hunter_alchemst
Aug 22, 2008, 10:30 AM
A Primer on Graduate Schools in the US
By RAUL P. LEJANO
When I left home for the States many years ago, as my folks wisely told me to get a graduate education. I said I would be back in a year or two. Well, the year or stretched on and on, and now, I find myself, years later, with many graduate degrees, no marketable skills, and few career options other than being a Filipino academic in the US.
Nowadays, I see students applying to graduate schools all over the world—Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, etc. This is great. How amazing it is to find so many great institutions in so many places. But I am knowledgeable only about graduate schools where I teach, so this is what I will take up in these few pages.
There are two kinds of universities in the US—teaching universities and research universities—both important, and both of interest to us.
For those interested in undergraduate studies, many teaching universities provide a wonderful education. For more advanced degrees (Master’s and Doctoral degrees), some of the world’s best research universities are to be found in the US. Of the research universities in that country, the most excellent (though this is always debatable) to me has always been the University of California, Berkeley.
Other great research universities have names that are familiar to most—MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and UCLA (which, before I came to the States, I knew only because of the legendary basketball player, Lew Alcindor). Less known over here are other equally excellent institutions such as the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, etc. In terms of intellectual substance, ranking mean next to nothing—but they do matter if you decide to embark on an academic career in the States.
GETTING INTO A GOOD UNIVERSITY
There are some common mistakes that I see people make in the application phase. Mine was knowing nothing about the graduate schools before entering the fray. I went pretty much by what I saw in the brochures and so, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to attend the University of Vermont (where I saw pictures of white-water rafting) or Rice (the brochure showed a very diverse student body) and never occurred to me to look at rankings, until my parents told me to apply to a school whose name they had actually heard of (and hence I applied to Berkeley). But most people now are less naïve than I was then.
Apply to several schools
It is a common mistake not applying to enough schools. People pick their two or three dream universities and apply to those.
So, let me be precise: when applying to graduate schools in the States, apply to at least seven, and even more if you can. Pick three or four from among the most prestigious class of universities, and three or four back-up schools.
Yes, I know application fees are expensive but, in this case, it would be penny-wise and pound-foolish and wanting a kingdom for a horse (Shakespeare in Richard III). By not spending that extra $50 on one more application, you may be foregoing the chances of receiving a fellowship that pays $40,000 a year. Even if your credentials are superlative, a university may admit you without any financial assistance because the department simply does not have the funding.
You need to apply to many to stand a chance of getting a good offer. In fact, the ideal is to be accepted into at least two institutions because then you can actually, believe it or not, play one offer against the other and negotiate a better package.
Apply to both public and private institutions. My mother attended exclusively private schools (NYU, Columbia), and I went the public route—but option is great, so consider both. Yes, private universities have higher tuition fees, but they also have the most money for fellowships, assistantships, and the like. I knew none of this when I was applying.
Submit your application early
Be professional in all things. You can submit your application material late, but that ensures you of not getting any financial assistance, or worse, an automatic rejection.
Sitting on an admissions committee once, I received an inquiry from someone who wanted to turn in her application material a month late. Hers was a strong application. But I did not know how to tell her that, well, the committee had already gone through all the applications, and that we were just too busy to schedule an extra meeting, so sorry.
Take the entrance test
Since you were a pretty good student here at home, you would instantly be accepted into the best schools there. Not immediately though, because graduate school applications have become a bit of a game, and you have to play it. Part of this game is the entrance test. Most universities will require you to take the Graduate record Examination (GRE), a universal test administered by a company in New Jersey.
You may be bright, just show up on the test day, wing it, and get a good score, but that may not be enough. It was different in my time, when you treated it like just another IQ test. Today, you have to spend at least a few months reviewing for it. Nowadays, it is becoming common to get applicants from China or Korea with perfect GRE scores of 1600—that’s the competition you are up against.
You are also disadvantaged because, as it turns out, our most hallowed universities in the Philippines, like UP or UST and the like, hurt students by being so stingy with the grades. A grade point average of 3.0 from Ateneo may be regarded as okay along Katipunan, but to admissions committees in the States viewing your file against the scores of American students sporting GPAs of 4.0 and higher (I do not understand how one gets a GPA higher than 4.0), 3.0 just looks drab. Believe me, you can argue that standards in institutions elsewhere are tougher than in the States but admissions committee members who are typically deluged with other committee work, will simply screen your application away.
I was once a visiting lecturer at Ateneo and taught a course on environmental policy. At the end of semester, the department chair asked me what grades I intended to give. I said, “I’m happy with their participation and the effort they made, and yes, I would like to give everyone an A.”
But he set me aside and admonished me, “No, you can’t, nobody does that, try not to give A’s.”
Anyway, if your college GPA is below 3.3, you will need to study extra hard I order to get a GRE score of at least 1250 (that’s combining the math and verbal scores). If you want to get into MIT, your GRE had better be at least 1350. If you score low on the GRE the first time, consider taking it a second time since the higher score is what gets reported. If you need to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), sign up for the Internet Based Test of English as Foreign Language (IBTOEFL) version, because a high score on the spoken portion of the IBT (eg, 26 or higher) is sometimes required by universities for international student to qualify for teaching assistantships.
Present letters of recommendation and a letter of interest
Did I mention that this has become a game? So, part of the game is getting glowing, in fact, stupendous letters of recommendation. They need to be from professors (not friends, relatives, politicians, or celebrities) you had either taken a class with or done research for. Pick those professors whom you know are impressed by you (or, if none, pick those kind-hearted ones who would write a great letter at the drop of a hat).
Even more importantly, write an intelligent, professional letter of interest. The letter of interest should not be about the soap opera that is your life or a forum for sharing intimate details, and such. Admissions committees are turned off by these. Why? Because, keep in mind what they are looking for—highly professional, research-savvy, sophisticated thinkers who can do research and original thinking without much hand-holding. They want a letter that shows that you have thought about the research issues in this field, that you have an ambitious intellectual agenda, and that you have great capacity for research. So, do yourself a favor and, before writing the letter, do some research—about some intellectual problem that you can touch on (concisely but not too briefly), about the department you are applying to, etc. You need to sound independent, entrepreneurial, and motivated. Remember, this is graduate school. Do talk about your experience, but those that enrich your intellectual and professional life, such as working in a refugee camp in sub-Saharan Africa, running a local office of Habitat fro Humanity, managing a gourmet coffee shop, etc.
(TO BE CONTINUED…pagod na ako mag-type.) :rotflmao:
RAUL P LEJANO’s academic career:
BS Civil Engineering (cum laude), UP (1984); MS in Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley (1986); DEnv, Environmental Science and Engineering, UCLA (1992); PhD, Environmental Health Science (concentration: policy analysis), UCLA (1988); Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (2000-2002); Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine (2002-2007); Associate Professor, Dept. of Planning Policy and Design, at the same university (2007-).
Published in Life Today, August-September 2008. ISSN 0116-6441
By RAUL P. LEJANO
When I left home for the States many years ago, as my folks wisely told me to get a graduate education. I said I would be back in a year or two. Well, the year or stretched on and on, and now, I find myself, years later, with many graduate degrees, no marketable skills, and few career options other than being a Filipino academic in the US.
Nowadays, I see students applying to graduate schools all over the world—Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, etc. This is great. How amazing it is to find so many great institutions in so many places. But I am knowledgeable only about graduate schools where I teach, so this is what I will take up in these few pages.
There are two kinds of universities in the US—teaching universities and research universities—both important, and both of interest to us.
For those interested in undergraduate studies, many teaching universities provide a wonderful education. For more advanced degrees (Master’s and Doctoral degrees), some of the world’s best research universities are to be found in the US. Of the research universities in that country, the most excellent (though this is always debatable) to me has always been the University of California, Berkeley.
Other great research universities have names that are familiar to most—MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia and UCLA (which, before I came to the States, I knew only because of the legendary basketball player, Lew Alcindor). Less known over here are other equally excellent institutions such as the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, etc. In terms of intellectual substance, ranking mean next to nothing—but they do matter if you decide to embark on an academic career in the States.
GETTING INTO A GOOD UNIVERSITY
There are some common mistakes that I see people make in the application phase. Mine was knowing nothing about the graduate schools before entering the fray. I went pretty much by what I saw in the brochures and so, I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to attend the University of Vermont (where I saw pictures of white-water rafting) or Rice (the brochure showed a very diverse student body) and never occurred to me to look at rankings, until my parents told me to apply to a school whose name they had actually heard of (and hence I applied to Berkeley). But most people now are less naïve than I was then.
Apply to several schools
It is a common mistake not applying to enough schools. People pick their two or three dream universities and apply to those.
So, let me be precise: when applying to graduate schools in the States, apply to at least seven, and even more if you can. Pick three or four from among the most prestigious class of universities, and three or four back-up schools.
Yes, I know application fees are expensive but, in this case, it would be penny-wise and pound-foolish and wanting a kingdom for a horse (Shakespeare in Richard III). By not spending that extra $50 on one more application, you may be foregoing the chances of receiving a fellowship that pays $40,000 a year. Even if your credentials are superlative, a university may admit you without any financial assistance because the department simply does not have the funding.
You need to apply to many to stand a chance of getting a good offer. In fact, the ideal is to be accepted into at least two institutions because then you can actually, believe it or not, play one offer against the other and negotiate a better package.
Apply to both public and private institutions. My mother attended exclusively private schools (NYU, Columbia), and I went the public route—but option is great, so consider both. Yes, private universities have higher tuition fees, but they also have the most money for fellowships, assistantships, and the like. I knew none of this when I was applying.
Submit your application early
Be professional in all things. You can submit your application material late, but that ensures you of not getting any financial assistance, or worse, an automatic rejection.
Sitting on an admissions committee once, I received an inquiry from someone who wanted to turn in her application material a month late. Hers was a strong application. But I did not know how to tell her that, well, the committee had already gone through all the applications, and that we were just too busy to schedule an extra meeting, so sorry.
Take the entrance test
Since you were a pretty good student here at home, you would instantly be accepted into the best schools there. Not immediately though, because graduate school applications have become a bit of a game, and you have to play it. Part of this game is the entrance test. Most universities will require you to take the Graduate record Examination (GRE), a universal test administered by a company in New Jersey.
You may be bright, just show up on the test day, wing it, and get a good score, but that may not be enough. It was different in my time, when you treated it like just another IQ test. Today, you have to spend at least a few months reviewing for it. Nowadays, it is becoming common to get applicants from China or Korea with perfect GRE scores of 1600—that’s the competition you are up against.
You are also disadvantaged because, as it turns out, our most hallowed universities in the Philippines, like UP or UST and the like, hurt students by being so stingy with the grades. A grade point average of 3.0 from Ateneo may be regarded as okay along Katipunan, but to admissions committees in the States viewing your file against the scores of American students sporting GPAs of 4.0 and higher (I do not understand how one gets a GPA higher than 4.0), 3.0 just looks drab. Believe me, you can argue that standards in institutions elsewhere are tougher than in the States but admissions committee members who are typically deluged with other committee work, will simply screen your application away.
I was once a visiting lecturer at Ateneo and taught a course on environmental policy. At the end of semester, the department chair asked me what grades I intended to give. I said, “I’m happy with their participation and the effort they made, and yes, I would like to give everyone an A.”
But he set me aside and admonished me, “No, you can’t, nobody does that, try not to give A’s.”
Anyway, if your college GPA is below 3.3, you will need to study extra hard I order to get a GRE score of at least 1250 (that’s combining the math and verbal scores). If you want to get into MIT, your GRE had better be at least 1350. If you score low on the GRE the first time, consider taking it a second time since the higher score is what gets reported. If you need to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), sign up for the Internet Based Test of English as Foreign Language (IBTOEFL) version, because a high score on the spoken portion of the IBT (eg, 26 or higher) is sometimes required by universities for international student to qualify for teaching assistantships.
Present letters of recommendation and a letter of interest
Did I mention that this has become a game? So, part of the game is getting glowing, in fact, stupendous letters of recommendation. They need to be from professors (not friends, relatives, politicians, or celebrities) you had either taken a class with or done research for. Pick those professors whom you know are impressed by you (or, if none, pick those kind-hearted ones who would write a great letter at the drop of a hat).
Even more importantly, write an intelligent, professional letter of interest. The letter of interest should not be about the soap opera that is your life or a forum for sharing intimate details, and such. Admissions committees are turned off by these. Why? Because, keep in mind what they are looking for—highly professional, research-savvy, sophisticated thinkers who can do research and original thinking without much hand-holding. They want a letter that shows that you have thought about the research issues in this field, that you have an ambitious intellectual agenda, and that you have great capacity for research. So, do yourself a favor and, before writing the letter, do some research—about some intellectual problem that you can touch on (concisely but not too briefly), about the department you are applying to, etc. You need to sound independent, entrepreneurial, and motivated. Remember, this is graduate school. Do talk about your experience, but those that enrich your intellectual and professional life, such as working in a refugee camp in sub-Saharan Africa, running a local office of Habitat fro Humanity, managing a gourmet coffee shop, etc.
(TO BE CONTINUED…pagod na ako mag-type.) :rotflmao:
RAUL P LEJANO’s academic career:
BS Civil Engineering (cum laude), UP (1984); MS in Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley (1986); DEnv, Environmental Science and Engineering, UCLA (1992); PhD, Environmental Health Science (concentration: policy analysis), UCLA (1988); Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (2000-2002); Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine (2002-2007); Associate Professor, Dept. of Planning Policy and Design, at the same university (2007-).
Published in Life Today, August-September 2008. ISSN 0116-6441