Eigen

I can't think of any programs where everyone gets a TT job within two years of completion. That would be insane! The job market is too saturated for that.

Helpful suggestions, most of the way around. I'm basing the current emphasis on what we (as current students) choose the school based on, assuming we want to attract other applicants like ourselves. Realizing that we're a small sample size, I wanted to reach out to a larger community here. Facilities are important for the lab sciences, and especially so in our case- it's necessary to show that even though we're a small program, we have the facilities to support top-tier research. When I say funding, I'm not talking about funding graduate students- that's a given- but rather the stream of NSF/NIH/DoD/DoE funding that the department gives- again, I think it's important to show that a lot of the national funding agencies have a good bit of faith in us, and that we're not hurting for money to fund our endeavors. And since in chemistry nearly all papers published are graduate student first authors, emphasizing top tier publications is, by default, emphasizing a heavy graduate student publication record. I'm more of a fan of in-person recruiting, both through conferences and bringing prospective students to the campus to visit- but I can't deny the importance of other marketing as well. So far, I'd say our success rate at getting people to apply after personal contact is quite high- we're a solid program with a lot of positives. It's expanding that reach to other students that's important. Thanks again for the suggestions.

We actually do have a no-fee pre-application, with a guaranteed week turn-around time. I think it's a great idea, I'm glad to see other places doing it as well. We have a pretty liberal application fee waiver policy as well. The thoughts overall were helpful- certainly some food for thought. I'm not so worried about the content (we've got a good group co-writing it), but the subject line. All the good content in the world is worthless if no one reads it! I'm sure programs are secretive about their recruiting, that's actually why I was asking here- there are a lot of people who've gone through this and gotten a range of different recruiting e-mails. I don't want to steal anyone's special tagline, but it would be nice to see if there are any particular pluses or minuses that people remember- things that really turned them off or they found helpful.

Ok, so I'm trying to help with our departments recruiting efforts. A broader applicant pool makes life more enjoyable for everyone. That said, I'd like to hear some opinions in what worked/would have worked/didn't work for recruiting you. I've put a nice bit of time into re-designing our posters/materials for in-person recruiting, and now we're getting ready to start with e-mail recruiting. The big question to start off with, is what subject line to use that will help people actually *read* the recruitment e-mail without deleting it. The next is, what would you say are the most important points to emphasize in getting people to at least consider our program? The things I think we should focus on are facilities, funding, and our strong publication record. Any and all suggestions would be helpful. We don't want to spam people out, but we're a small program that tends to get overlooked despite really good research, funding, and a strong publication record, so we're really trying to at least get people to put us into consideration. We're in the Sciences, but all perspectives are welcome.

I think one more month will make a solid year of top 10s. I post too much.... I blame it on having a smart phone and lab experiments that involve a lot of sitting at the bench waiting.

I'm thinking UclaColumbia isn't really sure what rolling admissions are.

These ideas both sound like things that would work in Highschool, but not so well in college. For the former- spending time in-class on marking low-stakes assignments really isn't the best idea. For the latter, I'd recommend *not* increasing the amount of grading you have to do by encouraging them to correct/hand it back in/come argue points with you at a later date.

That's why you don't scan print table of contents... You scan the ASAP list/RSS feed from the publisher. I find the problem with setting up keyword searches is that when I'm reading for new literature/to keep up with fields, I'm more interested in new and innovative ideas that may or may not be caught by my current keyword searches. Also, I find it exceptionally useful to be able to keep up with general directions in my field as well as advances in my subfield, which scanning ASAP articles does- I can see what people are working on in other areas without a great deal of effort. Both work, everyone just has their preferences.

That's because in this case, there's a general trend that backs the elitism. The majority of students from top-10 or top-20 schools are much, much better prepared for graduate school than the majority of students at a second tier state college. Admissions committees know this. They also know that just because the majority of students at an institution are better or worse doesn't mean that the individual student applying from that school might be better or worse than the average. There are plenty of cases of exceptional students form second tier state schools, and less-than-inspiring students from top tier schools. Going with the educational trends isn't "conservative", it's a smart gamble if you need some way to sort things out.

Yes, papers have titles. It would have saved a good bit of debate if you'd made clear that you were using "headline" and "title" (two non-synonymous words) interchangeably. That said, writing samples used for the GRE are small segments of larger papers- as such, they are rarely titled, since they are excerpts. Titles are typically used for standalone works. The GRE is not a drivers license test. Its point is to striate the pool taking the test such that there can be a rough means of comparison. Your metaphor between college admissions and the DMV makes little sense- the DMV has an infinite number of licenses to give out, assuming proficiency to a minimum standard. Graduate schools, on the other hand, have a limited number of spots to give out to the best applicants. The driving test is not a competitive process, such that percentiles are interesting to anyone- the GRE is.

You mean just not first author? Sure.

I'll answer that from both ends- I answer honestly when students email me about our group, and I also had good success emailing during admissions.

Bfat: If you read my post above, I came from a small state school and got acceptance into a top-10 program- and I know several others who did the same thing. If you're a good student, you have the experience and you have the drive, you'll probably fare pretty well.

The OP made no blanket assertions. He simply made a post to say that it's not always necessary to study- telling people that if they haven't had the time to study as much as other people here seem to, that they aren't necessarily doomed. You can't say it's either necessary or unnecessary to study for the exam- it completely depends on your backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses. My general suggestion to people that are worried is to read a bit about the format of the test, then clear an afternoon and take one of the whole powerprep tests that ETS sends. You'll get rough scores, and from there you can decide how much you need to worry about studying- if you bomb the practice, then figure out what you were weak on and brush up. If you do "good enough", then don't worry about it. GRE scores are used as a cutoff, sure.... But that's really about it. It's more of an "oh, they made over a 1200... put it in the "keep" pile". After that initial "did they meet the cutoff" look, I don't think GRE scores play a very large part of the equation. I think it's worth getting a score that's comfortably over 1200, but after that, I don't think it's worth the time to study significantly more- take those hours a day that you're studying for the GRE and use it to read articles in your field, do research, etc. I'd even say that you'd be better off putting that extra hour a day for several months into fine-tuning your CV and SoP.

And yet most faculty I know would say that they really don't understand why people spend so much time studying as well. I you need the study time to get good scores then by all means take it- but there seem to be a fair number of people who are studying a lot try to get perfect or near perfect scores, something that is absolutely not necessary. There is a lot of academia that is honestly about learning how to do "enough". Not overdoing it, not underdoing it and not focussing so much on one thing that you lose sight of the big picture. If you want to say that someone shouldn't be in the applicant pool because they didn't study for the GRE (which is not, by the way, an entrance exam), the majority of my program wouldn't have been considered.

You can look through the last two years of threads to get exact dates. It's usually sometime around then, but varies a bit from year to year.

It depends how insightful your comments on their research. The sad truth is, there's only do much research you can do without contacting them. Publications are on old research, not current and future directions. Similarly, most faculty are really bad about ever updating their group pages. And then there's whether or not the faculty you want to work with are taking new students or not. I actually didn't contact anyone at two of the schools I applied to- and the last school I visited the summer before applying. I think the visit, and some good one on one conversations helped a lot. At the schools where I didn't contact anyone, I got my application referred to the people I mentioned in m SoP, and we started talking within about a week of when I submitted my app (rolling admissions are great). At another school, it turned out almost all of the faculty I wanted to work with were either not taking students or had drastically changed research areas. I don't think it will matter hugely either way for you, honestly. As for the subjectivity of applications... I'd say they are, and should be a very subjective process. Souch of it is about fit and meshing of personalities that it has to be subjective to work.

If you've finished your applications you're past the point where it's recommended that you email professors. The idea is to contact them and talk about their research so you can feel put a good fit which you can then talk about in your SoP.

Just like anywhere else, some people want to make friends and some are loners. You can't generalize the response of one person to grad school in general. There are a few people in my department that are loners- they rarely hang out with the rest of us. Most of the group, however, are pretty social- we do lunches on a semi-regular basis, grab coffee while we're waiting for experiments to run, or go out at night to blow off steam after a stressful day. Being in a small MS program, your options may be a bit more limited- you have a much shorter time to make friends, and as you mentioned, a lot of the group are working professionals. Don't give up on trying, though!

Newspapers are not technical or academic communications- they're meant for the layperson with very little background. Academic writing of the sort you encounter in graduate school is not. You keep fixating on headlines, but I have yet to run across a single peer-reviewed paper that uses headlines- section breaks for "Introduction" "Results" and "Discussion" notwithstanding- but I don't think that's what you were referring to. As to your second point- there's a difference between making something difficult within the bounds of acceptable and correct writing, and jumping the shark so-to-speak. Even the piece (and I'll note that you're only harping on a single example) that you decry in this thread is difficult while using correct grammar, punctuation, and maintaining a progressive logical flow. It's not an easy piece to comprehend, but it's within the bounds of correctness. But lets be honest, if you need a headline to tell you what a section is talking about, your reading comprehension skills are pretty low. The point of reading comprehension is to be able to figure out what's being said from the actual content!

It's not about how much of the coursework is the same, usually- it's about where your funding comes from. If the school separately funds Mathematics and Statistics graduate students, you may not be able to jump tracks from one to the other, even if the coursework is 90%+ the same- there's funding available for you in one that you are receiving, but not the other.

Although anecdotal, my experiences have been that you can come from very poorly known undergrad institutions and go on to very good places. Of those in my cohort, at least one came from a smaller state school, and got admitted to at least one top 10 school. I went to a small state school (think very few graduate programs, second tier) and I got accepted to every school I applied to, with fellowships- including one in the top 10. Someone a year behind me in my undergrad program was admitted to Princeton the next year. And this is from an undergrad institution that *might* make the top 300 rankings wise- it's not hugely well known, although it did provide a very solid education. Your mileage may vary, but I know several success stories that indicate that is indeed quite possible.

There's one other thing that doesn't get mentioned when talking about schools- competition. Top tier undergraduate institutions have a *lot* of students from the same year applying to graduate school, often at the same places. Many of them have the same undergrad advisors, and the same courses. It can be harder to get LoRs that really make you stand out from the pack. That's not to say it's not doable, or that even a mediocre LoR from an elite PI won't take you places- but it's much rarer to have a professor be able to genuinely write, say, that you are the most talented student they've seen in the last 15-20 years. It's also worth noting, as Neuropsych did that it depends on what the school provides. A lot of SLACs provide excellent grad school preparation and counseling, and have the benefit of very close student-teacher relationships that can lead not only to good networking and advice, but also to really good recommendations.

Agarcia59 already answered, but yes- it's undergrads, first year grad students and second year grad students- you have 3 years of eligibility to apply for the NSF in most cases.

Depends on the school.