<p>Title says it all... Please add stats if avelable :)</p>
<p>From Princeton, or to Princeton? I can shed light on the latter…</p>
<p>To princeton, I am guessing it is different compared to undergrad admissions… What counts as a good ec… What is in place of ap classes… What is a good GMAT score? Dose the sat matter… Some basic stuff like that. I would not know b/c I am a hs student… Please tell me what I should do asap as a freshman…</p>
<p>^^^ I mean GRE not GMAT… But if you took GMAT please share</p>
<p>I guess I can kind of answer this, but I don’t think my answer will be helpful in the vast majority of cases. The grad school admissions process is very different from the undergrad one in the sense that it absolutely matters what major you select. While it’s often good to have a major in mind when applying for undergrad admissions, it’s a necessity that you know what you’re getting into for graduate school. Further, the important parts of your application depend heavily on your field. For instance, take two potential graduate students (not necessarily Princeton applicants):</p>
<p>1) Adam, who wants to go into applied math
2) Leslie, who wants to go into law</p>
<p>Adam’s application, even with a 4.0 GPA from Good University, will almost surely get thrown out immediately if he doesn’t have any research experience under his belt. To get in, Adam needs, in approximate order of importance</p>
<p>a) Research experience. A publication or two in an accredited journal can do wonders for an application. However, research not resulting in a publication looks great as well.
b) Letters of recommendation. These oftentimes follows directly from (a), in that the best recommendation(s) Adam can get will be from the person/people he worked with. The fact that said professor(s) witnessed Adam’s research potential gives their recommendation a lot of credibility. Recall that because Adam in graduate school, Adam’s focus will be almost entirely centered on research (mostly with his adviser[s]), so the graduate programs want to know that they’re accepting someone who won’t be wasting their time (graduate students oftentimes get paid to attend, so they cost kind of a lot).
c) Statement of purpose (graduate school equivalent of application essay). Here you list what you did, what you want to do, and who you want to work with in graduate school. They want to see that you’re a good match for the school and for the research faculty.
d) Courses taken (and grades). They want to know Adam knows (relevant) material beyond that subsubsubfield in which he’s doing research.
e) GRE (regular + subject test). A standard benchmark by which to compare students. In applied math, the GRE subject test isn’t overly applicable (lots of pure math in there), but it’s still important not to bomb it.</p>
<p>ECs aren’t nearly as important as they are for undergrad applications. Any additional recognition (particularly external funding!) is very good, and where it falls in importance depends on both the qualities of the recognition and the reviewer of the application.</p>
<p>As for the details of Leslie’s application… I don’t really know them that well (I’m in STEM myself), but it’s clear that there are some major changes to be made from the above checklist.</p>
<p>Firstly, unless I’m terribly mistaken, we can cross (a) off Leslie’s list of importance. Law just isn’t that type of field. The standardized test category (LSAT, in this case) ends up taking a great leap of importance in her application. Strangely, the courses Leslie has taken don’t need to correlate with her choice of field: I believe I heard at one point that physics is one of the majors that feeds the most students into Harvard Law (supposedly, they’re searching for students with the best critical thinking skills, as opposed to those with the most background). How important recommendations and other factors are is beyond me.</p>
<p>In summary, it is much more important to look into what is sought in your specific field than it is to research the university (though do look up the research of the relevant faculty in great detail!). My advice at this point: get into research. This is something many people (myself included) don’t quite realize the importance of until it’s too late (thankfully, it ended up working out for me). Everything beyond that is secondary (yes, yes… do well in your classes, but research takes priority). Check in with your undergrad adviser occasionally to see that you are on the right track and, most importantly, try to enjoy the ride =).</p>
<p>(By the way, a good site for discussion regarding graduate admissions can be found here: <a href=“http://forum.thegradcafe.com/[/url]”>http://forum.thegradcafe.com/</a> . If you wish, browse through the different posts to see what types of things people consider strong or weak in the reviewed applications.)</p>
<p>^^^thank you… Me personally…
double majoring in Aerospace eng and Astronomy at penn state and going for a ms or phd at Princeton… would I have time to do research?</p>
<p>Make time. Simple as that. Even something like an RA positin that results in no publications or a senior thesis is extremely valuable. I myself had nothing more than a senior thesis.</p>
<p>cesium55 gave a lot of good advice that I won’t repeat but just a few things. First, at least in the hard sciences, math, and economics (my field), the statement of purpose likely has less importance. Usually, the statement will just be used to determine if your research interests match up with faculty strengths. Just as an example from my field, writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning essay on why you want to do macroeconomics research at Caltech will land you in the auto-reject pile because Caltech doesn’t have any macro
faculty. Northwestern’s website goes so far as to say that it’s almost a non factor. Now, these are two examples from economics but I think they illustrate a point. Certainly don’t neglect your statement, I went through plenty of revisions and edits on mine.</p>
<p>GRE scores are tricky to gauge. The top science, math, econ, and engineering programs expect 780-800 on the math so getting lower will only hurt you. The verbal section is sometimes used as a tiebreaker but it depends on your department. In your case, just get the 800 on math.</p>
<p>Finally, coursework is very important, especially in the sciences. The strong applicants to Princeton and the other top schools while have multiple graduate courses and they’ll have A’s in them. You have to take as many advanced courses as you can, and you have to do well in them. I am willing to say that my coursework is what got me into grad school (I’m sure my recs were pretty good but even talking to other admitted students they were impressed with what I had taken).</p>
<p>So double majoring is not as good as single majoring and having tons of research?</p>
<p>Why not do both? Oftentimes, double majoring generally isn’t a huge commitment over getting a single major (though aero and astronomy might not have too many courses in common, so I could be wrong in your case). Almost all of the people I talked to who got into top grad schools double majored in applicable fields while doing research, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to do the same =).</p>
<p>I doubled Iin math and economics; they complemented each other nicely.</p>
<p>Thank you very much… Now concentrating on the people you know who got into Princeton, I want to know how hard it is to get a PHD at princetion</p>
<p>You mean completed the program? You’re not going to find much help with that on this forum but Ph.D. programs are extremely difficult no matter where you go. Princeton does however have a pretty low attrition rate, so it seems like those admitted have a pretty good chance of finishing.</p>
<p>^^^ 10q…
;
…</p>
<p>wow, cesium55, that was a very helpful post, thank you very much! :)</p>
<p>Anyone able to bit cesium55?</p>
<p>I provided a fair bit of information above… Any other questions you have?</p>
<p>
Hi. I couldn’t answer your question about students who completed it there, since the only Princeton Ph.D. I know was my BS/MS adviser at a different school (RPI… which is not in Rochester). At this point I’m just an incoming grad student :>.</p>
<p>If you have any other questions, though, maybe I could answer those (ex. process, GREs, etc).</p>
<p>Sorry for the double post. The following was supposed to be an edit, but somehow something got messed up and now I can only post a reply.</p>
<p>Actually, since you asked about GREs before, I can tell you everything I know (which is at least applicable to math/cs students, but probably most of the STEM fields). Note that I never really got a book to study from, so everything I have here is just based on my testing experience.</p>
<p>1) Like the SAT, the general GRE consists of three parts. They are (in order on the test):
a) Analytical Writing. There are two parts to this: the issue task and the argument task. The pool of questions for the issue task can be found at [GRE</a> General Test: Analytical Writing “Issue” Task Topics](<a href=“http://www.ets.org/gre/general/prepare/sample_questions/analytical/issues/]GRE”>http://www.ets.org/gre/general/prepare/sample_questions/analytical/issues/) . Studying these potential questions isn’t necessary (I don’t consider myself a phenomenal writer and I got a perfect score), but it probably won’t hurt to glance over and get a feel for what you’re going up against. The argument task is completely different from the SAT: it’s there to check that you can analyze an argument, see through its pitfalls, and rationally describe these logical errors (and likely how to fix them) in polynomial time. That this is included is a good thing for STEM people like us, because our college career is largely about examining arguments. Note: these essays have one human and one computer grader, so it might not hurt to go for slightly longer sentences to fool the computer (see [Flesch?Kincaid</a> readability test - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Flesch–Kincaid readability tests - Wikipedia”>Flesch–Kincaid readability tests - Wikipedia) ). This is pure speculation, though, so I could be completely wrong. I can’t tell you anything about the importance of this portion of the test, though. I could see it as either being important (can you write comprehensible papers?) or completely irrelevant to your application.</p>
<pre><code>b) Verbal. This section is mostly vocabulary based. I highly recommend you get a large set of flash cards to study from, because you will do poorly otherwise. Even with the large amount of studying of vocab, I still got murdered on that section, scoring hundreds of points lower than I did on the SAT (on which I got nearly perfect). Also, don’t bother studying Latin/Greek roots, as almost all of the vocabulary tested is unrooted (at least on my test =( ). However, seeing as almost everyone takes a beating on this section, scores as low as the upper 500s are still plenty good (a 600 would be in the 86th percentile, which is good considering that your only competition will be science/engineering nerds and the schools don’t really care about your knowledge of English trivia).
c) Quantitative. I thought this part’s a complete joke, but some people still have trouble nonetheless. The math goes through the end of what you’d see in highschool precalc (and the question difficulty is slightly easier than that in the SAT Subject test 2c), and the questions aren’t particularly difficult. As long as you keep your cool and don’t lose track of time, you should be getting a perfect or near-perfect score. That said, if you don’t score in the upper 700s, you’re likely going to be at a disadvantage during the application process, so be sure to score well.
</code></pre>
<ol>
<li>Like with the SAT, there are subject GREs. Unlike the SAT, the number of these you need to take will almost surely be either 0 or 1. Whereas I didn’t take any tests (the compsci test is more like a computer engineering exam, so many CS programs don’t request it), my two roommates (going into applied math) ended up taking the math test. Judging by the content of the math subject test, the GRE subject tests are no joke. Scores go up to 990, but you need to <em>really</em> know your stuff to score 900+ on these, and you must be an absolute monster at your field to score even close to 990. If needed, I recommend beginning your studying for this test extremely early, as having a bad score can ruin your application (a good score can probably help a lot, too… but I only know of cases where brilliant students go to their second-choice schools because of their GRE subject test scores).</li>
</ol>
<p>what if I am a minority and need a large financial aid package? Would that hurt me. how can I get to know the professors before I apply?</p>
<p>Most departments, especially at Princeton, give full funding if you’re admitted so financial need is probably not much of an issue. However, if you have an outside source of funding, such as NSF, it helps your chances.</p>
<p>I don’t know how much being a minority will help you. It certainly won’t help you but I think it’s probably less of a factor than in undergrad admissions. Looking at the grad school admissions statistics, the minority admit rate is typically the same, or lower than the overall rate so don’t count on this as a huge benefit.</p>
<p>Talk to professors whom you took classes with and did well in, and/or professors with research interests similar to your own. Some of them will be more than willing to help, others will not. Ask who is looking for research assistance. Professors are not going to come to you-you have to be proactive.</p>