How to Get into Graduate School

Daniel McGown

August 26, 2004

 

 

So I’ve got some programs I like. Now what?

 

There are a lot of things you can do to make yourself a more appealing candidate, but you need some time to do them. Some things have more impact than others, but don’t be intimidated by being in crunch time. Just do as much as you can with whatever time you’ve got.

 

§              Have a good GPA. Let me just get this one out of the way now. It’s the most obvious and least helpful bit of advice. A lot of schools like 3.5 or better. You can list your major GPA separately from your overall GPA if it helps. Some schools actually require that on their application forms. If you have a problem in this regard, though, I think they can be seriously ameliorated by combinations of the following.

 

§              Do an internship. This is undoubtedly the single most important thing on this list. Do it during the summer, do it during the school year, but do it. You must do this to get into the highest rated or most selective programs. After all, graduate student is a job, and experience counts big time. Remember, a professor’s not just looking for bright students. He’s staffing a lab, or whatever the equivalent is in your specific discipline, so if you come in not only knowing how to do stuff but being able to demonstrate that you can apply it to achieve desired results, you’re ahead of the game. It will also help you get through your research more smoothly, frankly, if you already have a fair idea of how things work going in. So instead of waiting tables at TGI Friday’s for dough, you need to seek out something in your discipline. Science students need to find a lab. If you can’t find a paid internship on or off or on a different campus, you should approach a professor to do unpaid undergraduate research assistant work. Working for free sounds like it sucks, but you need to get that foot into the door, and very few professors will turn down labor they don’t have to charge to a grant. Business students can do business internships or do an actual business job if they can wangle one. Law student wannabes can do internships at law firms. Vet students can volunteer at animal shelters or whatever. You need that practical demonstration to be saleable on paper, and you need the practical experience to speak intelligently if you get an interview. The other benefit from an internship are good rec letters, dealt with a couple lines down.

 

§              Study for the general GRE (or whatever test). It is surprising to me how many people don’t do this, either out of laziness or cockiness. It’s not a hard test in my opinion, but it’s a considerably easier test if you spend the time to do even a couple of GRE review books before you go in there. I have recommendations for some books to buy or avoid in my media reviews section, but I’ll tell you here that I’d use the Barron’s book followed by the ETS book, were I you. The Barron’s book is much harder than the GRE, and the ETS book is all practice questions taken from former GRE examinations. That way you get used to harder questions, and then when you hit the ETS book it’s like drinking water through a straw after trying to pull molasses through a coffee stirrer. Your confidence is a nice place when you take the exam. One thing you should know is that all GRE scores you receive for the past few years get sent to a school when you have your scores sent in. On the computer-based GRE, you can cancel your GRE examination after you finish your test but before you see your scores. Consequently, if you feel like you hosed your test, you can kill your score and take it again. I did this the first time I took it because I wasn’t absolutely sure, but I think it helped me smack the crap out of the test the second time around to have seen it once. It’s almost worth spending the money to take the computer-based test once cold and canceling your score just so you can see it for real.

 

§              Skip the subject GRE unless it’s required. I was all geared up to take the subject test in my area until a friend of mine who went to MIT for nuclear physics stopped me and told me not to. Essentially his argument was that for most programs, the general test is mandatory and the subject test is optional, and since the subject tests are usually harder than the general test, adding in that second chance only increased your odds of having a poor score on your record while not doing much to materially increase your chances of acceptance. I thought that made sense.

 

§              Get recommendations from people that know you. They actually read your recommendation letters. Honest to God. This isn’t like job references, where they’ll probably get checked to see if they’re present and skipped over. Your recommendation letters are very important, so they need to say more than, “This guy took my class. He got an A.” You need to make an impression on some PhDs such that they can write you a letter that means something. One way to do this is (ta-da) an internship. Another is honor societies or student chapters of professional organizations. You get to interact with professors that way. A third is to get recommendation letters immediately upon finishing a class that you burned up. In a year, the professor will have had dozens to hundreds or students tromp through his classrooms, and he may or may not remember you well enough to say more than a generic good-guy letter. Have him at least write you a generic letter right after the class ends, something to work from later, and at best if you have your programs picked you can get your letters right then and there. Remember, you need to prepare the forms for your professors as completely as possible before you give it to them, because they don’t have time to fill in your name and social for you.

 

§              Join honor societies and student chapters of professional organizations. When I applied to grad school, I already belonged to six societies, two of which were honor societies. For many all that is required is a form and a check, in return for which you get a membership card and a magazine subscription. Some also require a member to sponsor your nomination, which may mean as little as a signature. This helps fill in “Professional Memberships” and “Awards and Honors”. The magazines are also generally good as previously stated, and, if you have the time, taking one of the leadership roles in your student chapter (president, VP, treasurer, secretary) helps even more with faculty face time.

 

§              Tailor your application essays to your readers. Do not simply use a generic essay which you cut and paste into each application. Even programs in the same discipline at different schools have slightly different areas of focus, and different things they’re looking for in a candidate. A committee simply may not notice you have skills they need or accomplishments they like unless you tell them, even if it is in your resume, so make sure that you match what you write against what they actually do. If you structure your essay properly, you can set it up so that only one or two paragraphs will need serious modification per application, but the results will be tremendously worth it. On top of that, make yourself sound interesting. These people are going to have to work with you for a few years, so outside of straight “you need me for these reasons” kind of thing… sound interesting. Play up the parts of your life that make you sound different from the average candidate. I worked the whole military intelligence thing into essays for biological research programs, because it sounds all mysterious and romantic unless you’ve actually done it.

The above will give you a good, strong, solid application to almost any school. I think if you do these things, you’re going to have some pleased professors on the other end. I would just like to toss in, though, that there are perhaps four additional things that you can do to be Uber-Candidates with trumpet fanfare.

 

§              Get an article published in a professional journal. This is a possible outcome of either an internship or a spectacularly well done class paper. Nothing will make a professor sit up and take notice like a publication. Departments are keenly interested in people that have already shown they can produce publishable work. You will be the proverbial golden goose.

 

§              Get a patent. If you’re in a technical discipline, having patents is also good. Producing intellectual property can be as good as publishing to a department, because both come back to the same thing: money. Publishing helps get grants and funding, but patents can be a revenue stream in and of themselves. If you have patents, flaunt them.

 

§              Win or place in a well-known competition. Departments are looking for things that not only make you stand out but make them stand out (or continue to stand out, as the case is for schools like Stanford or MIT). Elite students make programs look more appealing.

 

§              Bring your own funding. Very little can make you as attractive as having your own support in place. If you’re free, you’re appealing, and if you won it competitively, you’re moreso. There are private foundations like the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation that have programs you can apply for, but you may have a tightly specific window in which you have to apply. Try places like FastWeb to look for funding sources. There are also scads of books on the subjects published and available at most bookstores.