<p>When applying to roughly 10-12 graduate programs, how did you decide how many schools to visit? Are visits really that important or provide any additional insights? </p>
<p>Did you visit just your top choices, or just those close to home? Did you only visit schools when you were offered an interview? </p>
<p>I'm trying to create a budget and make sure I am putting aside enough money to apply to roughly 10-12 schools, on top of GREs/GMAT and cost of transcripts from 3-4 schools. I'm also trying to figure in how much I'll want to spend on traveling to visit a few schools (probably my top choices, or those I think I have the best chance with). I'd like to know whether visiting the schools really had any effect on which you chose? Could you sense the atmosphere of the program, or did you contact people through e-mail to get that information?</p>
<p>I won’t be visiting any schools before interviews. None of the schools are in my state, I’m pretty busy, and the application process is expensive enough. I’ll visit if/when I get any interviews. I certainly see the benefits of visiting and meeting professors before hand, it’s just not feasible for me this year.</p>
<p>I’m doing the same thing as Virions; nothing. Lol. </p>
<p>Visiting schools is a positive factor in an admission decision, but it requires more energy/time/money than I see worth spending. I’m sure the majority of applicants get accepted without pre-interview visits. On top of that I think it looks like you’re trying too hard, especially if you didn’t happen to “just be in the area” or “have a friend in the same program who you were visiting.” Personally, I get pretty nervous and will let fate decide. I’m not the one to instigate because if it backfires (as in they actually don’t like me), I’d never live it down. Haha.</p>
<p>Well I’m wondering whether a visit, such as attending an open house, might provide some insights that would cause me to perhaps reconsider applying to the school at all. It is a place I would be living for 4+ years, so the atmosphere is as important to me as the strength of the program. I’m just wondering if visits actually provide that information, or if people are happy even at schools they’ve never seen before. I would also consider where I would be living, the surrounding city, and whether I would actually enjoy living in that location. </p>
<p>But as both of you said it is expensive so I don’t know if I’d really have the money…of course, it’s hard to figure out how much I’d need to save if I do get called for an interview, unless they do phone interviews or none at all.</p>
<p>Fair enough, but if the cost to visit is more than the cost to apply, it’s **definitely **not worth visiting - Apply, wait for an interview, and then decide if you like the school or not. </p>
<p>Scenario 1: If you visited and decided you didn’t like it, well you could’ve figured that out had you just applied and a) got rejected b) got an interview</p>
<p>Scenario 2: If you visited prior *and *went for an interview, you just blew twice as much money. </p>
<p>See what I mean? Again, this is assuming the travel/visiting cost is roughly equal to your application/materials.</p>
<p>Initially I was planning to visit 3 schools; I ended up visiting 7 after a last-minute panic attack two weeks before the April 15 reply deadline. All of my visits happened after I got accepted, with airfare and hotel paid by the departments.</p>
<p>Denizen - Well, at least 3-4 of the schools are within reasonable driving distance from my house, so I think applying to them would cost more than visiting and hating them, and thus not applying. There’s really just one school where the surrounding city is quite questionable…I’m not sure I would feel safe living there, so I may want to spend a day getting to know the area before I’d scratch it off my list. </p>
<p>b@r!um - I guess it would make more sense to visit after receiving any acceptances, if there was enough time to plan to do so before they needed my decisions. Did the visits help you narrow your choices, or did the financial offers bear more weight?</p>
<p>Then it’s worth it to check out these schools.</p>
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<p>But be careful. First impressions can be misleading. Don’t be quick to eliminate it just because you don’t like the surrounding area. Every city has its dangerous or boring parts. Ultimately choose based on the program/faculty. </p>
<p>All of the schools on my list so far have faculty that I would love to work with. But my list is longer than what I will realistically be able to apply to. So finding programs that have a good atmosphere and a reasonable place to live is important for me to narrow down the number of schools I’m applying to. I am not sacrificing faculty research fit for nice schools, just that I have too many I really like =/ And I think I have a decent spread as far as likelihood of acceptance…not that anything is ever guaranteed, but I would expect to get into at least <em>one</em> of the schools on my list.</p>
I made my final choice 100% based on my impression during the visits. All 7 of the schools I visited gave me decent funding offers and had interesting research groups. </p>
<p>MIT got scratched off my list because all of the grad students looked depressed and over-worked. At another school the grad students seemed a bit too happy and not terribly interested in their studies. (The finishing PhD students seemed to have a really hard time getting jobs too; I visited in April and half of them still didn’t have any firm post-graduation plans.) Two schools got scratched off the list because I did not mesh with my potential research advisers. One school got eliminated because 2 of the 3 professors who I was the most interested in working with told me in confidence that they might be leaving in 1-2 years.</p>
<p>The program I chose in the end was love at first sight: I really liked the faculty, the grad students seemed very committed to their studies and still had a social life, the program has a very strong placement record for their graduate students, the location is awesome and the university provides a ton of free resources to its students (which did not exist at my previous college). And I am very happy with the choice I made.</p>
<p>I didn’t visit any schools until I had acceptances in hand. Being a master’s applicant, I didn’t get funding for the visits… but I was frugal and basically turned it into a whirlwind of travel across the country… literally, as I left work in Juneau, Alaska, flew to St. Louis and then hopscotched from Columbia, Mo. to Bloomington, Ind., Syracuse, N.Y. and finally Orono, Maine.</p>
<p>The four schools I visited were finalist candidates - Maine had already extended a funding offer and Missouri, Indiana and SUNY-ESF had discussed it as a strong possibility. I interviewed with my faculty of interest at all four and really hit it off well everywhere. Missouri offered me on the spot and Indiana made an offer within a week. Unfortunately, SUNY-ESF wasn’t able to come up with funding… which is a pity because the professor’s research was right up my alley.</p>
<p>As with barium, the school I chose was also love at first sight. Indiana has a well-respected program and the minute I set foot in Bloomington, I knew it was the right place for me to spend the next two years - stunningly beautiful campus, an extraordinary college town, easy to get around, reasonably-priced housing and the ability to continue my cheap car-free lifestyle. It was very tough to turn down Maine and Missouri because there were strong pieces there too. (Maine’s funding was the best of the three, interestingly enough. But it really isn’t all about the money. Orono was too small for my tastes.)</p>
<p>I mainly visited schools during interviews as I was working across the country and didn’t have the time/$/vacation days to randomly visit. There were two schools that I visited extra because I was on vacation in the area and had appointments with professors.</p>
<p>My impression of open houses is that they are specifically for undergrad so I don’t think they’ll be much use for grad students. If you’re close to a school you are applying to you can email a few of the professors and let them know you’re in the area and ask to meet with them. I did that for two schools when I was on vacation and actually did meet with two professors to talk about their work. But I also got the brush off from a few others, so YMMV.</p>
<p>I only applied to PhD programs, so I was already expecting to be flown out to any school that wanted to interview me. Only one of the 11 schools I applied to was within driving distance, so visiting beforehand wasn’t really an option.</p>
<p>I ended up flying out to 7 schools: airfare, taxi, hotel, meals, and miscellaneous covered all seven times.</p>
I can’t speak for other fields, but most (selective) math departments have Open Houses for admitted graduate students. I assume these events are less common in fields where interviews are part of the admission process, because it wouldn’t make sense to fly applicants out twice.</p>
<p>Once, that was all i needed to be convinced that’s where I wanted to be. And then I went a second time, for an information session-like event that helped us choose our courses and meet future students and faculty.
I say go for it, you want to make sure that’s where you want to spend the next however many years your program is.
For some, that involved one visit, for others, it may be four/five times before their convinced/comfortable.
I say go with your gut. If you’ve got the feel for it, skip i</p>
<p>I visited 3 schools before applying. One of them was local, one was tacked-on to an expense-paid conference, and one (Michigan engineering) had a program in which they paid prospective students to visit campus. I ended up applying for all three.</p>
<p>I think they were valuable (especially since I didn’t have to pay for any). I got to speak to faculty at two of the visits, and some of them (as well as current grad students) offered me application advice. I think it’s worth visiting the local schools if you have the time.</p>
<p>10-12 schools isn’t too big of a list. After a couple applications you’ll find it pretty easy to tailor the SoP to apply for another school.</p>
<p>@b@r!um Ah, I see. In the biosciences they mainly just do interviews or they have an open house in Feb/March if they do a straight up admission (like Rockefeller), but there aren’t usually general open houses for interested applicants.</p>
<p>Just wait to see where you get in and then decide. Top programs usually cover a sizable portion of the travel and hotel costs for the flyouts. Even then, some are bound to overlap so you’ll have to decide which ones you want to attend. I believe you should worry about getting in first, then worry about where you want to visit. In my case, I had plans to go to 3 flyouts (2 as a wait listed applicant and 1 as an admit-some schools that wait list you will still invite you and cover the costs) but once I got my final admit, I completely cancelled one trip because I had no plans of going there and decided against another because of an overlap in days. So wait to see what happens, then decides where to visit.</p>