AverageEccentric

Hopefully this is useful for folks in all fields ... For various reasons I declined campus visits and postponed the requested Zooms from recruitment offices, and I'm putting them all into one week later this month after I have all the info from all the programs. I have offers, offer letters, funding packages, and graduate student manuals in hand. After having read all of that, what questions do you all think are most important to ask: -- The advisor(s) you have been assigned: -- The Graduate Advisor for the program itself: -- The other grad students currently in that program: -- Other parts of the university to talk with / research BEFORE accepting (specific resource centers, financial aid, Disability resource centers, Veterans resource centers, Human Resources about the fine print on the medical coverage (in the US), Basic Needs Hubs for the many of us looking at funding packages and work requirements that barely keep a person housed and fed, other things that have a lot to do with quality of life when committing to a place for 5 years, rec centers, intramural sports groups, resource centers specific to certain identities or needs ...)

Be really careful about this. It's important that both documents are very much your own work and express who you are authentically. Also, one of the biggest mistakes people think is believing that making an SOP or PS "better" is what will get them into a program. Typically, admission depends equally upon being a great candidate and authentically matching your area of expertise very closely to an advisor who happens to be taking new students in the upcoming year. It's a little more like finding a spouse than standing out as the best __ in a crowd. This is why in the US we're told to apply to 10-15 different programs, because no matter how good you are, your research might not match the couple of professors who get a new advisee that year. That being said, it sounds like perhaps you would be best served by learning a lot more about what the SOP and PS even are. The SOP typically is about your research, the personal statement about you. Definitely go do a lot more research about what those documents are, because it's not the kind of thing you just make "better" so much as "more authentic" and yes, being authentically you means some people will see that you're not a good match for the program. But that's just how it works. And, like marriage, it's better to end up without a yes than stuck with the wrong program. AND ... if for any reason you applied somewhere and they saw this message and realized it was you, it raises suspicion of whether you actually wrote your own essay or had someone do it for you.

Isn't the nature of a wait list that a decision has already been made? For example: They had 10 slots for candidates, chose 10 people to offer those to, and have already allocated each person on the wait list a specific place in line. All the tons of people already did all their reading and had all their internal arguments and debates to make those selections, based on the materials submitted by the application deadline. So 1) You've been assigned a spot in line that cannot be changed by 2) a committee that will not have further meetings at all, much less to deliberate changing those assignments, because they *already made fixed decisions* based on 3) a set of data which applicants aren't permitted to change after the application deadline. I could be wrong, but consider the chaos and unfairness if it really were the case that candidates could keep submitting more application materials to change peoples' minds after the deadline. I know it's really really hard and I'm sure a lot of us are also thinking "is there ANYTHING I CAN DO" to either get a different answer or get people to answer more quickly, but the one place we can invest energy at the moment is in just being that person we see in the future regardless of whether it's through the pathway we hoped for.

There's no absolute answer to this, and roll your eyes at anyone who insists differently. It varies from field to field, but if you're seeking to become an expert in a specific niche, you have to study under someone(s) who can train you in that specific niche, and the top-tier schools do not have people in every single niche. It's also absolutely not true that "most PhDs never make it beyond grad school." It sounds like you're thinking there's only one extremely narrow and specific way you can research your whole life (IE a tenure-track university position), which is **absolutely** not the case. It is true that there's a somewhat higher rate of folks getting a tenure-track position straight out of the "top tier" schools and those schools do have better funding. They also have their own drawbacks (they're often more stubborn about only funding specific research that's trendy at the moment, beholden to specific giant donors, and sometimes outright horrible places to be). And where did those top-tier programs get their professors? From mid-tier or lower-tier institutions (after said prof somehow made it big). However, sometimes the top-tier schools don't have programs at all in something that suddenly will be in high demand, or the experts in your specific niche, or the department that's the right size for you. Or the approach to research and methodologies that you know in your gut to be the right way to go. For instance in my field, the Ivies and other US News "top 25" programs don't love interdisciplinary work, often have small departments, and are mostly opposed to theory. They're also freaked out by certain topics at the moment and defunding certain lines of thought to comply with political demands. My work is considered by some to be "radical", it's multidisciplinary to the extreme, I use theory a lot and want to make theory, and it also has to do with topics taught most at "land-grant institutions" ... Furthermore, if I look at the job listings for professors in my field, I see a lot of requests for 5 specific "buzzwords" ... "if you can do 2 of these we'd especially want to hear from you" and HA I found a program where I can hit all 5. 2 specific subfields within my discipline aren't being taught much at all at the "Top tier" and are being taught *a lot* at the mid and lower tier. A lot of "top tier" are like the Titanic: they're so big and so entrenched they cannot turn in response to changing demands. They can afford to stay "old school" because wealthy elites; meanwhile less-famous programs can take risks, change quickly, experiment, and maybe the prof you need is starting out their cool new thing there right now (before they get knicked by an Ivy after they've hit it big). Also keep in mind that the US News rankings are partly informative, partly total BS. They measure something very specific. You're a researcher, go read their methodology statement. There's a lot they don't say. The other side of that is that in order to get into a program, you as a candidate also have to stop thinking "how to be the best" but "how to be the most authentic version of an expert in this niche that fascinates me" and learn how to articulate not how good you are, but what problems you want to solve with your research. I did a PhD Pipeline program run by THE top tier (as in, ranked #1-#3 by US News) program in my field. They advised a few things: #1 don't go straight from undergrad into a PhD program. #2 don't get into debt for a PhD unless you're *absolutely sure* (IE go for a funded program, any funded program, and some of those good funded programs are at institutions otherwise called "bottom tier"). #3 "Focus more on fit (find an advisor who is the expert in the thing you want to do) than on reputation" (specifically saying US News, even their own ranking, was mostly baloney), and #4 Don't go straight from undergrad to a PhD. Take a year, get some work experience. Maybe do an MA, not necessarily in exactly the same field maybe a complementary one. If that's not convincing I'll also note: My "best fit" came from a "mid tier" program. The people at that #1 institution said "Yes, that's a better fit for you than us, because we don't teach ___ unfortunately ... even though it's become crucial, our program hasn't changed course as quickly as others." I also found out that the prof I wanted to work underneath at #1, because of her cutting-edge work, had herself turned down an opportunity to get her PhD at #1 and selected the "mid tier" program which is so far my own best fit (and then she went straight to the tenure track at #1, though apparently the cutting edge thing I wanted to learn from her isn't something she gets to teach a lot yet). Maybe go talk to the career center at your university. There are TONS of ways to do research forever.

Unless something is very different in Canada than it is in the US, you probably need to ask the individual schools. Are you saying they list a prerequisite for applying, or just that if you haven't done it before you'll have to take it during the program? What was your undergraduate major? I'm taking an interdisciplinary Methodologies course at the moment as part of an add-on certificate to a MA in the United States, with classmates from humanities and social sciences, including social work. I also applied to PhD programs in multiple disciplines and had to answer different questions about methodologies. In both places I have learned that "methodologies" is highly contextual and means many different things. For instance one program said "our program includes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and while you take the courses in the program we worry that humanities folks won't be able to pass quantitative, so take a statistics course this term if you can." Some specifically want quantitative *or* qualitative, and those may be discipline-specific. Some of my peers in sociology have a single "research methodologies" course, and the psychology folks do too (exact same title) but those courses teach different things. And if someone says "just take a methodologies course, any methodologies course" it might be niches or perspectives like feminist, queer, Indigenous, decolonizing, or critical research methodologies. More to the point, if you're heading toward an MSW but your undergrad was in a different discipline, it's likely very important to have a talk with someone in each MSW program about what they look for from an applicant with your background, and what your chances are of being accepted. As I was considering a similar pivot from MA to PhD, I learned that some programs considered me well-prepared, some considered me well prepared IF I took one or two specific courses, and some weren't worth applying to at all. Not to mention, making that contact with someone in the grad program to which you're applying (or otherwise making completely sure there's a very close match between their research and yours) is a really crucial step for grad school anyway, in all except the programs that admit basically everyone who applies. Again, that is at least in the US context, but I've been applying to Canadian institutions and it seems to be very similar in both countries. Good luck!