My son applied to 12(?) in one field one year then maybe 14 the next year in a different field.
My daughter applied to two. They were competitive but carefully chosen as good fits, through visiting and meeting with faculty and students- before applying.
Oh for the good old days. I applied to 2 PhD programs, accepted at both. Site unseen, no interviews. That was a few decades ago. (I also applied to several law schools and was accepted at all.) However, the institution where I spent most of my career did do interviews of doctoral admitted students. Since our department (social sciences) was very good but not top 10 it was important for us to bring admitted students to campus to allow them to meet faculty face-to-face, as well as to meet other prospective enrollees. This was also a time to bring up add-ons to financial aid offers.
Most of the programs D1 interviewed at involved what appeared to her to be a meeting with current lab students to gain the students’ perception of good fit. Now that she has been on the inside of the process, that was an accurate assumption on her part. Current grad students do give input to the decision makers.
I also only applied to 2. But I was married and my spouse wanted to keep his job so it needed to be in commuting distance.
And my parents were not involved in any way.
So far that has only happened for my D at one school. During the visit they offered her a bump from a TA to an RA position (a very desirable change for her), and also threw in health insurance (covered for RAs, but not TAs). And she needs health insurance, so that mattered to her. She still isn’t going there, though, because it did not outweigh the negatives of the program. I don’t know the average length for other PhD majors, but for experimental physicists, it is 6.4 years average. No way did my kid want to commit to that length in a department and location without a visit first. And the visits have been very revealing, especially about department culture (I believe the phrase “This is a race to bottom” was uttered by my D at one point partway through her visits). In some ways this mirrors her undergrad search. I think the school she may end up at wasn’t very high on her list going into visits, but the visit surprised and impressed her, while schools that looked good on paper weren’t so impressive in person.
One more bonus she discovered yesterday in carefully reviewing the current preferred school’s grad student handbook – she might get out of quals exams because of her fairly high Physics GRE score. She is very pleased at that idea, quals requirements have been making her nervous.
LOL, if my son was married I would hope not to be involved in any way!
I don’t know if you’re aware of the type of involvement of parents but it must vary considerably from one to another. I’ll share with you my involvement. It’s been hearing my son talk (when he’s home on break) about the programs he’s applied to. It’s being aware of visits because my son sends me a copy of his flight information and he uses my credit card to pay for it. Sometimes he sends me the schedule of activities for those visits (it appears exhausting…one or two days full of activities one after the other). At some point after his return he usually mentions what it was like and his general feeling about his visit. My involvement is having him let me know health insurance information that is provided for the program he’s accepted (so I can plan ahead to drop him from my health insurance which is only available in state. I have to notify my insurance two months in advance by snail mail prior to cancellation). It’s knowing his acceptance is out of state and planning to change ownership of the car he drives (I own it) into his name and get him on his own insurance policy before he and the car move out of state. We’ll be doing that during spring break.
Other than providing emotional support and buying her some nice outfits to wear to her interviews, I had no involvement in D1’s Ph.D application process.
My involvement in my daughter’s grad school application process has been the provision of much emotional support and offers to reimburse her for application fees and other expenses, from the raincheck she has for paying back her own student loans instead of accepting my offer to pay them back (as a gift).
Just to clarify I don’t think my daughter’s visits were interviews. She just went to look at two schools that she had already assessed as good fits, well before applying. I don’t think she ever had an interview.
My son had interviews with every visit. I recall the last one having 4 interviews scheduled one after the other, each lasting 30-40 minutes. Afterwards they went to lunch. Before/after they toured the labs and buildings, met grad students, etc.
Does your kid compare PhD completion rates among his/ her programs?
No.
The 2 that DS was choosing between have a 41% and 40% completion rate. He chose the 41% but I don’t think that was the deciding factor :). Having said that, I think the programs with <25% completion rates (and there are more than a few of them in his field) would have spooked me.
Also in regards to visits/interviews, the ones that DS went on actually included both accepted and not yet accepted students. He was fortunately one of the already accepted and had meetings/interviews with multiple professors but it seemed that was mainly to familiarize him with their work, and presumably to entice him to choose them. I expect the not yet accepted were actually being interviewed for possible acceptance. Seemed like it could be a bit of an awkward setup.
Are quals the same as prelims? I know that my H and my son-in-law were in doctoral programs (not in hard sciences, but social science) where everyone had to take prelims. The exams were required before a student could start his/her dissertation; the idea was that the exams would determine whether the student was ready for dissertation research. Students who didn’t pass were usually asked to leave the program and received a terminal Masters degree in H’s program. (Don’t know if this is still the case–H graduated a long time ago!!) My son-in-law’s program gives students a chance to retake a prelim, if he/she failed some part of it. Son-in-law is a current student who starts his dissertation work next year.
@intparent I got my Ph.D. in Physics 25 years ago. I passed my qualifier the first time through, but getting ready for that exam was brutal. I suppose in the end it somehow made me a better person. I would have done anything to avoid that experience. Good luck to your daughter.
Yup, same as prelims, but in Physics they seem to call them “qualifying exams”. Every program she looked at gives a couple of tries. Some break the exams into sections and allow passing partially, just retaking the sections you don’t pass.
Yes, qualifying exams are the same as prelims. I’ve never heard of anyone ‘placing out’ of quals but every school does it differently. I know that in Physics/math, lots of foreign nationals score very high on the subject GREs as that is almost considered a necessity coming from overseas. The average scores for american grads are significantly lower than internationals. Those who come in well prepared often take/attempt the quals earlier than those who need more coursework preparation.
DS has a friend who did not pass his quals within the 2 allotted attempts and left the program after 2 years. DS has multiple tries allotted and has to pass in 3 separate concentrations in the field. Another variation in the PhD programs to consider–one that he did not pay much attention to, that perhaps one should.
Wow, this has been eye opening. I did not realize science PhD programs had become so competitive. Good luck to all of your students!
At some schools, there are yearly meetings with the committee, qualms, Masters, thesis reviews, progress.