<p>Hi everyone! My friends told me that if one gets rejected by Stanford, he/she won't be able to enter its graduate school. Is that just rumor? </p>
<p>C'mon MythBusters!</p>
<p>Yup, just rumor.</p>
<p>The admissions in grad school are handled by individual departments. They don’t care what someone did 4 years ago.</p>
<p>complete rumor.</p>
<p>completely false… I know tons of people who didn’t get into Stanford Undergrad, but got into grad school here…</p>
<p>The opposite is actually well-known to be the case. It’s no secret that Stanford does not like to admit its own undergrads to its grad programs, in contrast to schools like Harvard, which admit them in droves. You can even google this - many of Stanford’s departments are very explicit about preferring non-Stanford undergrads. (Many schools have this policy, with the reason being that they want their undergrads to get a fresh perspective at another department, or else risk becoming entrenched in the paradigm of their undergrad department.)</p>
<p>So in fact, getting rejected from Stanford bodes better for your chances of getting in for grad school. And no, the departments do not have access to a database of who applied for undergrad, whether they got in, etc. since it’s not a criteria for graduate admission at Stanford.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, I will mention that I know people in Stanford’s Med School, Law School, and the GSB who were also undergraduates here. I’ve also met some people in various other graduate departments who did their undergrad here, and of course there are tons of co-terms who get their Masters’ along with their bachelors’ degrees, especially in CS. Stanford may prefer, like many research universities, to cross-pollinate with other schools for their grad student population, but they do admit their own undergraduates as well.</p>
<p>The same is for MIT, at least for the Biology department. Last summer I did research at MIT (I do not study at MIT) and I was told by some faulty members that they actually discourage MIT undergraduates from applying to MIT for graduate school, they want them to gain a “new” perspective from a different program.</p>
<p>Thanks everyone! This really assures me! My rejection from Stanford doesn’t seem that upsetting now~ :D</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, here’s another anecdote. I don’t have a degree from Stanford, but I used to work there, and one of the perks was that I could take discounted classes. So I ended up taking about a dozen, mostly graduate-level classes for interest.</p>
<p>One of the classes was a computational math class, which was taught by the director of the program. One day during a class break, the professor and I were yapping away about nothing in particular, and she mentioned that I’d be welcome to apply to her degree program. I joked that I probably wasn’t smart enough to get into Stanford, and she very seriously said that it was her program, her decision, and if I applied, I was in. (I never applied. I already have a grad degree from “Fight On” U.)</p>
<p>I guess the point of the story is that getting into a Stanford grad program isn’t necessarily a strict, rigorous process. I doubt that being denied admission as an undergrad would restrict your chances for graduate school there.</p>
<p>@simba9 Wow! So that means graduate applicants are reviewed by departments themselves ? That really gives me another view point.</p>
<p>
I would actually disagree with this statement quite strongly, at least for Mechanical Engineering. I don’t know the full breakdown of the department but there’s a fairly large amount of people in the MSME program who are “co-terms”, which is Stanford’s term for continuing on into grad school from undergrad.</p>
<p>That said, not getting in as an undergrad definitely doesn’t preclude you from getting in here for grad school.</p>
<p>^ true, I should have been more precise - outside of the coterm (which by definition draws on current undergraduates), Stanford doesn’t care much for its own undergrads.</p>