Applying for Graduate School
Initial Steps: Your Junior Year Agenda
The Application Process: Your Senior Year Agenda
Parting Thoughts
The following instructions were prepared by Dr. Janet Goebel and English major Janet Lassan for students in the English Department. Much of this advice may be applicable to other fields of study but should be taken as only one viewpoint. Talk with faculty in your department about graduate school and look for workshops on applying for graduate school such as those sponsored by IUP Career Services or any that might be offered in your department.
The graduate school from which you ultimately receive your advanced degree will be the foundation of your professional identity for the rest of your life. Because academia rarely gives jobs to would-be professors with degrees from schools which rank lower than the one to which you are applying to teach, you want to be admitted to the best possible graduate school. The process is arduous and requires planning.
Initial Steps: Your Junior Year Agenda
Assuming you have done well in school and made yourself a well-rounded candidate with close faculty relationships, you should begin in your junior year to:
- Gather Information
Start with Peterson's Guide to Graduate Programs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Check in your department, the library, and IUP Career Services for further information and catalogs. Call or write for catalogs from schools that interest you. Look especially for programs which match your interests: if you want to study American Literature, look for a program that is strong in that particular area. Remember that school ratings for individual graduate programs are not the same as a school's overall or undergraduate rating. Look for a strong graduate program in your field.
An equally important source is people. The back of the IUP catalog lists the graduate programs from which IUP faculty have received their degrees. Talk to people who have graduated from schools that interest you. If your department maintains a list of alumni, check this to see who has recently attended graduate school, then call or write these alumni who will usually be very happy to share their experiences and suggestions.
- Get Ready for the GRE
The Graduate Record Exam and the Subject tests in your area of specialization are required by most schools. Because test results take 5-6 weeks to process, the last possible date to take this exam and be seriously considered by a graduate school is during the first week of October in your senior year.
Many students find that taking both the general and subject tests on the same day is exhausting and leads to poor scores. They recommend that you take the subject test on a different date. That means you should plan on taking one part of the test in June before your senior year.
Each of the tests costs approximately $50. Some students are eligible for a fee waiver - check with Financial Aid. Tests dates are normally in early October, mid-December, early February, mid-April, and early June. Applications and specifics are available in Career Services, Pratt Hall.
- Take Some Tough Courses
Make sure you have some courses on your transcript during the junior year which will be perceived as very solid. In some departments which offer graduate courses, such as English, it is possible for an undergraduate to take up to two graduate courses with permission.
- Make Contacts at Prospective Schools
One way to do this is by attending a professional conference in your field of interest. Ask a trusted professor for recommendations of which conferences it might be fruitful for an undergraduate to attend. Go to sessions in which people from prospective schools are giving papers. Later you can write a note saying how much you enjoyed the paper and perhaps even share a bit of correspondence with an interesting professional.
Such an elaborate strategy was unnecessary a decade ago but is fairly common practice among savvy students now. Many graduate applications even have a space that asks for names of any faculty on their staff you have been corresponding with. This procedure won't work if you wait until a few weeks before applications are due; it requires advance planning.
The Application Process: Your Senior Year Agenda
Most schools give more careful attention to early applications. In fact, some schools do most of their admitting from the early deadline pools and have fewer slots left for the later deadline applicants. If a school has two deadlines or rolling admissions, make sure your application is among the earliest. This means you must begin in the summer preceding your senior year and will be overwhelmed with the application process during the fall semester. Plan your schedule accordingly.
Applications are expensive. Plan to spend $20-$50 per school. Add the cost of mailing an official transcript to each one. A few schools offer application fee waivers to students with high QPAs - these are worth searching out. Despite the expense, the prudent student should probably apply to a minimum of eight schools. Two or three of these applications should go to the least prestigious schools you would be willing to attend.
Before you spend time and money applying, make sure you talk to faculty about the schools you have selected. Remember that the reputation of a graduate program changes over times as stellar faculty come and go. Faculty will also know how competitive the graduate school admission process has been for recent graduates and can give you information you will not find in writing.
There are three components to most applications besides your transcripts and GRE scores:
- Letters of Recommendation:
See previous section on "How to Get the Best Possible Letter of Recommendation." These weigh heavily with admissions committees. If, by chance, a professor who knows you well happens to have graduated from a school to which you are applying, this is often an advantage.
- Personal Statement:
These usually begin with a statement of goals and reasons for continuing your education. Requirements vary: some schools ask for much information about your personal life and extracurricular interests. These are hard to write well. Make sure you have several faculty members read your drafts before sending them in.
- Writing Sample or Portfolio:
Obviously this should be your best work that shows both mastery of form/technique and a serious grasp of content in your field. Ask your professors for evaluations of your best work and use their comments to guide your revisions. This component is, in many cases, more important than your grades or GRE scores.
Always check with each graduate school to which you applied to make sure that your materials have been received.
Many graduate programs still require competency in at least one foreign language; some still require two for the Ph.D. but accept knowledge of a computer language for one of the two foreign languages. If you have extra time during the last semester of your senior year, take an advanced course or two in your foreign language or in computer science. This will save you time and grief later on after skills have become rusty.
Parting Thoughts
You may not get into the graduate schools you hoped for and you will be tempted to settle for a lower-tier school. Some students assume they can go to a less-prestigious school for the masters degree and later transfer to a better school for the Ph.D. This is NOT a good idea. Good schools weed out their own masters candidates for their Ph.D. and accept the rejected Ph.D. applicants of even better schools. It is a real rarity for a student to move up from a mediocre masters program to a better Ph.D. program. Before you accept admission to a school you have reservations about because you have been rejected by the school you were really hoping for, take some time to consider other options:
- Study Abroad for a Year:
Most European universities charge no tuition and modest fees. An exchange program is not usually needed if you are not worried about transferring every single credit. If you can come up with living expenses, this is a good way to broaden your horizons, master a foreign language, learn more about your field, and have some thing on next year's graduate school applications that sets you apart from the crowd.
- Delay Your Graduation from IUP and Improve Your Qualifications:
Do an interesting internship in your field, take some more courses or some graduate courses, improve your QPA or GRE, revise your applications, attend conferences, do some research with the help of an IUP professor, or publish an article.
Either of these options beats an unemployable graduate degree, and either of them is better than working for a year flipping burgers!
