Campus visits either before or after you are accepted into a program are important and while they may be expensive, they are worth making. Visiting before you have applied, has several advantages: 1) you may discover that you hate the campus, the town and the program [or conversely that you love them]; 2) you can meet faculty, explore facilities and have a chance to make a good impression and sell yourself as a desirable candidate. If you visit after you are accepted, and you have more than one acceptance in hand, you can decide whether you [and your spouse?] can spend the next “n” years at this school. Post-acceptance visits may sometimes be underwritten or subsidized by a school, so do not hesitate to ask for travel money. Schools sometimes have graduate student open houses with tours, dinners and presentations about the campus – ask if they are sponsoring such an event. The cost of a weekend trip from California to New York may be prohibitive, but if you have been accepted to a school in New York and one in Philadelphia, for example, see if you can schedule the visits for the same weekend, get some funding from each school and combine the funding to make the trip doubly informative and half as expensive [or free!] … if you can.

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This posting will continue to explore what you need to know to make informed decisions about which schools to apply to, and finally, which offer you accept; it will focus on some of the less academic aspects of the process.

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Understanding the variables you need to compare as you evaluate graduate programs is time consuming, but understanding them is worth the time. Since a PhD can take between 5 and 10 years, depending on your discipline, it is important to understand how time-to degree will affect you. Outside the sciences it is common for it to take more than 6 years to complete the degree, and as more teaching jobs at colleges and universities are requiring that you have the degree in hand when you start teaching, finishing your degree in as timely a manner as possible matters.

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My first two postings on Comparing and Evaluating Graduate Programs focused on the importance of gathering information about admissions data, faculty size, requirements and graduate level courses in the programs you are comparing. This posting will discuss funding and teaching.

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Since the devil is always in the details, you need patience and persistence to learn what you need to know about the programs that interest you. Begin by examining admissions statistics and Graduate Record Examination scores [in cases where the tests are required]; this will help you to see how difficult this school might be to get into. An outstanding essay may not overcome mediocre GRE scores, so, even in the middle of your busy senior year tasks, studying for the GREs could make a real difference to your chances. Then determine the number of students that apply each year, how many are accepted, and try to get a fix on the program size [total number of accepted first year and enrolled students]. Unlike college where you took classes across many different departments during four years and got to know different students from different disciplines, in graduate school your personal horizons might be constrained by a small program in a small school. If you come from a large university where you had latitude and lots of friends, a small program might be constricting. Remember, you are joining a family, albeit as a transient member, and the people you know and work with will affect your everyday life in many ways.

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Your search for schools, either through Gradschools.com or Petersons [see posting I], or through the networking channels of faculty mentors, family or friends, will yield several schools that interest you. This process should be finished over the coming summer or early in your fall semester. The second step in the application process is narrowing your list by gathering information about the schools whose profile best fits yours and that are most compatible with your needs. Questions about program size, requirements, and funding might be answered from a good web site or by going to your library or college career center to look at [a large 6-volume set that contains detailed profiles of every graduate program in the US], but questions about support for teaching, health insurance, time-to-degree and placement are also terribly important and are best answered by speaking directly to the graduate program chair or the admissions chair of a particular program. Since graduate school central offices usually serve only as administrative centers, you will have to call programs to speak directly to faculty. When you call a program try to get to the graduate program chair or the chair of the graduate admissions committee. This is a good tactic because it gets you on their radar should you decide to apply to their program; they are also the people who should be able to answer the detailed questions you want to ask. continue reading this post »

If you are entering your senior year in college this is the time to start searching for graduate schools. If you have already graduated keep reading…this posting is for you too. The number of applications to graduate programs has been increasing for the past few years; there were 1.69 million applications for the class entering in fall, 2009 [an increase of 8.3% from the previous year] and nearly 450,00 students enrolled in graduate programs for the first time. continue reading this post »