Advice for visiting?

[kroner]

I haven't visited any schools yet, but I will be later this month. I was wondering if people could share their experience about how to prepare and what to expect. If you've done visits, what work did you do to prepare before you went? Did you contact professors? How many? Did you contact students? How structured were the open houses you attended? How structured were the visits that weren't open houses? How long did you stay? Any other advice?

[origin415]

I actually just got back from visiting both of my schools, so can answer these and any other questions from that experience, but obviously my answers will only hold for those individual schools. Although neither school has an open house, they were completely different in their structure. Utah was completely structured, I was contacted a couple days before my trip and given a tentative itinerary which spanned getting off the plane to getting back on. Washington, on the other hand, sent me an email the first night I was in Seattle saying to meet the grad admissions director at 8:30 on friday (this was wednesday night), and besides that day had my trip entirely to myself. Basically, my point is that schools will do it very differently.

I didn't do any preparation or work besides printing out a list of professors who do research in the areas I'm interested in and some maps of the area. I didn't contact any professors because I didn't have anyone specific in mind, but if you do then it might be a good idea. I contacted students beforehand, by grabbing some random email addresses off of the student list, and generally got either a friendly and helpful response or nothing. I used those responses mainly to plan what neighborhoods to look at for living and to have some incoming idea of the nature of the department.

At the one I was more interested in, I stayed 3 nights, the other 2 nights.

[m102010]

I already visited one campus (Johns Hopkins) and am planning to visit another next Monday and Tuesday (Brown). The Hopkins program only admitted a handful of students, so there was no formal visiting day. My potential adviser requested that I send her a list of professors I wanted to meet and things I wanted to see around campus. She set up my itinerary and it was great. Before arriving to campus I did a lot of research. I looked up all the professors research interests, read at least one article from every prof., and I developed a rough list of questions for the program as a whole and some prof.-specific questions too. I'm a bit of an overachiever, but I also do much better when I'm prepared. I found that many of the professors were impressed when I mentioned something about their articles and one even asked flat out if I had read anything he authored (then he suggested I buy his book too!).

I don't think it's required that you read every professor's work, but a basic familiarity with their research is helpful. Then you can incorporate your interests with theirs and cater your questions to their work. Also, remember that the visitation day is for your benefit. If you don't prepare beforehand then you may not know the best questions to ask to get the most information. You don't want to show up and essentially ask questions that you could have found the answers to online. Then you don't learn much more about the program than what they advertise.

Now, on the other hand, I mentioned something about reading articles prior to my visit to Brown to a professor from Brown and she kind of laughed at me and told me I was being very ambitious. I think it depends on the program and how much you need to personally prepare to feel confident. I found that over preparation made me feel more at ease because at least I could fall back on my question list if I couldn't think of anything to ask. At the end of the visit day you're so exhausted from meeting with professors and graduate students that it is nice to have some questions to fall back on.This visiting day is more structured since there are a lot of students attending at once. Usually there is at least one meeting with graduate students and this is usually pretty fun and you get to pose all the student-life questions.

That's a lot of information and I hope it's helpful.