Dave Mumby

@Quant_Psych_2018, there's no need to apologize. I took no offence at all. You started a worthwhile discussion, and I understand that this was your intention. So, some reasons behind all this variability in the advice... Some variability will naturally appear if one tries to integrate all the insights and suggestions that comes up when searching widely on the Internet for general advice. Some things can’t be reduced down to one-size-fits-all-situations. For example, a general forum like this one has participants from the entire spectrum of disciplines and fields of study, within all the STEM disciplines, the social sciences, the humanities, fine arts, business. People are sharing their experiences and stories of what they have been told. But, some good advice that would apply to a student going for a master’s program in Biochemistry, Engineering, or Exercise Science, for example, will not be such good advice for a student in English, Philosophy, or History. It’s not alway easy for a student to know when specific advice is really not meant for them. Often, whether or not a particular line of advice is relevant depends on how grad-school applicants are selected in the student’s discipline. For example, in almost all graduate programs in the humanities or fine arts, students are selected by a small committee of faculty members, and this is also the case in a minority of social sciences departments. But, in most STEM and social science disciplines it is usually only the POI who makes the decision about the individual applicants. But even when seeking advice from within your own discipline, one is still going to come across varying opinions. Professors do not receive a guidebook or any kind of training on how to supervise graduate students, or how to go about selecting them. We are left to figure it out ourselves, so naturally there are a lot of individual differences in terms of how professors perceive different situations. So, a student seeking advice about grad-school applicaitons from two professors in the same department can get different opinions from them. One professor might care a lot about how high an applicant’s grades are; another professor might not care much about the grades and might focus almost entirely on the statement of purpose and the letters of recommendation. Most professors are unaware of how their colleauges evaluate applicants and make their decisions about who to accept, so when they give advice, it will tend to be nothing more than what matters to them and what they assume matters to other professors. For instance, while some professors do not care to hear from potential applicants before they apply, the great majority do prefer to hear from potential applicants (at least within the STEM and social sciences). The one who doesn’t like it will tell you not to send an email to POIs, while the one who prefers it will urge you to send the email. The point is that most professors wil be able to give you some good insights and good advice about most aspects of the grad-school application process, but there will be certain areas where they cannot properly represent the opinons and views of the majority of other professors in their discipline. Professors simply do not tend to share notes on how they choose their own graduate students. This is one of the reasons why I interviewed dozens of faculty members and graduate program directors in different disciplines and at universities across U.S. and Canada when I was preparing to write the first edition of my guidebook back in the 1990s, and then again for the second edition in 2012. I continue to widely survey the opinions of faculty members in different disciplines so that I will be able to represent both the majority views and also give a sense of some of the differences, across different disciplines and between individual professors. This next reason for why advice can sometimes vary so much might seem a bit harsh or unfair to the many well-intentioned people who serve as academic advisors to undergraduate students at colleges and universities across the land. Of course, many students seek advice about the grad-school application process from an academic advisor within their department or faculty. Many academic advisors give terrible advice on this topic, simply because they do not have the necessary experience to be able to give reliable or valuable insight. This is often the case when the academic advisor has no personal experience supervising graduate students or participating in the selection process. You really have to be an insider to appreciate the way it works. But, even though your academic advisor may have gone to graduate school at some point in the past, this does not make that person an insider to the graduate admissions process. Nowadays, it is rare to find an academic advisor who is also a seasoned professor who has personal and direct experience with the grad-school selection process. In many academic departments, the role of academic advisor tends to be given to the most junior faculty members, and in many schools and departments, the academic advisors aren’t even faculty members. Their main responsibilities tend to involve helping students select the right courses in order to complete their degree requirements. An academic advisor might not understand the subtelies of how certain things tend to work when it comes to grad-school admissions, but he or she is not going to plead ignorance, and instead will probably just tell you what they assume to be good advice. Current or former grad students seem like they would be a great source of information about how to tackle various aspects of the grad-school applicaiton process, and some will indeed have clear insights into how things generally work. But, most graduate students are also in the dark about certain things, just like the majority of academic advisors — and for similar reasons. Good-intentions are usually behind all the advice, but some of it may still be off the mark. Grad students do not have first-hand experience with the peculiarities of the selection process, or how the decision makers actually reach their decisions. Finally, I want to say one more thing about professors who are experienced insiders to the grad-school application and selection process: The vast majority have seldom, if ever, given any deep thought to the finer details of the process from the perspective of the students, so they aren’t always aware of all the important insights that would benefit students applying to grad school. It’s simply not a topic that is on their radar, except maybe for a few days each year when they give some attention to application files from potential grad students. This is not intended to disparage other professors for their opinions or advice. It’s just not a topic that most tend to spend time thinking about. On the other hand, there are some professors who have dedicated a great deal of time and effort throughout their careers to researching the topic through interviews with others and extensive personal experience. Some of them end up writing guidebooks, or blogs, and some even end up being academic advisors

As the author of the quote being discussed here, I think it would help you if I put it into context in which it appears in my guidebook on preparing and applying successfully to graduate school. Mostly importantly, please note that I do not imply that all POIs want students to contact them before applying to their graduate program, only that some insist on this, and that in most cases it makes a significant difference. Since in the vast majority of cases, you will not know your POIs personal preferences, you should do the wise thing and try to make that pre-application contact. But, it isn't just for the sake of improving your chances of being accepted! There are at least three main reasons why this contact is very important, in the majority of instances. First and foremost, you need to find out whether this person is even interested in taking a new graduate student next year. Most commenters on this forum appear to understand this can be relevant. Most faculty members go through periods, from time to time, when they simply are not in the market for a new student. Reasons abound. They might have already made a commitment to another student for next year. They might already have as many graduate students as they can effectively manage and supervise at one time. Perhaps they will be out of town on a sabbatical leave for all or most of next year. Maybe retirement is looming within the next few years and its time to start downsizing. A loss of research funding, pending litigation, terminal illness… Like I said, reasons abound. And if you don’t find out whether this person is open to taking a new graduate student next year, you might end up wasting a lot of time, money, and hope on a fruitless application. This happens to thousands of applicants every year. The chances of being able to tell from someone's lab website or a departmental website whether they are taking new grad student for the upcoming year is very slim. I would like to emphasize that this is usually the only good reason to indicate to a POI that you are contacting them. It should be pretty obvious that if you tell someone you are contacting them to get your foot in the door, that will be seen as an attempt at manipulation and chances are you will be shooting yourself in the foot. Another important reason to contact a prospective supervisor before applying is to get some kind of impression of what he or she is like as a person. Remember that the faculty members in any graduate program are all different individuals. Different people deal with their students in different ways. A graduate student/supervisor relationship with each one of them would be different. You want to spend the next few years working with someone you like. Interpersonal compatibility is very, very important. Most graduate school applicants don’t give this very much consideration, probably because they fail to realize just how symbiotic the relationship is between graduate students and their supervisors. Many promising students end up with a supervisor who turn their grad-school experience into a nightmare. Many of those unfortunate students will quit graduate school before finishing, not because they are incapable of earning their Masters or Ph.D., but because working with their supervisor becomes intolerable for one reason or another. A significant proportion of students who begin a doctoral degree will quit before finishing, and the most commonly cited reason those people give is interpersonal conflict or disagreement with their supervisor (POI). Here is a reference, if you want to see some data on this: W.F. van Gunsteren, Helv. Chim. Acta., volume 99, pp. 755-759. There is no guarantee that when you email to find out if they are taking students, there will be enough subsequent communication between you and the POI to give you any insight to their personality and abilities as a supervisor, but there are ways to make it more likely that there will be some follow-up communication. Those tactics are beyond the scope of this discussion, but if someone want's advice, please contact me and I will try to help. A third reason for making contact before applying is simply to make yourself standout from the crowd a little. Most other students who apply to work with the same person will simply send the required application materials to the program. They will not personally contact this person, or do anything else to make themselves stand out. They will be relying only on how they look on paper. You will be far ahead of them by giving your POI a reason to remember you, before they even get to see your application file. This can happen automatically when you call, because it is so rare for applicants to have the good judgment to do so. You might be surprised to know how frequently it occurs that a faculty member implicitly accepts a new graduate student before he or she even sends in the application materials! In just the past few days I have heard from at least 4 recent clients (I provide a academic advising and career planning consultation service) who have already been told by their POI that they will be accepted -- and the application deadlines aren't until December or January. During my 28 year career, I have known this same thing to happen to hundreds of grad school applicants. It's also how I myself got into a PhD a program in 1988. And here, you can read about a particular case, where a student with a GPA of 3.27 was accepted into Cambridge University, despite his grades being below their cutoff. He succeeded only because he contacted the POI. I am confident that many readers of this forum will have seen graduate program websites that actually urge potential applicants to contact their POI before applying. Do not assume that program websites that do not explicitly make this recommendation are trying to discourage it. One last thing... this discussion began with someone alluding to the widely variable advice that students hear about applying to graduate school. There are reasons for all that inconsistency. That is a different topic, however. If someone wants me to elaborate, I would be happy to do so.