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Apply yourself
From standardized tests to personal statements, surviving the grad-school-application process
BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

Getting into grad school is a crapshoot. You can spend years preparing — keeping your GPA high in college, acing the GREs, getting the right work experience, writing and rewriting the personal statement until you can’t change another word — but at the end of the day, you’re competing against hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are equally qualified, who boast the same credentials and achievements, and who want to fill one of those few spots in the class just as much as you do. And it’s up to a committee of subjective, opinionated admissions people to decide whether you’re in or out. Beyond looking at résumés, transcripts, and essays, who knows how these decisions get made? Perhaps you apply in a year when the admissions gatekeepers say, "We’ve taken enough Bostonians. Let’s look at applicants from Topeka." On a particularly fussy day, one admissions officer might decide that any application filled out in blue ink gets tossed into the garbage.

While that’s a bit of an exaggeration — certainly admissions criteria are slightly more substantive than ink color — facing the application process can be daunting when you think about the odds. But it’s something that more and more people are doing. People want to go on to graduate school for a number of reasons: some do it because they’re not sure what else to do, or so they’ll earn more money; some do it to advance in their field; and some do it to immerse themselves in an academic passion. Regardless of the reason, an advanced degree is becoming the base-line standard in the job market. It’s been said before: a master’s is the new bachelor’s.

But first you have to get in. The start-to-finish process of applying to grad school can be a long one. All judgments as to whether you’re qualified for the program and whether you and the school are the right fit are based on a few forms and a few paragraphs, so your application will require an investment of time, effort, and money. Here are some strategies for surviving the process, along with tips and suggestions from people who have gone through it or are going through it right now.

The first step of the process is taking the GRE, the computerized, post-college version of the SAT. How much weight schools assign to your score varies from program to program; some schools don’t even require it. Conventional wisdom holds that the GRE won’t make or break your application; it’s just one of the quantitative factors admissions officers take into account. Alicia Simoni, a 25-year-old Johns Hopkins graduate who’s applying for a master’s in peace and conflict studies, recommends getting the GRE out of the way as quickly as possible. As soon as you think you might consider grad school, sign up for a test and start studying. As for those GRE prep courses, "in general I think they’re a substantial waste of money," says Simoni. "They teach you the strategies, but you can get the same strategies out of a book."

What you can’t find in a book is what you personally want out of a program. Deciding which schools to apply to can be the longest, most intensive part of the process. "I’d categorize identifying the schools as one of the harder parts," Simoni says. It requires asking yourself what you want out of a school, looking at programs, and deciding whether you think they suit your needs and satisfy your criteria.

"I spent a lot of time toward the end of my senior year of college researching schools," says Tod Andrews, 24, who’s currently applying for an MFA in creative writing. "Narrowing down the ones to apply to was really hard." Andrews started by looking at faculty lists. "That was all I had to go by at first," he says. "If I knew someone’s work and I didn’t like it, I skipped over the school. If I liked it, I looked intensely. After that, it was a matter of looking at the style of program, and with an MFA, the programs vary quite a bit. Syracuse takes three years to complete — most take two. NYU allows you to take a course from anything offered in the entire university. A lot of places stymie that and limit it to English classes." Coming up with a list of schools demands research and a bit of soul-searching.

For Mike Boylan, on the other hand, who’s completing his second year of film school at NYU, deciding where to apply didn’t prove as difficult. When he began feeling antsy at the Somerville-based production company Powderhouse Productions, he started reading up on film school. "Immediately the aesthetic of filmmakers NYU has produced and their mission statement appealed to me more than UCLA, for example," he says. "It’s much more of an independent film school." Boylan ended up applying there and nowhere else.

Whether you apply to one school or 10, there are a bunch of bureaucratic hurdles to leap: test scores, transcripts, résumés, recommendations. "It’s that stuff that ends up taking up more time than writing an essay," says Simoni. Pulling together the various forms and scores is "what makes the whole process feel like a huge burden." On the pain-in-the-ass scale, Simoni ranks asking for recommendations right after taking the GREs. Asking someone to write on your behalf can be a delicate matter, especially if you’ve been out of college for a few years. Oftentimes people don’t want to let their co-workers know that they’re thinking about heading elsewhere, and they haven’t necessarily kept in touch with professors. (If you’ve been out of touch with a professor, sending along a copy of a paper you wrote for his or her course provides a specific reminder of your work.)

As with the GREs, Simoni suggests starting early. "It’s hard not to feel a little guilty," she says, "sending the forms, asking them to get them to me by the deadlines, which are always around the holidays. You’re asking people to take time out of their own busy lives. And it’s so out of your control; if they don’t get it in by the deadline, then the application isn’t complete."

As an applicant to an MFA program, Andrews focused all his energy on the creative sample. "With a writing program, you put all your eggs in the creative-sample basket. That’s what they’re concentrating on," he says. "I didn’t get hung up on the statements I had to write or the GRE I had to take." But he did spend two years polishing his sample. Andrews also recommends talking to someone who’s gone through the type of program that interests you. "Grab someone who’s been through it. I talked to someone at length. I asked questions about the process and where to begin looking. This person let me know what to focus on. He became my guide."

With programs that don’t focus on a single creative sample, the personal statement is what provides the most intimate look into who you are and what you want. You should find a balance between touting your past accomplishments and anticipating how the program will foster your future successes. "My tendency at first was to write more about what I’d done than what I planned to do," says Simoni. "Space had to be dedicated to where I wanted my career to go. It’s as much forward-looking as it is backward-looking."

Initially, Andrews found himself anxious about the anonymity of the process, of the lack of control he had over the outcome. But he "stopped thinking of these places as robotic institutions" with an assembly line of application-readers. "They’ve got a thousand applications, and they have to pick eight," he says. "If yours doesn’t get picked, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. There’s never a reason to get too stressed because in the end, it’s up to somebody else." It’s just a matter of putting your spoon in the mix to see if you can stir the pot.

Simoni had a similar change in perspective about the grad-school-application process. "At first I was thinking more about what could get me a job," she says. "Recently I’ve been much more focused on what I’m interested in. I’ve actually been excited as opposed to thinking this is what I should do." Boylan echoes this sentiment. With the personal statement or creative sample, he argues for sticking to your convictions and not trying to pander to what you think admissions officers want. "The only way to go wrong is to try to hedge your bets and try to think about what they want to hear," he says. "They need to know that you are singular in your passion."

Nina MacLaughlin can be reached at nmaclaughlin[a]phx.com


Issue Date: January 28 - February 3, 2005
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