If you are considering graduate school as a choice for you, you may find the following handout to be helpful. Applying to Graduate School (PDF)

Resources to Explore Graduate Programs

• Peterson's Guides to Graduate Programs
• Graduate School Guide
• ScholarStuff’s All About Graduate Schools
• World Wide Graduate School Directory
• Ph.D’s.Org-espcially for science, math and engineering students
• Graduate School Guide- www.graduateguide.com
• Association of American Medical Colleges
• Graduate School Directory
• Prehealth advising
• Prelaw advising
• Credential services

Testing Resources

• ETS - Education Testing Services includes, among others, GRE, GMAT, & TOEFL
• GRE - Graduate Record Examinations
• GMAT - MBA Explorer
• LSAT - Law School Admission Council

 The Top Five Credentials Needed for Graduate School Applications

• Academic achievements/experience
• GRE scores
• Recommendations
• Statement of purpose (the application essay)
• Undergraduate GPA (major and cumulative)

When a committee must choose 10 candidates from 800 applications, it will use these guidelines to sift for the golden students. It may seem like the odds are stacked against you, but there are some strategies you can employ to make the application process easier for yourself and for the reviewers.

For instance, organize your application materials. As application materials begin to arrive, make file folders for each school and write the deadline across the front. You will be tempted to start all kinds of lists--lists of phone numbers of schools, of application materials required for each school, of faculty in the programs--but my advice is to keep all the information pertaining to each school in a single folder. If you try to consolidate information into lists, you have several lists to keep track of, and almost instantly the material becomes unwieldy and disorganized.

Also, plan to send everything together. Even though schools may request that you send materials such as transcripts or recommendations directly to the graduate school or to the department, I would suggest that you collect ALL of the application materials yourself. This will save you the headache of calling schools individually and making sure everything has been received. If you send everything yourself, you only have to wait for your acknowledgment card to arrive. If you have to send transcripts, recommendations, or other items separate from the application, be prepared to spend hours on the phone verifying with the schools that all of your materials have arrived.

Graduating Engineer and Computer Careers, 2007

The Statement of Purpose

There's one piece of the process that you cannot rely on anyone to write for you—the statement of purpose. This is your opportunity to dazzle the admissions committee with your intelligence, maturity, focus and compatibility with the faculty's research interests. All of the admissions officers, deans, and faculty I've interviewed take this part of the application seriously, and some weigh it as the number one criterion for evaluation. In addition, many faculty regard the essay as an example of your writing skills, an important part of your graduate career whether you're pursuing English or engineering.

Writing an essay, or personal statement, is often the most difficult part of the application process. Requirements vary widely in this regard. Some programs request only one or two paragraphs about why you want to pursue graduate study, while others require five or six separate essays in which you are expected to write at length about your motivation for graduate study, your strengths and weaknesses, your greatest achievements and solutions to hypothetical problems.

An essay or personal statement for an application should be essentially a statement of your ideas and goals. Usually it includes a certain amount of personal history, but unless an institution specifically requests autobiographical information, you do not have to supply any. Your aim should be a clear, succinct statement showing that you have a definite sense of what you want to do and enthusiasm for the field of study you have chosen. Your essay should reflect your writing abilities. More important, it should reveal the clarity, the focus and the depth of your thinking.

Before writing anything, stop and consider what your reader might be looking for; the general directions or other parts of the application may give you an indication of this. Admissions committees may be trying to evaluate a number of things from your statement, including the following things about you:

• Expectations with regard to the program and career opportunities
• Writing ability
• Major areas of interest
• Research or work experience
• Reasons for deciding to pursue graduate education in a particular field and at a particular institution
• Maturity
• Personal uniqueness—what you would add to the diversity of the entering class

If there is information in your application that might reflect badly on you, such as poor grades or a low admission test score, it is better not to deal with it in your essay unless you are asked to. Keep your essay positive. You will need to explain anything that could be construed as negative in your application, however, as failure to do so may eliminate you from consideration. You can do this on a separate sheet entitled "Addendum," which you attach to the application, or in a cover letter that you enclose. In either form, your explanation should be short and to the point, avoiding long, tedious excuses. In addition to supplying your own explanation, you may find it appropriate to ask one or more of your recommenders to address the issue in their recommendation letter. Ask them to do this only if they are already familiar with your problem and could talk about it from a positive perspective.

In every case, essays should be word processed or typed. It is usually acceptable to attach pages to your application if the space provided is insufficient. Neatness, spelling and grammar are important.

Graduating Engineer and Computer Careers, 2007