Grad School Advice
Just when you feel like you’ve figured college out, it’s time to look ahead to graduate school. Pathways to advanced degrees are incredibly contextual, but we have a few tips to get you started.
Talk to Your Faculty EARLY
Your faculty have been there. They successfully navigated the years-long process of obtaining an advanced degree and often have personal advice from the experience. Also, your faculty connections will end up being the people you ask for letters of recommendation. The earlier you get to know them, the more details they can share about just how awesome you are.
PS - Even if you end up not going to grad school, their recommendations work for job applications as well.
Talk to Your Advisor EARLY
In many cases, your advisors have also been there. Many have seen their students gain admission to grad school, and they can speak to those students’ strategies. They can help you connect to faculty and research opportunities that improve your application. They can also help you understand the risks and benefits involved in pursuing advanced degrees. Finally, your advisors work with you to create degree plans that allowÌýyou to meet pre-requisites or gain experiences that make you as competitive an applicant as possible.
Learn How to Talk ´ºË®ÌÃÊÓƵ Yourself
Start by learning more about yourself. Reflect on your values and interests, your background and experiences that brought you to where you are now. Admissions committees are looking for the best candidate for their program, which includes academics and personality. People, as a rule, love clarity. If you can clearly articulate who you are, the committee can know if you are a student who will grow in their program.
Give Yourself Time
Deadlines come fast, and letters of recommendation come slow. It’s wise to know your preferred universities’ deadlines well ahead of time (ideally a year) to allow yourself time to complete the application and your faculty to write a strong recommendation. You’ll likely be contacting offices for transcripts, faculty for recommendations, companies for required exam scores and potentially loads of others. Although it seems like a personal process, it ends up being a collective effort that you have to coordinate.
Find Feedback
Know as much of your admission committee’s process and practice it. Programs can require essays, portfolios, interviews, exam scores and résumés to start. You can get feedback on all of these facets of your application before you either send them or experience them. To put your best foot forward, get as much feedback as you can. Write multiple drafts of your essay, try out a few practice interviews with career services and spend time preparing for your exams. The time you put in practicing makes the process familiar. That leads to success.
Go Visit
For many advanced degrees, you are paired with a faculty mentor or advisor who will guide you through the degree and help grow your research or creative work. It helps to know if you all get along, even if your research interests match. The bonus of knowing you are compatible thinkers both on paper and in-person is that you’re about to set off on an experience in which you spend a load of time together. It helps to know if that time will come easy.