Grad school admissions

Graduate School
1

<p>I know that there have been countless threads trying to debunk the misconception that "where you go for undegrad plays a role in where you could go for grad." I think that the consensus I've come across contradicts that.</p>

<p>Yesterday I was browsing CC (NO WAY! :)) and came across a table for grad studies at UChicago showing where their undergrads go. All were tippy-top schools (jealous lol). I thought "in-breeding" was a fact until I saw this: the #1 destination for each division was, you guessed it, UChicago!!</p>

<p>Are there any readily-available lists out there for top grad schools showing where their grads came from? I plan to shoot as high as possible, like Ivies haha, even if that means having no life in undergrad.....I don't have one now, so why should I have one in the future?</p>

<p>Given where I'm unregretably going now (Beloit), do I have a shot at Ivies, assuming I take advantage of opportunities here? I want to go to a top school really bad haha.....it's important for my field, I've been told.</p>

<p>I'm just really worried that I'll end up at a state school, and that, to be frank, is not what I want.</p>

2

<p>Where you go for undergrad isn’t as important for getting into top grad schools as many people think. Depends on the type of degree and field, but if you want to do a PhD at School X and have good research experience and a decent gpa, you’ll get picked over the guy coming from Harvard with a slightly lower gpa and no research experience. Prestigious undergrad definitely gives a slight boost, but it is less important than gpa, gre, rec letters, research experience. That being said, coming from a school which has a known tough reputation (i.e., Georgia Tech) it could help you out vs someone with a higher gpa from a not so reputable school.</p>

3

<p>I suspect that the answer depends a lot on the discipline and the degree. (For example, universities seem to accept a lot of their own undergraduates for professional or Master’s degrees, but much less for PhDs.)</p>

<p>For math PhD programs, undergraduate origin seems to matter <em>a lot</em>. For example, in my year all American admits to the math PhD program at MIT spent their undergraduate years at a top 20 university in math (but did not necessarily have a degree from a prestigious university). The same is true for all of the current math PhD students at Stanford. Princeton Math goes even one step further and only admits students who are basically done with all of their graduate-level coursework before they even start grad school. (That’s because Princeton does not offer foundational first- and second-year graduate classes; only advanced topics classes on current research topics.)</p>

<p>I wonder if there’s a causal link behind the correlation. I would not be surprised if grad admissions was actually completely fair, and the top candidates all happen to be concentrated at a few “prestigious” universities. (For example, strong math students often distinguish themselves through math competitions in high school, which would give them a leg up in competitive college admissions. Once they are in college, a math major at an Ivy might get pushed more than his peer at an average university and come out of college way ahead.)</p>

4

<p>There aren’t any such lists.</p>

<p>You need to also remember that depending on the field, “the Ivies” may or may not be “the best” graduate programs. There are a good many fields for which the Ivies don’t even have research or graduate studies!</p>

5

<p>Many graduate programs will list their current graduate students, and some include mini biographies. I use this to see where the grad students at a program of interest came from, and I also peek at their CVs to see what kind of things they had achieved at the undergraduate level (can usually figure this out by the years of graduation and achievement, depending on how much information they include). I find this much more useful than program rankings when deciding whether I am competitive for the program. </p>

<p>It takes a lot of time to research prospective programs and advisors, but it is important to know as much as you can about the people who work at and attend the school, where they came from, and where they end up afterward to compare your own achievements and desired outcomes.</p>

6

<p>I know that there have been countless threads trying to debunk the misconception that “where you go for undegrad plays a role in where you could go for grad.”</p>

<p>No, there haven’t. I haven’t seen a single person here say that where you go to undergrad doesn’t play a role in grad school admissions.</p>

<p>Yesterday I was browsing CC (NO WAY! ) and came across a table for grad studies at UChicago showing where their undergrads go. All were tippy-top schools (jealous lol). I thought “in-breeding” was a fact until I saw this: the #1 destination for each division was, you guessed it, UChicago!!</p>

<p>Correlation does not equal causation, for a number of reasons.</p>

<p>1) You only used one university.
2) Students who are likely to go to a place like Chicago are more likely to plan on going to graduate school anyway, because they are driven, ambitious students from jump. Your student at the local public may have zero ambitions of going to graduate school. It’s not necessarily because his public will disqualify him; he simply does not want to go. Another thing is that peer group plays a role here - the kid who goes to Chicago is far more likely to have peers who intend on grad school than the kid at Eastern Michigan, so that may influence his decision as well. It doesn’t mean he can’t get into grad school from Eastern Michigan.
3) I think most schools have high numbers of their undergrads attending their grad school, unless they have an explicit policy against admitting their own. Their professors are already familiar with their work; they may have begun research on a long-term project that they can continue in their graduate study. They may be comfortable in their current location, having put down roots. That doesn’t mean that outsiders can’t get in, though.</p>

<p>I think undergrad college does have a small influence (aside from the environmental influences that motivate a student to go to grad school anyway), but that’s because certain departments and schools are known for their strength and/or turning out students who become successful graduate students. However, I don’t think that’s limited to the tiny crop of schools that CC tends to think of when they think of top schools. Professors usually have a much larger scope than that.</p>

<p>There are no such lists. Ivies are not the only places with top graduate programs - in many fields (including my own) many public flagships have the best programs (in my field, the #2 program is at Michigan, and other top programs are at Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, UCLA, UC-Berkeley, and UNC-Chapel Hill). So don’t make the mistake of focusing only on the Ivies, and definitely don’t turn your nose up at public universities.</p>

<p>Given that, I went to a small LAC in the top 100 and I got into an Ivy League PhD program in the top 20/top 10 in my field (I’m in an interdisciplinary program; it’s top 10 in one field and top 20 in the other). I had a life in college. I only had a 3.4 cumulative GPA, in fact. Beloit is a pretty well-known elite LAC and you should do just fine coming out of there.</p>