Pathway to Penn: Finding the Right Graduate Program For You

Yesterday, I began my "Pathway to Penn" series as both a window into my first-hand experiences on applying to graduate school (and ultimately ending up at Penn), as well as some general information and advice to prospective applicants. Yesterday's post dealt with deciding if graduate school is really the most appropriate option for you. Once you cross that hurdle and ultimately decide that graduate school is an appropriate option, the next step is to research various types of programs.

**Note - I will be tagging all posts in this series with "Pathway to Penn", so as my blog grows, if you want to refer back to any of these posts, just search that label.

If you can remember your time researching numerous undergraduate institutions, you know that it can be a meticulous and time-consuming process. It's hard enough to investigate, save, and compare details of a handful of schools while in high school, but it can be an even more involved task with the academic workload that comes with your late-junior and early-senior years. Therefore, I'm going to provide you with some good places where to start, as well as some general advice.

For prospective graduate students, a good place to start is by looking at the authors of journals you use as references in your own undergraduate research. It may also be helpful to look at some of the editors of journals your P.I. publishes in or where you retrieve a lot of your references. Obviously, some of these researchers will be outside of the USA, but most of them probably conduct research within our borders. This is especially helpful if you are interested in ultimately choosing a dissertation topic on a genre you have worked with as an undergraduate.

Another good source for starting your school search is to ask faculty with whom you have worked with, either via research or course work. They will likely know some specifics about a program, in regard to its reputation in a particular area. A good example is the University of Washington Medical School, which is an outstanding school for primary care.

Despite all of the advice you can receive from peers and mentors, ultimately you will have to do some information cataloging yourself, which requires you heading off to each respective program's website and seeing what they offer. A good way to establish a list of schools is by using the U.S. News & World Report website. As a caveat, there has been some controversy about these rankings, especially on the undergraduate side, but if you use them simply as a list of overall schools plus particular areas in which certain schools excel, then you should encounter no problems.

At this stage in your application process I wouldn't put too many restrictions on the potential programs you choose, if any at all. If, for example, you are from New England and insist you wouldn't want to head over to the west coast to attend graduate school, that doesn't mean you should automatically exclude any schools from that region. The time for narrowing down your list, and the criteria for doing so, will come later. At this point you should be looking for schools that offer a graduate program that matches your research history and interests. I cannot stress this point enough, as it is customary for graduate programs to reject well qualified students because their research history and interests don't match their program. With graduate applications increasing and endowments falling at many universities, you can't afford to have many of these schools on your final list, as you will be self-rejecting yourself from the start.

I added Penn to my list on the recommendation of one of my good friends, who himself happens to also attend the university (though in the School of Law). I researched the BGS website and found myself impressed with their areas of focus. Penn is the world leader in gene therapy/genetic engineering research, and while at the moment I'm not signed up for that area, this fact heightened my interest in the program. Additionally, I had the Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences as Washington University in St. Louis as a top-3 choice because one of the editors of the Journal on Bone Mineral Research (JMBR) (a journal my undergraduate lab publishes in and cites from) is a professor in the DBBS program.

Finally, a word on the decision of whether or not to include your undergraduate institution on your list for graduate school. As a rule of thumb, I would always include it in the initial list, but depending on what field you are in, it may be best for you to exclude your undergraduate school. Some in the field may question your research background and environment if you are at a school for 10+ years; it's similar to politicians "being inside Washington, D.C. too long". Additionally, your undergraduate school may even forbid you from applying to graduate school in a particular program, as is the case with the Psychology department at my alma mater, Rutgers University. Ultimately, it comes down to how strong your undergraduate institution is (no one is going to question you for staying at Harvard for 10+ years) as well as whether or not their graduate program matches you. As a rule of thumb, however, the overwhelming majority of students attend a different graduate school than their undergraduate school.

The next post in the series will focus on acquiring additional information about programs from reputable third-party websites, which can provide you a more "what is life like in this program" feel than the information provided on school websites.

I will also interject with some non-Pathway to Penn series of posts to maintain commentary on a wide range of topics, so to those of you reading my posts but not interested in attending graduate school, stick around!

Cheers,

Mike C.