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.
Using Local Resources
The easiest place to start looking is in your own academic department.
Ask your advisor, and other faculty members in your major department about
good places to do graduate study. This can be helpful, as if they know
you are considering graduate study, it will be somewhat easier to ask them
for letters of recommendation.
Another good suggestion I recently heard in a Newsgroup was to locate the
people who are writing your college textbooks. If your department thinks
enough of them to select their textbooks, they might be worth considering
as prospective graduate advisors.
If your university offers graduate programs, students in those programs
can also be a valuable resource too, as they will, in many cases, have
similar perspectives to yours, having gone through the application process
(in most cases) recently. Some graduate programs make a point of asking
their current students to help with recruiting prospective students; once
you have identified a program as a possibility for your studies, ask for
the names of current students who would be available to answer your
questions about the program.
Usenet Newsgroups (see The Internet, below) are
another good way to locate current students at a particular program in
order to ask them about a particular program.
If the Placement/Career Development Office at your school or another
school close by you sponsors an on-campus career day or a
graduate/professional school fair, take advantage of the opportunity.
Graduate and Professional Schools often have representatives available to
answer your questions regarding their programs. At career days, you also
have the option of asking prospective employers about the best preparation
for particular careers.
Widening Your Research
There are various reference guides available,
which list degree programs at various colleges and universities. Many of
these guides also include hints on researching schools or the application
process. There are also guides and publications in which schools
advertise their programs.
Various organizations serve as resource centers, helping students and
universities find each other. The locater services with which I am most
familiar is sponsored by the Educational Testing Service, and are free to
persons who are registering for the GRE or
GMAT. If you choose to participate at the time you sign up for the
test, your name, address, and some general background information goes
into a database, to be referred to institutions requesting information on
prospective students. The service costs you nothing beyond what you pay
to take the test, and could result in your discovering possible places to
do your studies that you may have overlooked otherwise.
If I find out about other locater services, I will put in links to them.
Many Colleges and Universities are on the the
World Wide Web. If you connect to the main Gopher or Web site at a
university, you can usually see a good representation of the school's
programs, and the Web is constantly expanding. The UWM home page (see
link below) also includes some listings for other resources, under the
heading "Other Places to Surf (Where Do I Start?)."
Web pages at other colleges and
universities sometimes contain information on a wide variety of
programs besides the host school's.
Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Web site currently includes Web pages with specific
information on graduate study in many areas; the list of participating
programs is constantly expanding.
For More Information
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 071197