How to Get into Graduate School

Daniel McGown

August 16, 2004

 

 

OK, smart guy, so how am I supposed to pick a program?

 

This country has an obscenely vast wealth of graduate school programs. There’s likely never been a society in the history of the face of the earth with the depth and breadth and sheer number of graduate school opportunities. Before you can evaluate a program, you need to find it, so here’re the ways I found mine.

 

§              Read. It sounds obvious, but there it is. I’m going to break this up into pieces:

 

o      Read periodicals. If you have access to them, you can read professional journals like Nature or Science or whatever your field has. That’s going to give you some real insight into what departments actually do, but that’s not strictly necessary. Many fields, especially scientific ones, have more popular (and readable) “parrot periodicals” like New Scientist or Chemical & Engineering News or The American Scientist that take some of the interesting bits out of recently published work and distill it into a summary article. These articles invariably contain names and institutions and usually contain references to the source article from the journal. If you find something you like, pop by their website, see what they do there and get a copy of the journal article.

 

o      Read books. Borders and Barnes & Noble carry some books on every topic, and likely so does any decent library. Spend some time reading books vaguely in the vicinity of the direction you want to go, subject-wise. If you find a winner of a book, check into the author, see where he is, see where that leads. I learned about my topic of study by reading a book called Deep Hot Biosphere I bought randomly at Borders. Good read, that book, and it got me looking at Thomas Gold, which got me looking at Cornell, and then other geology departments, and then I found my program at Princeton. I never would have otherwise. Also, if you find you can’t read a book on the subject without forcing yourself, you may be looking at the wrong topic… or a bad writer. I can’t help you with that.

 

o      Read the Web. If you already have a pretty good idea of the topic you want to study, Google it. Don’t just stop with Google, though. Google will get you a lot of things, sure, but a lot is what you already have. Use more end-specific search engines, too, like Scirus or PubMed. These specifically will return more journal hits, but they also return names and places which you can turn around into Google.

 

§              Talk to people in the field. There are lots of people who can help you with this. Talk to your professors and your advisor, sure, but that’s just a start. Go to conferences or student presentations in your school’s vicinity. E-mail people doing research in the fields you like and ask them about their school or other schools they might recommend. I e-mailed a professor in Canada once to ask about industrial microbiology programs, and I wrote another at Dartmouth to ask about metabolic engineering schools. This should include the PhD researchers and the grad students, who can give you the valuable skinny on what’s really going on.

 

§              Look at the rankings. It seems shallow to do this, but it’s not, not really. You’re not just getting a Master’s or PhD because it’s cool. You’re getting one to help you sell yourself for the rest of your life. You want a name to go with your name. Consequently, find out which programs are respected or at least noticed by your professional community and the world. It’s very important, however, to remember that program rankings are given by both school and topic. If your school is in the top twenty-five for overall rankings that’s great, but if it’s not in the top ten for your specific subject, maybe you need to find out why…? Anyway, some places you can look:

 

o      Spend ten bucks on the annual US News and World Report rankings, either the paper or web copy. It’s just ten bucks, and it may make you think of schools you might not have considered otherwise. I, for instance, would never have thought about the University of Wisconsin Madison as anything but another generic state school until I noticed it was #2 in the nation for microbiology, outranking most Ivy League schools. It turned out to be a biologist’s paradise.

 

o      The Princeton Review is another common one, and they tend to focus more on the overall questions of the program. Faculty interaction, area, liveability, political orientation, etc. However, Princeton Review stuff tends to be bound in books, which makes it more expensive. At the very least, browse it in a book store or check it out from the library. There might be a web edition, I don’t know.

 

o      If you’ve got a school in mind, try Googling it with terms like “(school name) ranking” and see what you get. Professional organizations sometimes maintain rankings in certain directions. Magazines like Business Week sometimes have their own rankings, but only for certain categories. You might get lucky.

 

§              Learn program nomenclature. The names of fields, programs and departments are like code phrases that should tell you essentially what the program does even if you don’t click any farther. These tend to be conserved from school to school, so once you have the lingo down, searching for the kinds of research you like at universities becomes immensely easier. You also sound more like you know what you’re talking about when communicating with professors – and selection committees.

 

§              Even so, remember to look in weird places now and again. As a biologist, I applied to several straight biology departments, but I also applied to a chemical engineering department and a geosciences department because they did biological research I was interested in. There was also an aerospace engineering department at Colorado, I think, that I considered, because they also did some biological stuff I thought looked cool. The world of the interdisciplinary and the difficultly categorized means stuff doesn’t always pop up exactly where you’d expect it. It’s what they do that matters.