Grad School Application Thoughts

April 15, the magical day that everyone else thinks of as Tax Day and grad school applicants think of as My Last Chance to Get off the Wait List, has come and gone. Tam and I have been chatting a bit about her grad school application process and the outcome. She's going to a PhD program fully funded with a fellowship - it's a good thing - but the school is not MIT. (Sorry, Tam, I have outed you as having not been accepted to a school that you did not apply to.)

On some of the online grad applicant boards, the level of cheerleading is basically ridiculous at times. A person writes, "I have a 2.1 GPA from Southwest Podunk State College's online program so I never met a professor in person, an 850 GRE, no writing sample or research experience, and a major in basket weaving. What are my chances to get into a top tier English PhD program? Oh, and by the way, my cousin is typing this for me because I don't speak English." About a dozen people respond with a variant on "Hey, you may as well go for it! It's a crap shoot who gets in anyway! I know somebody in a situation kind of like yours who is in her second year at Harvard!"

People often say that getting into grad school is a crap shoot, and it is, but not in the way these Pollyannas think that it is. The crap shoot is this: Even if you are an amazing, highly qualified, brilliant student and can prove it with credentials, any given program is probably going to reject you. There are just too many great applicants and too few positions for them.

In some fields, you may be Mr. Brilliant but if it just so happens that Ms. Especially Brilliant applies to work with the same professor/in the same lab in a program, too bad for you. In others, you may be Ms. Awesome but not have as high a research interest match as Mr. OK but Specialized so you get turned down. In others, you may have everything going for you but you got a 760 on the GRE quantitative so your application isn't going to be looked at by some schools. This year funding at the University of California - Whatever just sucks in general so hard that it doesn't matter how great you are. This year Professor Dream Match isn't taking students so your app goes nowhere.

Also, you may just not be the Mr. Brilliant you think you are. Sure, you may be Mr. Brilliant at your undergrad institution, but there are hundreds (thousands?) of colleges. Can you really know where you stand against your competitors, especially those at top tier programs? Do your professors even know? Unless they're a recent PhD themselves, perhaps not. Everybody has upped their game since your advisor got his PhD in 1983.

And let's face it: all of us saying it's a crap shoot only can claim that it's a crap shoot from our perspective. Unless we are members of an admission committee (and even then, our perspective is limited), we don't really know what they're looking for.

People often confuse having the minimum requirements for a program - like having a GPA and GRE score in the range of applicants who are accepted - for having a serious shot at the program. Of course, what's crazy are the ones who do not meet the minimum requirements, like not having the prerequisite coursework/degree, not speaking the necessary languages, etc., but who still think they can talk their way into a highly ranked PhD program on the basis of their general smartness. Um, getting into a doctoral program is not about being "smart" - it's about being ready to do specialized work at a high level.

Tam pointed out that everyone claims to have stellar letters of recommendation (LOR), but this is not likely. I think "stellar LOR" should mean "Influential scholar whom members of the admission committee respect a great deal thinks I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread...maybe even since the invention fire, which, if I'd been alive back then, I could have invented in half the time because my awesomeness knows no bounds as this brilliant professor is saying in my letter." Really, most of us are going to have to be satisfied with having "decent" recommendations.

The crap shoot thing doesn't mean, however, that it is utterly random who gets into PhD programs and who doesn't. Those who are better applicants have a much better chance of getting into at least one of the schools they apply to (and in the end, you can attend only one) than less-qualified applicants. And I'm just not familiar with any credible instance of a person who is poorly qualified getting into a very top program. (Any who did was fucking the head of the adcom or was admitted as an act of passive-aggressiveness by some members of the adcom against others or some other bizarre, rare thing that ultimately does not bode particularly well for that person's chances for successfully completing the program.)