Hello everyone, I am currently a high school senior who for financial reasons may end up attending Umass Boston next year. Ideally I would like to go to grad school for international relations or possibly law school. I was wondering how much of an influence your undergrad schools reputation would have on grad school admissions. I know Umass Boston compared to other Boston schools (BC, Tufts, BU, NEU) has less options in terms internships/co-ops, research, study abroad, leadership programs mainly due to it be a state commuter school (I.e. less funding and less engaged student body) . I’m just afraid that even with a good gpa, test scores, and recs I won’t be as competive as kids who went to some of the aforementioned schools. Thank you for your time and have a nice day.
P.S. I have family and friends who currently attend UMB and their experiences reaffirmed some of my concerns.
You can go to graduate school - a good graduate school, a top one even - from UMass-Boston.
Undergrad reputation has a small effect on admissions, but it’s not the way you might assume. It’s not the allure of prestigious names that are prestigious with people off the street - like “Ooh, Student A went to Harvard” or “Wow, Student B is at Amherst.” It’s about the level of familiarity with the program and college in preparing students for graduate study. Obviously many elite schools are well-known for that - there is, after all, a reason they are elite. But there are lots of other not-so-obvious places where faculty know that the students who come from there are well-prepared for graduate school. For example, I was a part of a lot of networks for students of color, and a lot of my grad school colleague in those networks - especially Latino colleagues - went to Cal State Northridge. They have a great psychology department and are known for preparing lots of diverse undergrad students for graduate study in that field. Two other places known for great departments in my field are SUNY Binghamton and SUNY Stony Brook, also regional public schools.
And that’s not to say that if your college isn’t known to faculty that they won’t accept you. It gives you a little leg up. But WHAT you do in undergrad is far, far more important than where you go. If you go to UMass-Boston, get great grades, do excellent research and foster great connections with your professors, you’ll be in better shape than a Yale or Swarthmore student who does none of those.
Also, one thing a lot of students might not know is that you don’t have to do research at your home university. I went to Spelman, which is located in Atlanta. There are great research opportunities there, but lots of my classmates went to do research at Emory, Georgia Tech and Georgia State professors - and CDC scientists - because those universities and institutions are so close. And when I was at Columbia as a grad student we often had CUNY students do research in our lab. So even if you attend UMass-Boston, if you see a professor at Harvard or MIT or Tufts or BC or BU or NEU or any of the other schools in the area that’s doing fascinated research - reach out to them and see if they would like a volunteer RA from UMass-Boston.
I’m afraid that I must disagree with the sentiment of the answers mooted in this thread for while I agree with the specific text of juilliet’s response, I would place a different spin upon the issue. I agree with her statement that “it’s about the level of familiarity with the program and college in preparing students for graduate study”, the truth of the matter is that many graduate adcoms will not be familiar with many lower-ranked programs. For example, to use her example of Cal-State Northridge that may very well have a stellar psychology undergrad program - I admit that I don’t know, for I’m not a psychologist - the unfortunate fact is that many top psychology PhD axioms may not be aware of that fact.
I also agree that what you do as an undergrad can indeed outweigh the brand-name power of other applicants. But the problem is that what you can realistically accomplish within your undergrad program is indeed heavily constrained by said program. To wit: while I agree with juilliet that if you can conduct and publish excellent research as an undergrad at, say, UMass Boston, you will certainly be on par or perhaps even superior to - competitors from name-brand programs, the sad fact is that that’s a huge if. The fact is that UMass Boston undergrads probably won’t be publishing research that is considered ‘excellent’. The assessment of research is a strong function of where one publishes, which is itself a function of one’s coauthors. The unfortunate truth is that many (probably most) faculty at Umass Boston are not routinely publishing in top journals. Their research is not heavily cited. Indeed, if such faculty were indeed publishing in top journals and/or were heavily cited, they would be leveraging that as the means to transfer to a higher-ranked university. Hence, given that the faculty themselves at such lower-ranked schools themselves are unlikely to be conducting ‘excellent’ research (in the manner that ‘excellence’ is defined by academia in terms of journal prestige and/or citation count), and given the importance of prestige of authorship collaboration regarding academia publishing, it frankly is unlikely for any particular undergrad at a school such as UMass Boston to be publishing research that is deemed to be ‘excellent’. One might disagree with that particular definition of ‘excellence’, but - whether we like it or not - that is the definition of excellence that prevails within academia. {Academic publishing is unfortunately an elitist enterprise, as much as we might wish otherwise.}
Actually, many students from liberal arts colleges, where faculty are not expected to have a competitive, funded research program are highly sought after for graduate school. Nowadays, with the large number of REU programs available to students, many can get meaningful research experiences outside their own university.
Indeed, there are graduate programs who may not scrutinize at all their graduate applicants individually because they have too many. However, any graduate admissions committee which excludes applicants based solely on their undergraduate institution is not serving its own best interests and they know it. They might exclude them based on GRE scores or GPA but once the cut is made, there is a very thorough process of evaluation. I have seen this from both sides as a faculty member writing reference letters for my advisees and as the director of graduate admissions for my department. My university is not one that everyone knows about and my department is small and therefore not highly ranked in the USNWR popularity contest rankings, however, our students have been accepted to many top physics programs over the years and that is because of their accomplishments.
