going with this whole deal. Do you want to work in academia? Do you want to work in industry? How much resume muscle does your PhD bestow? How much networking will you get? Will it be in the right places? In short, how can you put this PhD to work for you?

 

Otherwise, that’s it. Thanks for sticking it out this long and good luck getting into wherever you decide to go.

 

Why am I listening to you on all this, again?

 

Well, I got into some good schools, not every program I applied to, but at more than half, and that’s not bad. I got into Princeton, which I accepted, but I also got into Johns Hopkins University and the University of Wisconsin Madison, both highly respected and well-rated schools for biology, as well as my alma mater, the University of Maryland College Park. Everywhere I was accepted I was also offered full funding through fellowships except for College Park, which still offered me funding through an assistantship. So, I’m not just spinning this stuff out of cobwebs and fairy dust.

 

This essay is just a manifestation of a habit of mine to mark down stuff that’s worked for me somewhere so that the next guy maybe doesn’t have to swim upstream as hard as I did. Please, please, please let me know if there’s anything here that was useful to you, needs corrected or could be put better. This, like all the Web, is a work in progress.