<p>Ok, lets pretend that I went to Stanford for my undergraduate years in, lets say engineering. Now, I do well there, but not as well as others who are competing to get into Stanford's graduate program. Because I already went to Stanford for 4 years as an undergrad, does this give me a leg up in my admissions chances? If they know I am a good student, we will say 3.5 GPA, is it much easier to get in than say a student from another school with a higher GPA?</p>
<p>Logically I would think that it helps a lot, but then again, I don't know the graduate admissions process.</p>
<p>My hunch says the benefit you'd get is in being better known to the faculty sitting on the graduate department which would accept you. </p>
<p>Do they have loyalty to their own undergraduates simply because you went to school there? I sincerely doubt that. It's probably just that the faculty there is aware of exactly what you faced as an undergraduate, and so is better able to put your achievements in context.</p>
<p>it totally depends on the school, and I don't know about stanford in particular. I know that Princeton accepts almost none of its undergrads for the grad school, you need to have a very specific reason to want to stay. They want you to go out and be exposed to more faculty and different places so as to add to your network.</p>
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But if you were an exceptional student in your faculty, wouldn't the professors in admissions want you to stay? My guess is yes...
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<p>It really depends. As ec1234 points out, many refuse to accept their own undergrads because they want them to have better exposure/connections. This is less true in engineering/CS, where the majority of the grads will likely not go into academia. It is very true for humanities/social sciences.</p>
<p>The best way to know is to look at the number of grads they have taken from their own undergrad, and find out what their stats were.</p>
<p>When I was an undergraduate at MIT I loved it. I thought it was a great place, and I wanted to go to graduate school there too, of course. But when I went to Professor Slater and told him of my intentions, he said "We won't let you in here."</p>
<p>I said, "What?"</p>
<p>Slater asked, "Why do you think that you should go to graduate school at MIT?"</p>
<p>"Because MIT is the best school for science in the country."</p>
<p>"You <em>think</em> that?"</p>
<p>"Yeah."</p>
<p>"That's why you should go to some other school. You should find out how the rest of the world is."</p>
<p>. . . . I learned a lot of different things from different schools. MIT is a <em>very</em> good place; I'm not trying to put it down. I was just in love with it. . . . It's like a New Yorker's view of New York: they forget the rest of the country. And while you don't get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being <em>with</em> it and <em>in</em> it, and having motivation and desire to keep on --that you're specially chosen, and lucky to be there.</p>
<p>-- From "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! <em>Adventures of a Curious Character</em>" by Richard P. Feynman.</p>
<p>^That's true for some (but not all) of the science PhD programs at MIT, but not at all true of the engineering programs -- the most common graduate school destination of MIT undergraduates is MIT itself, because the engineering departments are vigorous inbreeders.</p>
<p>It completely depends on the program. In most (BUT NOT ALL) cases, your professors will want their best students to go to OTHER programs, even if theirs is terrific. This is because we want our best students to be exposed to other professors, other methods, other ideas. </p>
<p>Let me oversimplify by putting it this way: The optimal outcome for my best students is that they become better than I am. They cannot do that if they are mentored by me alone.</p>
<p>It differs by field. In my opinion for engineering, advisors love for students to stay for the Masters and gain additional training but want them to leave for their doctorate in order to gain a different perspective.</p>
<p>Hmm so here's what I know specifically about Chemical Engineering at Stanford</p>
<p>1-Getting into the co-terminal masters degree if you're an undergrad at Stanford isn't as hard as getting in for masters somewhere else. I know one person who got in with a GPA of 3.2 (he said at the time that that was there's cut-off number and that he barely got in...)</p>
<p>2-There's really now way you can get into the PhD program in ChemE at Stanford if you were a ChemE undergrad at Stanford.</p>
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It is very true for humanities/social sciences.
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<p>This is highly dependent on the school.</p>
<p>As a case in point, take economics. That's a social science. Yet both the Harvard econ and business-econ PhD programs are absolutely rife with former Harvard undergrads. The same could be said for numerous other Harvard humanities/soc-science departments.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, the more selective the graduate program is, the more likely its professors are to want the program's undergrads to broaden their experience and attend graduate school elsewhere.</p>
<p>pacman1, I know at least some departments at UCLA do love their undergradaute ( AKA, biochemistry, engineering ). Not sure other departments tho.</p>