What Questions Should I Be Asking Schools Where I've Been Accepted?!

[Femme Pedagogy]

Hello all, 

 

I've been admitted to one Cultural Studies PhD and one Gender Studies PhD. The Gender Studies program is one of my top choices (UCLA!). I haven't yet received an official letter, and want to play it cool. BUT! - I also feel like a should have a billion questions. Funding aside (which they can't give me info on yet), what kind of questions should I be asking faculty, current students, etc.?

 

I'm just so freaking thrilled that I'm in I don't know where to start!

 

Thanks.

[uromastyx]

Oh my. That is impossible to answer.

A couple of my top questions:

To what extent does the program support scholarship (conferences, pubs, etc)?

Graduation times? Placement record (if not known).

Congrats!!

[anthropologygeek]

What kinda of jobs do your recent graduates have?

[Tuck]

I would ask about tenure-track placement rates, both for the program in general and for your particular advisor. I would also ask about completion time for both.

[DStory247]

Keep them coming! I am in the same boat as Femme Pedagogy!

The aformentioned suggestions are great, but let's have some more!

[juilletmercredi]

1. What is the average time to degree of your students?  What is the variance around this number?  (E.g., is it 6 years and is that because pretty much everyone takes about 6 years, or is that because some people skedaddle out in 4 years because they are superstars and others take 10 years because your dissertation support sucks?)

2. Do you have a travel fund for students?  How much can students get to travel to conferences?  Do they have to be presenting in order to travel?

3. Definitely placement rates, but not only that but WHERE people are ending up.  Are students ending up in large research universities or small teaching colleges, are both?  Are they only ending up in cultural studies/gender studies departments or do they find themselves in sociology and anthropology departments too, or elsewhere?  Anyone at non-academic jobs that may be appealing to you, like UNESCO or WHO or World Bank?  (Some programs don't keep accurate numbers, but professors should be able to recall where recent graduates have gone.  If the professors can't remember ANY names or very few, that's a red flag.)

4. This you can answer yourself, but take a look at the doctoral handbooks of both places.  What are the coursework requirements?  What are the comprehensive exams like?  What are the procedures to get your dissertation out the door?  In my field, some schools have more formalized qualifying exams whereas other schools only require the submission of a publishable paper or grant.

5. What kinds of professionalization experiences do students typically do with advisors?  Do they coauthor papers?  Co-write grants?  Do students tend to get external fellowship or grant aid for their research?

6. You might ask for a recent calendar of events - look at who's come to speak at the department, how often they have seminars and colloquia and brown bags and all that stuff.  In really good departments you can sometimes have the opportunity to meet some big names and important people and network with them.  My department has brought some phenomenal people in and always give the grad students at least a half hour to mingle with the exclusively - and usually they plan a special lunch just for the grad students and the speaker.  I met Michael Marmot this way - he's HUGE in my field.

 

7. You also may want to talk to graduate students and get this from their perspective about professionalization.  For example, in my department our DGS and departmental coordinator send around job ads, calls for papers, and funding announcements ALL the time.  We have a prolific new faculty member who started offering a grant-writing workshop in our department.  The DGS reserves a brown bag each April for student research presentations.  We're required to submit yearly progress reports and I know our DGS personally reads each one because she responds to them all.  These are the things that professors may not even know are going on, or not think about to mention to you, but that grad students find important.

[fieryfox99]

2 questions I've asked current grad students in the programs I've been accepted to which have gotten me useful/interesting responses are: "Was the program different at all from what you expected it to be?" and "If you had to go through the program again what would you change?" For me, it's helped me decide if the program really would be a good fit or not.

 

I think asking about career plans is important as well so you get an idea for where this kind of program is going to take you.

[MadScience]

2 questions I've asked current grad students in the programs I've been accepted to which have gotten me useful/interesting responses are: "Was the program different at all from what you expected it to be?" and "If you had to go through the program again what would you change?" For me, it's helped me decide if the program really would be a good fit or not.

 

I think asking about career plans is important as well so you get an idea for where this kind of program is going to take you.

 

Just curious, do you think they answered this honestly? I would be worried they'd always give a positive response, even though they may regret the program, out of worrying that their PI might find out something negative they said.

[fieryfox99]

Just curious, do you think they answered this honestly? I would be worried they'd always give a positive response, even though they may regret the program, out of worrying that their PI might find out something negative they said.

 

I've gotten both suspiciously overly-positive responses and critical, candid ones about the programs I've applied to. As long as you take everything you hear with a grain of salt to account for the fact that the students might have been instructed to recruit you or are worried about annoying their PI, I think you can learn a lot from talking to current students. The more the better really, and you can form a good picture of the types of people who are at that school and how they like the program they're in. I'd say there's no harm in asking.

[MadScience]

I've gotten both suspiciously overly-positive responses and critical, candid ones about the programs I've applied to. As long as you take everything you hear with a grain of salt to account for the fact that the students might have been instructed to recruit you or are worried about annoying their PI, I think you can learn a lot from talking to current students. The more the better really, and you can form a good picture of the types of people who are at that school and how they like the program they're in. I'd say there's no harm in asking.

 

I agree, it's definitely one of the better questions to ask. I've always gotten very positive responses from the students which at first I was thrilled about and over time have begun questioning how valid they are. I think you're right though - asking and then interpreting their responses as either genuine or exaggerated is the best way to get some sort of interpretation of how life is within that program. And by increasing your sample size, you can get a pretty accurate idea

[TakeruK]

Asking the tough questions to grad students is a useful thing to do in person. If you are someone I don't know, I would not be so comfortable saying everything I really thought in writing. I would probably only stick to facts that I don't mind being traced back to me (for example, I might say "Course X is not very useful to a student in Y", or "The funding level here is really low", or "The department accepted way more students than they have funding for", or "I find the Journal Clubs meetings very poorly run and thus boring" -- not that any of these are necessarily true about my current programs, but just the level of honesty you could expect from a "cold call" email). I'm okay with saying these things to a "cold-emailer" because the statements are either true facts or opinions I have already shared with the department. 

 

But if you sat down and talked to me during the visit days, I would probably tell you more information, like, "Prof. X has been poached by University Y and is likely moving, although it has not been announced officially yet", or "Prof. X is not fun to work for", or "I feel that the Profs in Dept. Y do not get along very well", etc.. 

 

As for questions to ask the department / profs, I asked:

 

1.[To the dept head] What are the department's plans for the future? Do you see this department expanding and hiring more faculty? If so, will you be diversifying the research interests or continue to have the same focus? 

2. [To a prof of interest] What are your plans for your research group? Are you planning on hiring more graduate students or staff and expanding research in more directions?

3. [To a prof] What are your sources of funding?

4. Many people have suggested asking about placement rate in academia, but you should also ask if they know about how their graduates fare outside of academia. When I asked this to one prof, I was surprised to hear him say that he has only had one graduate leave academia and that he was "very disappointed" and that he felt his time training that student was "wasted". Kind of a red flag there, for me!

5. When asking about graduation rates / quals passing rate, it's very important to be precise in the way you ask it, I think! Many schools I visited said numbers like "all" or "95%" or other very high numbers of their students pass the quals and eventually graduate. Then comes the qualifier: they mention these numbers are for people who chose to finish. Or, they might give very low failure rates (e.g. in the last 10 years, only 2 students have been asked to leave). Few schools actually tell you how many people chose to leave and they make it sound like the student really did want to leave. However, every student I knew that left grad school "chose" to leave in the sense that they were not directly forced to, but they left because of very poor dissertation support, or other circumstances caused by the school or department. Quals is an especially common time for people to leave -- most schools allow a "re-take" but sometimes they make it very obvious after failing the first one that they don't think you should continue so the student "drops out" even though it should count as a student that the department failed. 

[goldheartmountaintop]

I've gotten both suspiciously overly-positive responses and critical, candid ones about the programs I've applied to. As long as you take everything you hear with a grain of salt to account for the fact that the students might have been instructed to recruit you or are worried about annoying their PI, I think you can learn a lot from talking to current students. The more the better really, and you can form a good picture of the types of people who are at that school and how they like the program they're in. I'd say there's no harm in asking.

 

One thing I've found helpful is reading dissertation acknowledgments, which are often openly available on the department's website. It's kind of creepy to do because you're reading about real people, but if you ignore that aspect, I think it's a good way to gauge the writer's overall experiences in the program. In my field, the dissertations usually start off with a page or two of acknowledgments to faculty, fellow students, etc. Reading them can really give you an idea of the atmosphere of the program, the sense of rapport among students, and the supervisory styles of the professors you want to work with. Obviously, the dissertation acknowledgments are always positive, so you won't really be able to find out about the bad stuff about the program, but I think that you can count on them being more genuine (and more detailed) than emails from people trying to recruit you.