Finding a Graduate Program...Some Hints

There are many sources of information--faculty, students, publications, and the Internet, to name a few. Once you have decided which characteristics of a program are most important to you, you can start looking.

Hint #1: Start Looking Early

The best advice anyone can give is to begin researching prospective graduate schools well in advance of your intended starting date. The application process in itself can take several months, and the cost of applying (application fees, transcript fees, test registration fees, postage, etc. plus the time required to complete an application) is high enough that you will want to make sure you are applying to programs to which you have a decent chance of being admitted. This requires a fair amount of research before you ever fill out an application form.

If you are thinking of going on to graduate school right after finishing your current bachelor's degree program, most of the advice I have encounter suggests that you begin looking in your junior year, so as to have the senior year available for the application process: gathering persons to write recommendations, doing test preparation, etc.

If you are coming back to school after several years, you want to begin the search process well in advance of your intended starting date. You may find, of course, that the time required to do your research and preparation for the admissions process will affect your starting date.

Hint #2: Use Many Sources

The more sources you use, the more likely you are to find a program that meets your goals. Below are a few suggestions on places to begin your search.

Follow Your Interests

If a particular field of study interests you enough to consider doing graduate study, pay attention to who is working in that field and where they are. Read their publications. Visit their World Wide Web pages. Contact them and ask intelligent questions about their work. Take advantage of opportunities like professional meetings to meet people at other institutions who are working in fields that interest you.

Discipline-specific listings of websites are available on the World Wide Web to help you locate colleges and universities offering degree programs in your field of study.

Another good suggestion I heard on Usenet was to locate the people who are writing your college textbooks. If your department thinks enough of the authors to select their textbooks, those authors might be worth considering as prospective graduate advisors.

For a perspective on determining whether or not you would like to work with a particular faculty member as an advisor, read Professor Marshall Dermer's "An Insider's Guide to Choosing a Graduate Advisor and Research Project in the Laboratory Sciences," available as part of the web page for the UW-Milwaukee Department of Psychology. Many of Professor Dermer's suggestions on choosing an advisor can be applied to study in other fields.

Collect Recommendations

Ask your advisor, and other faculty members in your major department about good places to do graduate study. Their familiarity with the field, and with your interests and the quality of your work means that they should be able to make helpful suggestions. And if they know you are considering graduate study, it will be somewhat easier to ask them to write letters of recommendation.

Also ask students studying at the institutions you are considering for their opinion of the program and other aspects of graduate life. Usenet Newsgroups are another good way to locate current students at a particular program in order to ask them about a particular program. Some folks have even put up web pages about their experiences.

You should also talk to people working in your chosen field, as opportunities arise.

Consult Other Sources as Necessary

There are various publications in print and on the Internet available to you. There are organizations that can help you track down graduate programs. And for "brute force" type searches, there are always web search engines and privately assembled lists of colleges and universities.

There are also a number of books that talk about the what, the why and the how of graduate education. One that I can recommend is The Graduate School Handbook by Richard Jerrard and Margot Jerrard, published by Perigee/Berkley Publishing Group (part of Penguin Putnam).

Next Steps

Once you have narrowed the field down, you can focus on selecting schools and programs to which to apply.

Click here for some ideas on what the application process is like.

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Updated 05122000