Visiting prospective grad schools

[AaronM]

I'm heading out this summer to visit some family that happen to be near a school that I'm applying to and I'd like to visit said school but am not really sure what I should ask professors about. I don't want to ask info that is available on the website because I don't want to waste their time. What should I ask the professors about the program? If anyone has already had some campus visits, how did they go? Am I just over thinking all of this?

[TakeruK]

I'm not in sociology but some things are applicable to other fields too. I haven't visited schools before applying though, only after they accepted/made an offer and invited students out for a visit.

Here are some questions that I try to ask the profs about their program/school when I am visiting. I've done two rounds of visits, in 2010 (in Canada) for MSc programs and in 2012 (in USA) for PhD programs. Maybe you might want to give a different spin on these questions since you are still at the application stage:

[Questions about department, maybe you could ask to the department head if you end up meeting him/her]

1. Approximately how large is your incoming class of students?

2. What's the approximate student-to-faculty ratio?

3. What percentage of students make it pass orals/comps? What percentage graduate?

4. How many students graduate per year?

5. What's the average/median time to degree?

6. -- ask questions about financial support package if not clear on the website, especially if it just says something like "TA", you could ask what kind of courses you'd TA, how many hours, etc.

7. Is the department planning to grow? Are you going to be hiring / planning to hire more faculty?

8. Ask questions about the research focus/goals of the department -- are they looking to specialize in a certain subfield? Or are they trying to broaden their interests and start a new subfield research group? This question goes well with #7.

9. Do you keep stats on where your students end up after their PhD? How many get post-docs/tenure-track/research positions/teaching positions/etc.

10. Are there teaching awards / conference travel grants etc. offered by the school/department to its students?

When talking to individual professors, you could try asking some of the above questions again, especially if they are the head of a research group. They might have different viewpoints/opinons. When talking to people you might want to work with if you go to the school, you can ask questions about them too. We usually begin these meetings talking about actual research that we could do together but after that's all done, I tend to also ask:

11. Are you planning to take students from the [Fall 2013] cohort?

12. What kind of research opportunities do your students have? (in my field, I'd like to know if their students will be able to visit telescopes where their data is coming from, if they have funding to send us to conferences, etc. Usually I don't directly ask about money related issues, but with the prompt given here, the prof usually says something like "Well I believe students have to present their work at conferences so I try to send everyone to at least one meeting per year" or whatever)

13. I ask them questions about what they do for fun / their interests (usually I do this only after they ask the same about me) -- one person told me they were only interested in research, nothing else, so that was a good thing to know

14. I ask them about their plans for research in the future -- are they going to continue doing whatever they're doing now? planning to branch out? etc.

I think a big part of visiting is to make sure the school is a good match for you. Of course, since you are visiting before you apply (and are accepted), you will want to make a good impression too. So you should keep that in mind, and some of the questions above might not be fitting for a pre-application visit. But some things are still worth knowing -- if you get answers that doesn't satisfy you, then you can cross that school off your list and save yourself time and money on applications!

But once you are accepted, the roles are reversed -- the school is now trying to sell itself to you. Make sure that you end up picking the school that is the best match for you! However, remember that even though they want you, there are a ton of other qualified candidates too -- sometimes accepted students will come off as arrogant to the departments' faculty (or even current graduate students) and that's not a good way to make a first impression.

Oh also, don't forget to talk to the current students as well! You definitely should talk to them if you want to know what Prof. X is really like as a supervisor, instructor, etc. And impressing the current students (positively or negatively) could be as important as impressing the profs -- there's lots of communication going on inside a department.

[AaronM]

wow lots of great advice, thank you so much!

[splitends]

I visited about half the schools I was looking at the summer before I applied, and actually only talked to graduate students at all but one school (it happened to be the bit of summer where almost everyone was out of town on vacation) but still found it really helpful. So first off, I would highly recommend getting in contact with graduate students in the program. I just looked at the school website for people who had attended the same undergrad university as me and emailed them, or if there was no one from my school then someone from the same part of the country. It was really helpful to talk to people with similar frames of reference-- who had a similar idea of what it meant to be at a large school v small school, public v. private, west coast v. east coast, etc. Also, many of the grad students I got in touch with had served on admissions committees before, so they often had helpful and insightful things to say about the admissions process at their schools on top of info about the department itself. And frankly, students sometimes have a better idea of what's going on in a department than faculty. If you care about things like collegiality or mentorship, you might get a more accurate picture of inter-student cattiness or neglectful advisors from grad students than from professors.

Insofar as what to ask...I'm not sure that I would ask about some of the things listed above. Personally, I try to stay away from things like student to faculty ratio and number of graduating students just because I don't think most faculty have really accurate information about that, and if the info is available it's usually listed on the website. I would stick first and foremost to things you are legitimately concerned or curious about. In the world of sociology, it was important for me to know how qualitative v. quantitative methods were thought about in the department-- what sort of training in which methods was available? What training was required? Did people take mixed methods seriously? I would recommend asking things that would give you information about whether or not you would really apply to that school (I crossed two schools off my list after visiting) and also information that could help you with applying. Of course you have to do this delicately, but I don't think it's out of line to ask things like what sort of students do well in that department/what students do poorly, is there any particular types of experiences that prepare students well for this program, etc.

Anyway-- It should be a fruitful experience no matter what. Good luck!