Ten Tips for being an ideal graduate school applicant:
Get excellent grades in your science classes, I mean it. If you need
help to achieve better grades, do what you have to do: study with a buddy,
get a tutor, do extra problem sets, whatever it takes to gain a mastery
of the subject material. If you do need help (we all do at some
time!), don’t beat yourself up over it, and also don’t let
your pride keep you from seeking it out. Science isn’t easy,
but don’t settle for that B when you don’t have to.
Get excellent GRE scores. More often than not, this means practicing
GRE exams from library books, and/or taking a GRE preparatory course. We
can usually tell who was surprised when they went to take the test. Sometimes
they don’t get interviewed. We know you’re smart, but
practicing teaches you how to take the GRE. To be successful
you need the triple threat of knowledge, preparation, and experience. I
cannot emphasize this enough.
Conduct research while you are in undergraduate, whether it is during
the year at your university or in internships over the summer. Be
sure to conduct independent, thought driven research that you clearly
understand and can communicate, written and verbally. Learn how
to carefully critique journal articles and how to think about how other
results in your line of research may lead to the conclusions that you
draw from your own data.
Review the faculty research interests and see what department and lab
you may want to work in during graduate school. In graduate school
you do rotations, which are a short amount of research time in an average
of three different labs, so you can get an idea of where you want to
stay for your PhD research. Read the published literature and get
into contact with faculty or graduate students in the lab if you are
interested in more information. Make a strong effort to understand
the research, and come up with good questions that you can ask the people
in the laboratory.
We want to see your personal side in your statement of purpose, but
we also want to see that you are specifically knowledgeable about the
research that you have conducted as an undergraduate. We also want
to know if you have had any unique experiences or challenges on your
road to becoming a scientist, and how your experiences and perspectives
will contribute to the diversity of the scientific community. Make
sure that a faculty member at your university critiques your letter prior
to submission. P.S. No typos!
Ask your research advisors to write your letters of recommendation
for graduate school. Ask them if they will write a strong letter
of recommendation for you. We require three letters, if you don’t
have that many research advisors, ask a professor with whom you’ve
built rapport. Yes, we have received letters where professors
were lukewarm about a candidate, and we’ve even received letters
where an advisor said that the candidate was not suitable for our program. We
want honest letters from your recommenders, and if they can’t honestly
give their strong endorsement, we suggest you find someone who can.
Be yourself, because you are fantastic, and always put your best foot
forward. No 2cute4u@unprofessional.com email
addresses. Take any slang, emoticons or texting abbreviations out
of your email and conversation. Always address faculty as the default ‘Doctor’ when
you don’t know their educational status, or when they haven’t
told you that you can call them something else. Take any wild
nonsense, or mention of wild nonsense off of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook
and the entire internet while you are at it. Tell your friends
to please keep it clean while you are applying.
Submit all parts of your application on time. This speaks volumes.
If anything is going to be late, communicate this to the department. Make
sure that your referrers submit their letters on time too. Then
give them a hand-written thank you note.
A shortage of coin doesn’t have to keep you from graduate school. Check
out the GRE fee-reduction voucher program for financially eligible individuals. If
you qualify for this waiver, you may also qualify to have the Stanford
application fee waived. Project 1000 is also a great program for
underrepresented students who are applying to graduate school. This
program allows students to apply to up to 7 universities fee free, within
their list of participants, such as Stanford. Once you are admitted
to a program in the Stanford Biosciences, your tuition is paid for, as
is medical and dental insurance, and you receive a stipend of $28,500.
It’s okay if you are not personally ready to attend graduate
school for a PhD in genetics right after graduation. There are
many graduate students who took time off to travel, who raised children,
or who worked as lab technicians prior to attending graduate school. If
you are not academically ready for a PhD in genetics, you can always
join a post-baccalaureate program to gain additional academic and research
knowledge. A master’s program in the sciences can
also help you transition from undergraduate to PhD level work, and can
prove to faculty that you are PhD material.
