Application review process

[virtua]

How does the system work? So, graduate school receives my application and then they pass it to the department-so that`s it? 

Do all the professors review my application? Are available funding and decision on admission absolutely separate things? I mean, does the decision on admission depend on the fact that if there is a professor willing to sponsor me? I`m talking about PhD program application.

[sierra918]

This is variable depending on the institution and particular program.

[TakeruK]

It depends on each program and school. Here is a typical, generic thing though:

1. You apply to the graduate school.

2. The graduate school compiles all of your materials and forwards it to the department. This is probably done automatically. Usually, some of the material will be filtered out for the graduate school only, not the department. For example, there may have been some questions on financial need or your ethnicity etc. that the school wants for stats but the department does not need/use for their decision. How much filtering gets done depends on the school, I can imagine some schools will not pass on incomplete applications to the department etc.

3. The department reviews the applications they get and make their decisions. (See more below).

4. The department decisions gets passed back to the Graduate School in the form of admission recommendations. At this point, you will often get a notification from the department that they have recommended you for admission.

5. The Graduate School does a final check to ensure the accepted applicants actually meet minimum university-wide requirements, such as GPA. If there is a problem, they will work with the department to sort it out. Usually a department can advocate for a candidate that doesn't meet a minimum requirement but are extra qualified in some other way.

6. You get an official notice of acceptance from the Graduate school.

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Step 3 above is where there is going to be the most variation. Most departments will form an admission committee and only this committee reviews the applications. Membership in this committee can vary from place to place. In my field, it's often true that newer faculty who are looking for students will generally be on this committee. In other places, the committee makes a shortlist of the most excellent candidates and then forwards these packages to all faculty and waits to see if any other faculty member is willing to sponsor them.

Funding and admission are highly linked but the amount of correlation depends on the school. In some places, like my undergrad school, you absolutely need a professor to be willing to pay for you in order to get an offer. At other places, there is funding from the department and/or TA work, so you may not be funded directly by any professor for your first 2 years. In this case, you don't need a faculty member to explicitly sponsor you for an acceptance---the idea is that you'll find someone who will pay for you after 2 years (or you won't pass your quals etc.).

However, in any case, funding is often one of the main limiting factors in admissions. Even if there is no requirement for a professor to pay for you, the department only has so much money for new students and there are only so many TAships to go around. It will often be the case that there are way more qualified applicants than there are spots for admission, because the department/faculty will be unable to pay for every qualified person.