I’m going into my Junior year at a Public university & wanted to know some advice to increase my chances of being qualified (& have a shot) of attending an Ivy school for my Grad degree(s).
Of course people might mention, “get good grades,” but I need something more specific than the usual vague suggestions. I don’t expect a perfect: “do these things and you’re in”
Just stuff to have in mind & use as incremental goals while I still have some school left to do.
It may be that an Ivy League school is not the best for your grad degree. You should research departments, rankings and professors. Just do you work as best you can and see where you land. Make sure to talk with your professors and peers as well to get a feel for where the best programs are in your field.
Came here to say this. Oftentimes rankings within a particular field are not what you’d expect. Sometimes publics outrank Ivies - it depends on the field.
As for what you can do: get good grades, do research, have profs who can give you recs, study for the entrance exam, know the lay of the field. It’s not complicated like undegrad admisssions.
It really depends on the field. Many grad schools want to see some professional experience in their applicants. You can successfully apply to law school or med school straight out of undergrad but it’s almost unheard of to get into a highly ranked business school without a few years of experience. Public Health, Education, Public Policy and many other fields are somewhere in between.
In any case get as much exposure to the field as possible by participating in internships, research, volunteer, summer jobs or other work. Not only will they help beef up your resume but they’ll help you home in on what you want to do and why.
Get to know your professors. The more they know and like you the better the possibility they’ll write you a positive recommendation. Depending on the field (for instance academic fields like mathematics or history) and who the rec. is from this can be one of the most important elements of your application. When I worked in a doctoral program at an Ivy League U. many moons ago and sat in on the admissions committee I would sometimes hear people say things like “Joe Professor at Peer University says this kid’s really bright. I gave him a call and he convinced me to take a chance on her.”
For the record, I agree with @Compmom. An Ivy League school will not automatically be the best in your field so make sure to research all your choices. Work with the grad school advisor(s) at your school to identify appropriate target schools and strategies for applying. Most schools will work with alumni even years after graduation so they can be a great resource.
Another resource is alumni working in the field you want to pursue. See if your school has a shadowing program that will hook you up with alumni. Not only can it be helpful in the short run, but it can help you increase your contacts in the field.
Also grad students at your own school may be helpful. @Sue22 's suggestion of alumnae/i is an excellent one.
Firstly, thank you all for your feedback. To give you a better idea of what I have going on: I will be getting my B.A. in Linguistics. That degree by itself doesn’t really say anything about anything, so specializing is pretty much a necessity. I want to do Computational Linguistics &/or Language Acquisition (software programs), but essentially it all is a form of A.I.
I have googled top LING schools a million times over the last couple years and have seen plentyyyyyyyyyyyyy of prestigious schools rule the rankings list. MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berk, Oxford, NYU, and more. I wouldn’t apply to a random high caliber school that didn’t have a great ling department or specialization of my field.
But, it was always a dream of mine to go to Oxford, but I didn’t know how to prepare myself for it in high school & let that dream drift away. I don’t need to leave the U.S., but want to prepare myself to apply to the highest programs I can, knowing that at the very least, I will always land a great option, but I don’t know any strategies because nobody in my family understands the college process in general.
Are you interested in academic jobs? If so, what I was told in my former field (Classics) is that British PhDs are not as valued in the US because they do not involve as much preparatory coursework but go into research sooner. Then again my adviser was an Oxford PhD and he got tenure, so that perception is not insuperable.
Your aiming high is a good thing. If academia is the aim again, it’s better to not go to grad school than to go to a non top 10 in your field.
I don’t know as much about industry unfortunately. But like I said, grad school admissions are relatively straightforward. Grades, test scores, prof recommendations, research, that’s about it.
You are doing all the right things (except your headline, which implies that you want one of 8 specific schools, when your post says you are looking more broadly at prestigious schools that are strong in your subject!).
As others are asking: is your goal academia or industry? are you looking for a Masters or PhD program?
If you are looking at a Master’s program, look at the program and faculty expertise to see the ones that are exciting to you, then look at where program grads tend to go- sector / industry / etc. It’s not a deal breaker, but it can help you target your application list, as well as tailor your app to the strengths of the program.
If you are looking at a PhD program, fit will matter even more: you will want to know the research focal areas well enough to have some rough ideas as to who you might want as your supervisor. Collegekid2 id’ed a couple of potential supervisors at each uni she applied to. She felt it helped shape her Research Statement, as she was able to link her experience to things that they were doing. For my PhD apps I pulled up the list of department research interests at the unis I was interested in, highlighted all the ones that I thought sounded interesting, and looked up the profs associated with each. At one uni, all but 2 were the same prof, so I went ahead and made an appointment- pre-application- to meet that prof. Talked about current research in the dept. Ended up being the only program I applied to- the fit was that good -and that prof became my supervisor.
I’m not trying to become a professor. The most teaching I would want to do would be abroad in Asia or occassional workshops. I want to be in the more computer side of ling. I wouldn’t be getting a Master’s IN linguistics, but rather in a subject that can be paired with linguistics, but preferably has a notable ling department, so those resources are available to me and I have people’s brains to pick that are experts. I don’t intend on getting a PhD at the moment because it’s too far off for me to say and my field wouldn’t necessarily need it, but getting a Master’s and knowing that’s still an option, is a great thing to keep in mind.
That’s a good idea to look up supervisors
Harvard pops up a ton for Linguistics & Yale/Princeton have apparently great Computational Linguistics — the purpose was to reach for the highest and at the worst, fall amongst the lower-greatness. The location of the Ivies is part of my allure, but it’s not the sole area that I need to be. Stanford, here in California is also very high in that department while only being a drive up north for a few hours. Same with Berkeley. Then of course, I have UCLA near me, so I would have no problem going there if I got in, but I want the experience of the old historic universities that have a totally different atmosphere than here in California.
Since I have not finished my B.A. yet, I don’t want to give myself tunnel vision. I mostly wanted some loose form of “checklist” if you will, about how to standout. I didn’t know how to look competitive going from high school to college, just knew I wanted to pass all my honors/AP classes and had a lot of extracurriculars that were joyful but not Major-related. I didn’t realize any of the strategies people had to get into top schools. I thought you were obviously the smartest kid and went & the rest of us “smarter than average” kids went wherever we could. Not sure why I thought that. So now I want to know I did everything I could to feel my grad application has a chance rather than just settling for whatever happens
For ease of reading:
Ah, okay, it’s really going to depend on what you want to do your masters in. Many Ivy-type schools will not offer terminal masters degrees, but only hand them out when you bounce out of a PhD program.
The challenge of grad school is becoming informed enough about what you are really interested in to be able to choose a program that fits- without, as you noted, getting too narrow too early- especially when you are looking at a boundary-crossing field. I hadn’t realized that started with CS, and are now adding linguistics, so you will need some linguistics classes to help you work out what you find most interesting!
Grad school admissions is different-and in some ways easier than undergrad, because it is more specialized. For a masters program, it is going to be grades (overall and major specific), test scores (where relevant), LoRs and your Statement of Purpose (how t
This time next spring look at grad school at the details of programs / outcomes.
Like choosing ECs in HS that were joyful to you, when you look at the details of masters programs look for the ones that make you think ‘ooohh- that would be interesting!’ Collect those into a pile and after you have a group go back through them looking for commonalities.
Follow what is most interesting to you. It may take you to that ivy-covered Ivy you have been dreaming of! but even then- you want the ivy-covered Ivy that is truest to what you find interesting, and you only figure that out by focusing on what’s actually in the programs. This is much more important for grad school than for undergrad, which is (in the US) designed to be a relatively general program.
Emily Bender, a prof of computational linguistics at UWa, wrote an article about comp ling & grad school- my post got bounced back for putting the link in but if you do a search for the topic you should find it.
“Computational Linguistics &/or Language Acquisition (software programs), but essentially it all is a form of A.I.”
You can go to graduate school straight from getting a bachelor’s degree, or you can work for a few years in between. My personal feeling is that you need to be pretty sure that you know what you want to go to graduate school for before you do it. Working makes the most sense if you can find a job that relates to your desired field.
Either going straight to graduate school of finding an appropriate “intended major related” job can be easier to do if you get to know professors as an undergraduate student, and if you get to participate in related research or internships or coop programs. Professors will be writing your recommendations, but might also know of appropriate jobs or know of appropriate schools that you might want to consider for graduate school.
I think that there is a pretty high overlap between the best universities for AI and the best universities for computer science. MIT comes to mind, along with Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, and Washington. I would expect some schools in the UK to be strong, along with some universities in Canada.
Of those schools, it looks like CMU, Stanford and Cal might offer full-time MS in CS programs. MIT does not offer one separate from the PhD program and UW’s is part-time.
@collegemom3717 Thank you for that response! You said a lot of helpful info to keep in mind. I will try to find that article if I can
@DadTwoGirls Yea, I probably wouldn’t go directly to Grad school, because I know a lot of them prefer you to have experience and I can only do so much research in 2yrs. One of the public universities I was accepted to offers a certificate in CompLing, that seems enticing or I can choose to Minor in CpuSci. I never really got to any of the important CpuSci classes before transferring, because I figured out in my 3rd quarter that I was going to switch majors and focused on my GEs so I could properly transfer. So, idk if doing the certificate in a specific field is better than doing the CS minor, since I don’t plan on doing general CS…
This is good to keep in mind, even though I am not getting my masters in CS. It seems like it would be better if I was double majoring rn in CS
It’ll be a similar situation in whatever field you choose. Terminal master’s can be hit or miss, but sometimes there’s a lucky surprise.