I’m teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I’m giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week’s was “How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School.”<\/p>\n
I’ve probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I’m too lazy to look for it, and this particular presentation was slightly different than anything I may have put on the web in the past. And I might as well wring another post out of the topic, while it’s fresh in my mind…<\/p>\n
There are several steps to the grad school application process, but the most important part of the process comes at the very beginning. Step Zero: Do you really want to go to graduate school?<\/strong><\/p>\n (Continued after the cut…)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are lots of bad reasons to go to graduate school. Chief among them is inertia– college seniors have been in school for something like seventeen years, and from that perspective, it can seem like going to school is the only thing they know how to do. Grad school seems like a continuation of that process, and so some people drift in that direction.<\/p>\n This is a terrible reason to go to graduate school. It’s just postponing the inevitable process of getting a job, and the reward isn’t worth the hassle. If you’re thinking about grad school just because you don’t know what else to do, find some other ideas. Get a job for a while. Take a year off and travel. Do something other than being a college student for a little while, and then see if you feel like going to graduate school.<\/p>\n Another weirdly common idea is that there’s good money to be made by going to grad school. I’m not sure where this comes from, but it’s not accurate. Don’t get me wrong– small-school academics are at the low end of the Ph.D. pay scale, and we’re comfortably middle-class. But you’re not going to get fabulously wealthy by getting a doctorate.<\/p>\n There’s one and only one good reason to go to graduate school: You should go to graduate school if you really enjoy doing research, and want to make a career of it. Grad school is designed to train you to do research in a particular field of science, and not much else, and a Ph.D. is pretty much a prerequisite for a career as a researcher. You can do other things with the degree– plenty of Ph.D. physicists work as engineers, or programmers, or financial analysts– but there are easier ways to get those jobs, ways that don’t involve graduate school.<\/p>\n The only thing you need<\/strong> a Ph.D. for is a research career, and that’s the only reason to think about getting a Ph.D. in science.<\/p>\n Step One: Determine your research interests<\/strong>. By this, I don’t mean that you should plan your thesis project before you settle on a grad school, but a lot of the school search process depends on what sort of thing you want to do. Anything you can do to clarify your interest in research– and you are<\/strong> interested in research, as we established in Step Zero– will make your life easier down the line.<\/p>\n “Determine your interest” in this context can be broken down into two big questions. The first is simply “Broad or narrow?” Are you interested in a range of different fields, or is there one specific field that really grabs you? If you have broad interests, then you’re going to want to shoot for schools that are good at a bunch of different things. If you have narrower interests, then you’re going to want to make sure that the schools you apply to have strong programs in your desired field.<\/p>\n The other big question is “Theory or experiment?” This can be a tough one to answer, because many students have a skewed idea of what those categories mean. Some students seem to think that theoretical research is just like doing problems for class, and the experimental research is just like the stuff you do in lab classes. They’re wrong, on both counts. This is an area where actually doing<\/strong> some research will help. If you work on an experimental project as an undergrad, and really like it, you might be an experimentalist; if you hate it, you might think about theory.<\/p>\n (In a purely strategic sense, I’m told that graduate programs in physics get many more applications from students saying they want to be theorists than they get from students saying they want to be experimentalists, so there may be some slight advantage to saying you want to do experimental work. I doubt the gain is big enough to be worth lying about, though.)<\/p>\n Step Two: Investigate graduate schools<\/strong>. There are lots of ways to look at grad programs. US News helpfully provides rankings<\/a> of graduate programs (I’m not willing to pay to read them, but you might be). A site called phds.org has a handy online ranking generator<\/a>. And Google is your friend when it comes to finding information about various colleges and universities.<\/p>\n And, of course, you can always use the old-fashioned technique of actually talking to people. If you’re a college student, you’re surrounded by faculty, all of whom have gone to graduate schools, and will have opinions and advice to offer. Ask them. If you’re in an active department, there’s also probably a colloquium series of some sort bringing in speakers from other institutions– talk to them, if possible. Many of them will be actively recruiting students, and will be happy to talk about their school. And if you’re completely desperate, there are even cranks running weblogs, who will happily hold forth on just about anything.<\/p>\n Step Three: Apply to lots of places<\/strong>. The meat of Step Three is really the application process, but it’s worth emphasizing that you should apply to a large-ish number of schools, to give yourself a range of options. Yeah, there’s usually an application fee, but it’s better to spend some extra money and have choices than to save money on applications, and not have any options.<\/p>\n The application process isn’t too different from the college application process– you have to provide transcripts, and test scores, and write an essay, and all that stuff. Some elements that may not be completely obvious:<\/p>\n First of all, you’re going to need recommendation letters from faculty. Make sure there are faculty who know you well enough to write a good letter, and ask them in advance<\/strong>. Going to a faculty member and saying “Um, Dr. X, can you write me a recommendation for Harvard? By the way, the deadline is tomorrow…” will get you a letter that starts off “Student Name is the sort of jackass who waits until the last second to ask for a recommendation…,” and you don’t want that.<\/p>\n (OK, it’s not that bad, but you won’t get as good a letter as you would if you gave them more notice…)<\/p>\n Also, don’t be afraid to ask advice about your statements. Show a draft to your faculty advisors, tell them where you’re applying, and ask what they think. And for the love of God, listen to their advice– if they say “You should apply to better schools,” apply to some better school. If they say “These schools are kind of a stretch,” apply to some lower-tier schools, too.<\/p>\n If you get the chance, it probably doesn’t hurt to visit the schools you’re interested in at this stage. I don’t know that I’d fly cross-country on your own money to check out a school on the opposite coast, but if you’re applying to Harvard, and you’re going to be in Boston anyway<\/strong>, swing through Cambridge. Take a tour, talk to whoever’s around. It can’t hurt, and might help, either in making up your mind about applying, or by fixing your name in the mind of the people who will read your application.<\/p>\n Step Four: Acceptance<\/strong>. Assuming you’re accepted to at least one school, how do you decide what to do?<\/p>\n The one absolutely essential item here is to visit the school<\/strong>. Many schools will actually pay for you to come out and see the place, and you should take them up on it. It gives you a chance to see the campus, visit some research groups, and get a sense of what you’re in for. Even if you only get accepted by one school, visit before you accept their offer– if you go there and hate the place, you can always get a job for a year, and try another round of applications later. Better that than going to a place where you’ll be miserable.<\/p>\n When you visit, make sure you talk to some students. You’ll definitely get to talk to some faculty, but the students are the important ones. They know the quality-of-life stuff that will really matter to you, and they’re less likely to try to sell you a line of bullshit. If they’re miserable, they’ll tell you. If they’re happy, they’ll tell you that, too.<\/p>\n When you talk to people, find out about departmental policies, which vary quite a bit. Are there qualifying exams or not? What are the pass rates on the qualifiers? Is there a limit to the length of a graduate career? What is the funding situation like? Are there generally research assistantships available, or will you be expected to teach to make ends meet?<\/p>\n A critical thing at this stage is a sort of analogue of Yog’s Law<\/a>: You Do Not Pay to Go to Grad School in Science. If they’re not offering you a tuition waiver and a TA job at the very least, don’t go. You’re not going to make big money while in graduate school, but you shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege. Better to be paid for flipping burgers and apply again next year, than to shell out good money for the right to work problems from Jackson.<\/p>\n Another thing you might want to do is to try to figure out where you stand relative to the rest of the students. How do your test scores compare? How does your undergraduate preparation compare? If you’re way at the upper end of the distribution, you could probably get into a better school, if you’re way at the low end, you may be in for a struggle. This is a little dicier, though, as that information can be a little hard to get.<\/p>\n That’s a quick and crude sketch of how to go about the grad school application process. If you look around a bit, I’m sure you can find no end of other advice (some of it written by me), much of it broadly similar to what I’ve written here, and much of it contradictory. This is what I’m offering this week– thoughts and comments are welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m teaching our senior major seminar this term, which means that once a week, I’m giving hour-long talks on topics of interest to senior physics majors. This week’s was “How to Pick and Apply to a Graduate School.” I’ve probably written this basic stuff up about three times already, but I’m too lazy to look… Continue reading The Grad School Application Process<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}