Guide to Getting Into Graduate School > Preparing For Your Graduate School Visit
Visiting prospective graduate schools is more important than many students believe. First hand experience on campus, with faculty, and with current graduate students can give you more useful information than anything you can read about the school online or in a book. In addition to helping you decide if a school is right for you, it also helps you know if a school is “not” right for you (a point that is often overlooked).
Let me give you a personal example. I visited a university in Ohio that is well respected, has renowned and well-published faculty members and seemed like a great fit on paper. My visit was suppose to last 2 days, but a winter storm turned my visit into a 5 day journey. Although I spent a great deal of time with current and prospective graduate students (who were all very nice), in my 5 days there, I interacted with faculty only one day. Faculty members new that all of us visiting students were stranded, but not one made the effort to spend any additional time with us – no trips to the coffee shop or pub, no lunches, not a single moment to get to know us better or help us learn more about the school. This was enough for me to decide that it was not the right environment for me to spent the next 4 or 5 years in. Fortunately, I visited other schools where faculty members went out of their way to include visiting students in classes, activities, and social events.
Visiting your first prospective graduate school can seem intimidating. It pays to be well prepared for a visit, particularly if the institution is far from home. Some schools will be more proactive than others in helping you arrange your visit. Some schools may choose to provide you with temporary housing in a hotel room or dorm, cover some or all of your travel costs, and even provide you with complimentary lunch.
A school might coordinate the visit of a group of prospective graduate students and plan mixers with current students and faculty as well as campus and housing tours. It will be up to you to set up individual meetings with professors and faculty. Being formally invited to visit a school indicates a significant degree of interest in you, but definitely does not imply you're already in.
A visit to a graduate institution is your opportunity to ask the right questions and show off your positive qualities. Remember that although you will be trying to impress them, they will also be trying to impress you. The institution you'll be visiting probably sees a visit less as an interview and more as a chance to meet their candidates and to see if there is a good fit. In graduate school, you will mostly be working with the faculty and other graduate students, and you will probably know everyone in your department. But even if you don't have great interpersonal skills, or you're quite shy, don't be stressed. You will be approaching professors and grad students as more of an equal, and it's possible you'll interact with them in their offices in the morning and over a beer in the evening.
Give yourself plenty of time to prepare for each visit, and try to write down your impressions at the end of each day. It's even better if you can punctuate your notes on the institution with some pictures, so that you can remember it more vividly at home. As for what to wear, you can look at photos of graduate students on the website and you can definitely email your liaison at the prospective school to ask him or her what to bring. It's good not to overdo anything - you don't want to show up in an evening dress and four-inch heels but you don't want a ratty t-shirt with stained jeans either. As a guideline, plan for business casual dress with some comfortable walking shoes and some layers in case the weather gets cold or rainy. It's also very convenient to have a small Internet-enabled device with you, whether a smartphone or a laptop, because you might not be able to use that campus's computers. If you've interacted with visiting prospective graduate students during your college career, you can take some tips from their demeanor as well. What you say and what you know will be far more important than what you are wearing.
By now, you know your research interests. The first question you might hear from faculty is "what are your interests?" If you've done research on your topic of choice, great! You should read a few academic papers about your topic so that you have something to springboard a conversation from. It's okay if you haven't done research on your topic in particular. It’s also a good idea to read some read some pieces that cover what’s going on more generally in the field, rather than highly specific topics.
That said, let me tell you that in many cases, faculty don’t care much about what research topics you want to explore. That sounds harsh, I know, but the truth is that many faculty members believe that new graduate students should spend time assisting the faculty member in “their” research. As one faculty member told me early in my academic career, “graduate school is for you to learn to conduct research, and I’ll tell you what topics to research. When you graduate, you can do research on anything you want.”
When presenting yourself during a visit, try to gauge whether the faculty member you're talking to has read your application and personal statement or not. For one thing, you don't want to bore them with repetition if they have. In addition, if your personal statement presents you in a certain light, it is to your advantage to maintain consistency with that image. Reading and remembering the personal statements of all the graduate candidates is no small task, so if faculty start asking you questions about your statement, you can take it as another indicator of interest in you.
When you are booking your individual meetings with professors, it is very helpful to look at their websites and to search for their work in academic databases. If a website is not frequently updated and you are curious about a professor, email him or her ahead of time just to ask about their work. To start with, you'll be looking at how frequently a professor publishes, and their last published paper date. For example, if someone publishes two or three papers a year but hasn't had anything new since 1997, you can assume new research won't be coming out anytime soon. Frequent and recent publications are the hallmark of a productive (i.e well-run) lab.
After you narrow down a group of professors by research interest and recency of publication, it is time to look at whose names appear as authors of the papers. Do the graduate students' names appear or is the professor the only author? If you don't see any graduate students as authors, you may have a faculty member who doesn’t allow graduate student co-authors. This isn’t common, but does occur on occasion. More common is the faculty member who insists on being first author all the time, even if he/she doesn’t do the research. It's pretty unlikely that a professor has had the time to first-author ten papers a year, so take it as a warning sign if only one name is always first author (some professors are profoundly productive, however, so don't just blindly cross them off your list).
Papers with a long list of authors (around 6+) suggest higher levels of collaboration, sometimes between universities or departments. This can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's great to mix with other departments, obtain new skills, and even attend their conferences. On the other hand, there's a bit of a challenge in making sure that there is enough room for you and your ideas in that long list of illustrious authors.
Now that you've looked thoroughly over the titles, dates, and authors of academic papers, it's time to skim a few. Having familiarized yourself with a brief bio of the faculty you'll be visiting is great, but dropping a few hints that you've read their work sends the message that you are a resourceful and intelligent student who takes an active interest. Intellectual curiosity is wonderful to have as a personal quality, and faculty will recognize that. Of the professors you choose to focus on, one or more might end up as your advisors throughout your program. When final admissions decisions are being made, you want one of the professors you met with to express an interest in you, because you are at least tentatively being matched up with a professor from the start.
Given that, I recommend speaking with current graduate students about any faculty members you think you may work with (or who may become your advisor). Find out what kind of advisor/mentor they are – do they take time to get to know their students and help them succeed? Are they only concerned with their own advancement? Do they give you responsibility to conduct your own research or will you be a research assistant your entire academic career? Are they easy to get along with? I’m sure you can imagine many more questions to ask.
At some point during your visit, housing and financial concerns might be discussed. You know your own concerns best, so when you walk around a new campus, try to envision yourself living and working there. At some point, you'll need to decide where you can afford to live and with whom, whether you'll have a car, how you'll support yourself, and what kind of health insurance you will need. You might need to establish residency if you're going to a different state. These things all vary school by school and state by state. Take some time to think about important questions and jot them down. It might be useful to talk about these things with your family ahead of time. If you will be moving to graduate school with your children or spouse, you'll need to think about schools and daycare as well. Graduate housing agencies expect a much higher proportion of families than undergraduate housing agencies do, and might even provide cheaper housing for families than single students in some cases.
It is of paramount importance that you talk to current graduate students about everything you want to know, including housing, finances, and health insurance. Find out if the graduate programs offer tuition remission and stipends for teaching courses, being a teaching assistant, and/or being a research assistant. You also want to look at the demographics of the graduate students, and decide if you are comfortable with how diverse they are in social, economic, and even ethnic backgrounds. This is a sensitive issue, but it's not one you want to be surprised with a year into your program.
Your visit to a graduate school will be exciting and exhausting. You might be socializing with faculty and prospective and current grad students and taking walking tours of campus all day, and if you have done everything right you will be dead tired. Talk to everyone, even if you don't think you'll be working with them. Don't discount anyone you meet, especially not the secretaries, because they organize and run everything. Get a really good feel for the people, the campus, and explore the facilities they have (research laboratories, classrooms, library, dining hall, gym, local attractions). If you are in a group of prospective students, make friends with them. You'll see some or many of them again when you are admitted. Although you will be competing in a sense for spots in the program, the admissions committee and faculty will make the final call, so you may as well enjoy meeting the new faces. Being surrounded by thousands of students has given many professors a sense of which people are successful and sociable and which are not. So rather than aggressively competing
with your neighbor, just try to make a positive impression on those you want to work with.
In conclusion, a visit to your prospective school can be an invaluable experience for you, and can potentially mean the difference between an admission letter and a rejection letter. If you get the chance, go! What if you need to miss two days of class? Talk with your professors well in advance (more than two weeks) and discuss makeup arrangements with them. As the time approaches, remind them again so they don't think you've just skipped out. The grad students and professors who teach your section remember what the admissions process is like, and are probably going to be happy you're advancing your career and future.