Your humble bloggers here at Cosmic Variance have spent quite a bit of accumulated time in academic and research settings — in fact, my guess is that none of us have spent an entire year away from such a setting since the age of about six or so. That’s a lot of accumulated wisdom right there, and it’s about time we started sharing it. Since it’s that time of year when applications are being sent off to graduate schools, I thought I would start off by letting everyone in on the secret to how to get accepted everywhere you apply. Of course I can only speak for physics/astronomy departments, but the basic lessons should be widely applicable. [Update: see also Choosing a Graduate School and How to Be a Good Graduate Student.]
So, here goes: have great grades, perfect GRE scores, significant research experience, and off-scale letters of recommendation. Any questions?
If, perhaps, it’s a bit too late to put that plan into action, here are some personal answers to questions that come up during the process. Co-bloggers (and anyone else) are free to chime in with their own take on these complicated issues. Keep in mind that every person is different, as is every grad school — in fact, specific schools might behave quite differently from year to year as different people serve on the admissions committee. Don’t sink your sense of self-worth into how you do on these applications; there’s a strong random component in the decisions, and there are a very large number of good schools where you can have a fun and successful graduate career.
- What do graduate school admissions committees look at?
Everything. Keep in mind that, unlike being admitted to college (undergrad), at the grad school level the admissions are done by individual departments, with committees comprised of faculty members with different kinds of expertise, and often students as well. They’ll look at your whole application, and in my experience they really take the responsibility seriously, poring over a huge number of applications to make some hard decisions. Still, it’s well-known that careful examination of a thick file of papers is no substitute for five minutes of talking to someone, which schools usually don’t have the luxury of doing, so decisions are always somewhat fickle. - Even my personal essay?
Well, okay. I wouldn’t sweat the personal essay; in my experience it doesn’t have too much impact. Let’s put it this way: an incredibly good essay could help you, but a bad essay won’t do too much harm (unless it’s really bad). To a good approximation, all these essays sound alike after a while; it’s quite difficult to be original and inspiring in that format. - Are GRE scores important?
Yes. At least, in the following sense: while bad GRE’s won’t kill your chances, good GRE’s make it much easier to admit you. (We’re speaking of the Physics GRE, of course; the general tests are completely irrelevant.) It stands to reason: given two applicants from similar schools with similar grades and interests, there’s no reason for a department to choose the student with lower GRE scores. At the same time, you can certainly overcome sub-par GRE’s by being outstanding in other areas; this is particularly true for students who want to do experiment. I know at Chicago that we let in students with quite a range of scores. - What about research experience?
Research can be a big help, although it’s by no means absolutely necessary. These days it seems that more and more undergrads are doing research, to the point where it begins to look unusual when people haven’t done any. There is some danger that people think you must want to keep on doing the kind of research that you did as an undergrad, although I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Mostly it shows some initiative and passion for the field. It can be very difficult to do theoretical research as an undergrad, but that’s okay; even if you eventually want to be a string theorist, it’s still great experience to do some experimental work as an undergrad (in fact, perhaps it’s especially useful). - How do I get good letters of recommendation?
It’s more important to have letters from people who know you well than from people who are well-known themselves. One of the best side benefits of doing research is that you can get your supervisor (who hopefully has interacted with you quite a bit) to write letters for you. It’s really hard to write a good letter for a student who you only know because they took one class from you a year or two ago. Over the course of your undergrad career, you should find some way to strike up a personal relationship with one or more faculty members, if only to sit in their office now and then and ask some physics questions. Then they can write a much more personal and effective letter. Of course, if you are just a bad person who annoys everyone, it would be just as well to stay hidden. (Kidding!) - Is it true that the standards are different for theorists and experimenters?
Typically, yes, although it might be different from place to place. Because a lot of undergrads haven’t been exposed to a wide range of physics research, a large number of them want to be Richard Feynman or Stephen Hawking or Ed Witten. Which is great, since we need more people like that. But even more, we need really good experimenters. Generally the ratio of applicants to available slots is appreciably larger for theorists than for experimenters, and schools do take this into account. Also, of course, the standards are a little different: GRE’s count more for prospective theorists, and research experience counts more for prospective experimenters. And let’s be honest: many schools will accept more prospective theorists than they can possible find advisors for, in the hopes of steering them into experiment once they arrive. - So should I claim to be interested in experiment, even if I’m not?
No. Think about it: given that schools already tend to accept more students who want to do theory than they can take care of, what are your chances of getting a good advisor if you sneak into a department under false pretenses and have to compete with others who came in with better preparation? It makes much more sense to go someplace where they really want you for who you are, and work hard to flourish once you get there. - Do I need to know exactly what I will specialize in?
Not really, although in certain circumstances it can help. Professors like to know that someone is interested in their own area of research, and might push a little harder to accept someone whose interest overlaps with their work; on the other hand, most people understand that you don’t know everything after three and a half years of being an undergraduate, and it can take time to choose a specialization. In particular, at most American physics departments (unlike other countries and some other disciplines), it is generally not expected that you need to know ahead of time who your advisor will be when you arrive, or which “group” you will work in. - Should I contact faculty members individually if I’m interested in their research?
That depends, mostly on whether the person you are contemplating contacting is desperate for more grad students, or is overwhelmed with too many requests as it is. In popular areas (ahem, like theoretical particle physics, string theory, and cosmology), there are generally more applicants than departments have advisors for. In that case, most people who receive random emails from undergraduates will just urge them to wait for the admissions process to take its course; remember that it’s a zero-sum game, and for everyone who gets in there’s someone else who doesn’t, and it would be a little unfair to penalize those applicants who didn’t contact faculty members personally. On the other hand, if you have reason to believe that someone you’re interested in working with is trying to get more students, or if you think your case is somehow unique and requires a bit of attention, feel free to email the appropriate faculty member with a polite inquiry. The worst that can happen is that you get a brush-off; I can’t imagine it would actually hurt your chances. - Is my life over if I don’t get into my top grad school?
Yes. Well, only if you let it be. The truth is, how you do in grad school and beyond (including how you do on the postdoc and faculty job market) depends much more on you than it does on where you go to school. In the next episode of “unsolicited advice,” we’ll think about how to actually choose where to go, including how to get the most out of visiting different schools.
Actually this episode was not completely unsolicited; thanks to Philip Tanedo for suggesting we share some of our invaluable insight. See, sometimes we really do listen.
For “Anonymous because it’s Hip”: the personal essay is most important for people exactly in your situation — those who have taken a somewhat non-traditional route to grad school applications. Essays from people coming straight out of a physics undergraduate degree are all pretty much the same. Some are better written than others, some are wittier than others, but none of it usually makes much impact on the admissions decision. But for someone with an unusual background the essay can be the make-or-break piece of evidence. In my experience, this is more true in astrophysics than in physics, because there seem to be more students applying “because it sounds cool, and I don’t know what else to do.” Your job in the essay is to convince me as the reader that your involvement in the field has gone well beyond that level, and that you’ve at least begun to grapple with the realities of graduate student life (and beyond) in a new field. I was once a math major applying to physics PhD programs, and I’ve switched fields again since, so I’m sensitive to the possibilities of changing directions. But for the committee, the safest candidates for success in field X are those who were already successful in field X as undergrads. You’ve got to convince them to take a leap of faith.
Following up on citrine615: I don’t encourage visits before admissions decisions. Grad departments aren’t set up to host and interview people at random times of the year. When I served as a grad advisor, I usually just passed random visiting prospectives to a friendly graduate student to look after. Most top departments, though, will go to great lengths (including financial lengths) to make it possible for you to visit after you are admitted, and will make it easy to meet and talk with the faculty. At that stage, you should definitely visit any place you are planning to spend the next 5-7 years of your life.
Hi,
1.
What exactly are the “Tier 1”, “Tier 2” and “Tier 3” schools? Could anyone give me 5 examples of each?
2.
Who determines how they are tiered?
Thanks,
David
The US system sounds extremely complicated 🙂 In Europe we first study physics, write an M.Sc. thesis and then apply for a job as a Ph.D. student.
The Ph.D. student usually can start his/her research straight away. Sometimes some specialized courses need to be followed.
You write a few articles, compile your Ph.D. thesis and then you’re done.
Count Iblis, there is not one common European system. Programs vary a lot between different countries. A requirement of one or two years worth of coursework before spending a couple of years on your thesis (nominally at least, in practice it tends to take longer) is not uncommon.
I was told by my professor that (if your interest is mostly in theory) in applying to grad school, you shouldn’t explicitly state your desire to be a theorist, since at this point you have no idea if that is what you are really cut out for. Rather, just express interest in learning all aspects of the given field. This will make it less difficult to get into grad school, since it will be easier to place you with an advisor until you are sure of what you want to do.
This seems like good advice to me, but would you disagree? I agree that claiming to be interested in experiment when really not is no bueno, but this seems like a much safer plan if you honestly aren’t sure.
I’d better post this anonymously.
I’ve served on a number of faculty search committees at quite decent schools, and let me tell you that it DOES matter where you went to graduate school. When you’re looking at 200 applications from particle theorists that all start to look dizzying alike, it is definitely to the candidate’s advantage to have the name Princeton, Chicago, or MIT on the top of his or her CV. Podunk State? Not so much! And don’t forget that some of the people on search committees reading your application will not be experts in your field, and will NOT know that your advisor Prof X at Podunk State is one of the world leaders in your field.
Do anything you can to stay inside the Golden Circle, my friends. If your PhD is not from a brand-name university, it WILL be harder for you to get a faculty position. Not impossible, or course, but certainly harder. I suppose I’m mostly arguing with Moshe’s point.
As a student applying to grad school (most likely) next year, the advice is most welcome!
Thanks guys (and girl 🙂 ),
NM
In response to the anonymous above… I apreciate the insider info there, it is just as suspected.
However, as a graduate student at a second tier school (and by second tier, I still mean a quality school but not premier league), I thought I’d throw in my tuppence for the perspective graduate students out there.
Often, schools that offer a less competitve environment to work in are better places to thrive academically. There are many quality researchers at schools that are not MIT, Harvard, Princeton etc., and often, you will find that the lack of elitism that pervades these places rather refreshing. Depending on your personality, it makes learning, making mistakes and being allowed to have ideas a lot easier. In short, you’re allowed to flower a lot more (depending of course on your advisor).
I personally attended the lowest ranked grad school I was accepted to and it has turned out to be the best decision of my life, especially when compared to my colleagues who are at ‘top tier’ universities. I wouldn’t have it any other way were I to make the choice again.
David (#27) — there’s no official ranking, or at least that’s not what is being referred to. Just an informal semi-consensus about what schools are doing the best research in the field.
Twaters (#30) — I think this is one of those times when it’s best just to tell the truth. If you want to do theory, say so; if you’re open to whatever strikes your fancy, say that.
Anonymous (#31) — I have to say I’m very surprised, and a little skeptical, to hear that anyone is making faculty offers on the basis of where someone went to grad school. If you had said it was on the basis of where the person was a postdoc, it would have made slightly more sense — but to choose new faculty members by what grad school they went to is both incredibly lame and quite the opposite of what I have actually seen. At the faculty-search level, what matters are your publications, your letters of recommendation, and the actual job visit once you make the short list. I’ve never even heard anyone mention the grad school someone came from, except in the context of “yes, they came from X’s highly productive research group at school Y, but they’ve subsequently established their own independent track record since they’ve been a postdoc.”
Two questions:
1. How are students from abroad viewed? If from Europe, they probably have studied a lot more.
2. Why is the GRE physics so valued? It is just a speed test. Personally, I thought it gauged my potential for doing research more or less as well as a test consisting of adding a 1000 two-digit numbers really fast would.
it would be a little unfair to penalize those applicants who didn’t contact faculty members personally.
Quite literally the opposite of what every other person I’ve ever heard give advice about grad school said.
Though perhaps I should add that usually the advice includes to requirement to inquire about a person’s research, whether they or people they know are looking to take on students in that field, and other assorted nuances, in combination with an injunction not to be an idiot and wait til the last minute because the person will likely be beset with a blizzard of email and start deleting messages as if they were all on the university-wide listserv…
My comments would be a bit too long for, well, the comments section, so here’s a manual trackback to the post on my own blog.
#36: invcit, you may find this interesting:
http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/135.html
Roughly 1/3 of grad students in the US are foreigners on temporary visa. My impression is that Chinese and Indians dominate, with a minor sprinkling of Europeans. There is much less of an incentive for the latter to go to the US for grad school than for the former; it tends to be the very best, most ambitious and adventurous that do, with the rest being quite content to stay closer to home (few European universities would qualify as “world class”, but the other side of the coin is that they can be rather more comfortable than US ones). So it’s reasonable to expect European grad students in the US to be talented and ambitious; knowledge level on the other hand can vary a lot, again because there really is not one common European system. Somebody coming out of a good German undergraduate program may have absorbed more course material than a British Ph.D. – the range is that wide.
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Dissident, yes that’s true. In some countries the system looks more like the US system.
Here the university from which you obtained your Ph.D. doesn’t play an important role. Your CV should contain a list of published papers that speaks for itself.
I served on the admissions committee when I was in grad school, and I have to disagree with some points here.
(1) Writing on your application that you want to do string theory and solve the fundamental problems of the universe will make it harder for you to get in. More than half the applications I read said something like that, and they are almost all written by people who don’t understand field theory (not that I expect them to have learned it in undergrad). They were just saying what they had been brainwashed to say by their undergrad professors and textbooks. Doing research in condensed-matter theory or experiment and saying that you want to do that will increase your chances of getting in, because professors have to match up students with their research programs, and everyone knows that 50% of the people entering won’t do string theory.
(2) Particle experimentalists are the bottom feeders. They always need a lot of bodies for their experiments and data analysis and they aren’t as particular as everyone else. They are also always the people pushing for the size of the entering class to be increased. If you want to get in more easily, say you want to do particle experiment and then switch after you get in. One tactic that was used well was to get research support from the particle experimentalists until after the qualifiers were passed, and then immediately switching to another group. That worked well for several people I knew.
(3) Low Physics GRE scores hurt you, but high scores from foreigners are suspect. Since there is zero preparation for GREs in most American undergrad institutions, it’s pretty rare for even good Americans to score above 900 or so. You want to be above 780 or so to be safe if you are coming from a good American institution. Below that and it starts to hurt you. If you score badly the first time, study for them and take them again. It is very common for people to improve their scores markedly the second time around and only the highest score matters.
(4) Elaboration on (2). It is very much in your interest to express interest in a subfield that you know is not as well-represented in the entering class of students and make contacts with the professors in that subfield before you apply. If you have someone rooting for you, it doesn’t matter how low your GRE scores are, though obviously the recommendation letters matter most. By far the best thing is to get good recommendation letters from people at the school you are applying for. I’ve seen people who did good work with professors at the school they were applying to get in despite mediocre grades and awful GRE scores. Grad students need to be sorted into subfields, so if you say on your application that you want to do condensed matter experiment and people actually do that at the university, you have a better chance of getting in.
(5) Once you get into grad school: realize that more than half of entering grad students work in a different subfield than the one they thought they would work in when they applied. 50%+ of people can’t work in string theory, and many of them won’t work in particle experiment either. (Not least this is because many theorists have little money and can’t support their students, so they spend a lot of time TAing when they could be researching.) There is always a drain of people out of theory into experiment, and a drain of people out of particle physics into other disciplines. You need to come to terms with that.
(6) If you don’t go to a Tier 1 grad school, start seriously considering non-physics jobs as soon as you get in, because the statistical chances of you getting a tenure-track job in a research university are quite low. Even if you get into a Tier 1 university, your chances are still at best 50% and often worse than that. How many postdocs are you willing to take? How many times are you willing to move? Are you willing to get divorced and put off children? All of these questions come into play if you want a tenure-track job in a research university.
One other thing. Sean’s point about “So should I claim to be interested in experiment, even if I’m not?” gets it exactly backwards. I knew a lot of people who weren’t interested in experiment when they came in who turned into perfectly good experimentalists. A lot of people change fields or have no idea what they are doing when they get in, even at “Tier 1” schools. Don’t take yourself too seriously on what you want to do or not do as an undergrad unless you have done extensive work in at least two different subfields as an undergrad. (Very few people have this, by the way.) You need to be open to changing your mind. I knew a lot of people who went through a lot of unnecessary pain because they brainwashed themselves that doing a certain type of physics was the only thing they wanted to do. These kind of people almost always have long and unhappy grad school careers and then leave the field bitterly immediately after grad school ends.
Look at grad school as a series of hurdles. Getting in is one hurdle. It doesn’t matter once you are in what you said on your application. I’m not suggesting untruth, but a reflexive rigidity or too strong a belief in ultimately malleable rules (that may not even exist) will get you into a lot of trouble.
I have to agree with Sean (#35). I’ve served on and chaired several faculty search committees and the name of the graduate school is basically irrelevant. If a school is doing a search for a faculty member, they care what kind of research the person has done and is doing and how well it is respected. If a school is looking at the graduate schol qualifications (at least for a physicist) they are making a serious error that the places I know well wouldn’t make.
“If you don’t go to a Tier 1 grad school, start seriously considering non-physics jobs as soon as you get in, because the statistical chances of you getting a tenure-track job in a research university are quite low. Even if you get into a Tier 1 university, your chances are still at best 50% and often worse than that. How many postdocs are you willing to take? How many times are you willing to move? Are you willing to get divorced and put off children? All of these questions come into play if you want a tenure-track job in a research university.”
This sounds awful. Is there nothing that can be done about this situation? It makes me wonder if not the brighest people just drop out and do something else with their lifes.
Also, what happens to all the PhDs who weren’t able to get post docs, but wrote their thesis on something as far from the “real” (read “low energy”) world as particle physics? Sure, some of them end up in finance, but nowadays there are special programs in financial mathematics so competition is fierce. As for other jobs, well, it’s not at all a given that most employers have any idea of what it takes to be able to complete a PhD in physics, or how this would relate to the jobs in question.
Hi Sean (#35) and Mark (#45). Perhaps you’ve read more than I intended into my comments. I hasten to add that I’ve never seen a decision to hire someone based solely, or even significantly, on what school a candidate attended. Once it’s got to the stage that a long shortlist exists, such considerations are irrelevant, and the factors that you cited (publications, ref. letters, interviews) matter.
Where PhD school does matter, however, is in the very initial stages of the search, at the very first cut. You’re sitting there, you’ve got literally hundreds of files in front of you, and you want to winnow it down to the few dozen worthy of further consideration. At exactly this stage, a typical committee member is going to be understandly drawn to people from schools he’s familiar with and that have high reputations. That’s just human nature. Now this is NOT a simple cut on what school you went to. If you went to a lesser-known school, but yourself are well-known in your field or have letters from prominently known people, you may well make it past this first cut. But we’re not doing anyone any favors if we don’t acknowledge that these biases exist, and my experience is that an applicant from Podunk State is at higher risk of slipping through the cracks.
Hey all 🙂
I have some questions concerning coming from Europe:
Since I will probably do my master thesis here (which is 5 years of college). How long would it take for me to get a Ph.D. in the US? And what would I have to do to get one? Is it grad school?
How many schools should you apply to? When I looked at the websites (just Ivy league) I saw that I could buy Sean’s book from the application few. So I rate it as expensive. 😉
Helge
Helge– Yes, grad school is where you would get the Ph.D.; sometimes there are separate Masters and PhD admissions processes, but at many places they are just one process. The time it takes varies; say 5-6 years for someone with a typical U.S. undergraduate education. It could be less for someone who already had a Masters, but not appreciably less, since most schools still want you to jump through their specific hoops.
I would say apply to 5-6 schools, but that’s up to you. It’s generally not free, but on the other hand it’s an important step in your life.
invcit wrote:
It is pretty awful, and the reason why I’m trying to inject a small dose of reality into the glossy PR picture presented here.
If you ask Sean, Mark, JoAnne et al they will tell you that the solution is increased funding (tax-financed of course, but let’s not go into that now) so that all those new Ph.D.s can get academic positions too. But a moment of thought will tell you that this could never be more than a short term fix, for as long as the average professor produces more than one Ph.D. over the course of his career, the number of Ph.D. holders will grow exponentially, and therefore require exponential growth in funding and number of positions if they are all to become professors in their own right. Such a period of exponential expansion can only be temporary, or it would very quickly swallow all available resources (assuming a very modest production of 5 Ph.D.s per professor, it takes only eight iterations for the number of physics professors to grow from 500 to encompass roughly the entire population of the US).
Two options remain: (1) drastically reduce the production of new Ph.D.s or (2) reshape graduate education so as to meet actual (i.e. non-academic) demand.
The first option is anathema to the mainstream, since the academic system as it’s currently structured depends heavily on next-to-free teaching and research labor in the form of grad students and postdocs. Fewer grad students mean fewer TAs and more professorial time spent supervising mind-numbingly dull lab sessions and correcting homework instead of hanging out at conferences with Lisa Randall; fewer postdocs mean less research papers for the professor to put his or her name on (that being what gets you invited to conferences with Lisa Randall). The second solution is not much better, since non-academic demand for expertise in hot topics like superstrings, HEP phenomenology and early universe cosmology equals zero. Let’s face it, this stuff is fascinating in its own right (at least to us nerds) but as far as applications go, it’s useless. So going down this road – adapting to actual demand – implies all kinds of unpleasant things in terms of funding and job security of existing faculty.
Ergo, neither solution will be adopted voluntarily by those currently in the “Ivory Tower”. Their “solution” is to keep suckering in as many as possible into the pipeline and use the resulting hordes of unemployed Ph.D. holders as evidence that research funding needs to be increased. No, it’s not a pretty picture.
Indeed: “The number of the best American students who decided to go to graduate school started to decline around 1970, and it has been declining ever since.”
(The Big Crunch, by David Goodstein, Vice Provost at Caltech, and one of the few honest voices speaking up on this subject within academia)
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Getting a post doc position (and a second, and far too often a third one) usually isn’t all that difficult. The typical academic career path ends there. Sundrum (of Randall-Sundrum fame) was about to go that way, to a job in finance (or so he hoped, at least) before he was “saved” by co-creating the extra-dimensional industry. Finance remains perhaps the best way to recoup at least some of one’s educational investment. IT (software development, consulting) is a given option, especially for experimentalists (who may also have a future in electronics, depending on their specialization). But horror stories of cab drivers and pizza delivery boys with Ph.D.s abound. Understand, there really is no demand outside academia.