How the Heck Do I Apply for Graduate School? (Part One)

Article by Andrew Thoesen on Medium – Published July 8, 2017

For most people who begin this journey, that is the most accurate description of square one: how the heck do you apply to graduate school? Two million applications are submitted every year so it must be possible. Let’s begin by assuming that you have no prior knowledge or friends/family to guide you. This is the reality that many smart, creative students face.

Phase One — The Investigation — Mid-to-Late Summer

The Why: Before any other step of the application is completed, before you write a word for your application, before you even think about the GRE there’s a very simple question you must answer: why do I want to go to graduate school? What do I want to do? A PhD is a large investment of time and it is important to have motivation and focus to both guide your career and ensure that you survive the rigors of graduate school. It carries a heavy opportunity cost for many people, especially those students in lucrative STEM careers. The first Google result for why not to go is literally a blog giving 100 reasons. A more digestible summary is given here.

I gave up a large salary to return to school. A graduate degree is filled with uncertainty, mistakes, and failures. It’s not quite on par with law school where the governing body of the career path is advising you to avoid it, but it can be a struggle. Your ego will be eviscerated. Your identity as a smart and industrious person will be challenged again and again. If you undertake this, ensure it’s in an area which you will truly enjoy or be proud of specializing in. If you decide to embark on this path because you cannot figure out what else to do, you will not survive.

The Where: After you have decided why you are going to graduate school, it’s important to evaluate what kind of graduate school will allow you to succeed. I put together a list based on what I personally evaluated. Graduate school isn’t one-size-fits-all. For example:

• What are the most important qualities in a school to you personally? My undergraduate institution was in a relatively small town. One thing that I identified early in the process is the desire for a metropolitan location.
• Does the climate matter to you? I’m from Indiana. I don’t like cold and I especially don’t like lack of sunlight. During my search I focused on cities in the west, southwest, and southern states, with a smattering of other schools. There are many universities in this country. Take advantage of that.
• Does the size of the school or the city matter? The size of the school was not actually a big factor for myself. I would have been comfortable attending a small school that was next to a city. As it happened, I went to the largest public university in the country.
• What do you need for mental soundness? A PhD is not something to be taken lightly. You will question yourself. You will beat yourself up. Others will question you and beat up your work. Choose surroundings that will give you mental soundness. Not only did I land in an area with sunlight, I am surrounded by plenty of hiking trails which allow me to get away from work and into nature for a while.
• What can a school do to help you succeed in your career? This is tangential to “why” you want to get a PhD. More specifically, it refers to some of the “intangibles” that a university might have. For example, I now work on space-related engineering work. I’m currently completing a NASA internship. That is partially due to ASU’s ties to JPL and the relationship they have with NASA. Arizona State used to be a school listed as one of the top party schools in the country. It now has one of the premier earth and space science schools, recently landing a half-a-billion-dollar Discovery class mission. Although there are a few dozen schools ahead of ASU in the mechanical engineering rankings, there aren’t many which are better for the sector which I’m focused on.
• The X factors: Evaluate the amount of assistantships available at a school, the acceptance rate, and other qualities. Look at schools across the entire spectrum of rankings. Most universities in the top 100 will be able to provide you with a good graduate school experience. Graduate school is a bit of a numbers game. Your particular research area may be saturated with students that year all the way down from the top school to #50. Or, you may find a top 10 school in your field that just happens to be looking for someone with your exact interest and background. Both of these are real possibilities.

Make First Contact: Once you have identified a large grouping of schools (10 to 20) that you believe you would find acceptable, you should investigate labs in your chosen research area in each of those schools. One of the best steps to securing both admittance to schools and assistantships is to connect with prospective advisors before you set foot on campus. Crafting a short but effective email that communicates exactly what you can contribute to a professor’s lab is a bit of an art but one of the most important parts of the process.

Conclusion: If you begin this process in mid to late summer or early autumn, you should be able to make the deadline of most applications and also reach out in time to professors. Why is this? The financial side of running an academic lab is insane. Professors will have a good idea by mid to late summer of how many students they are financing, which grants have landed, etc.

Hey, look at that! You’re on your way! You’ve picked out your schools. You’ve picked out your labs and their projects of interest. You’ve sent emails to professors and maybe even gotten some responses. Now the real fun begins.