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<p>So true!! In fact, I think students should not be reading CC for advice on this, but rather go to their mentor. As so many things are field, and sub-field (and even ‘area of study’) specific. So very different than undergrad process.</p>
<p>I will add to what mini said, but clarifying that I am in a relatively large field but we also really know each other pretty well and there is a constant conversation among us about various things going on in the field, including gossip (who is moving where, what paper is getting the run around, whose student is on the market). And each year in the recruiting season, there is usually 1-2 hot candidates, that have applied to multiple top schools and ‘everyone’ knows of them and there is some good natured competition for those applicants. I’m grossly over-sipmlifying as its not all say 10,000 of us…nor does it involve all schools…but I mean more casual ‘word on the street’ kind of thing through our common network of people and schools, some schools being more connected to one another than others because of research commonalities. It could be mini speaks of a field that is distinctively small or (also?) that his offspring was this kind of ‘hot’ applicant. Also such applicants are remembered when they go on the job market.</p>
<p>But in my field all students are always funded (to varying degrees and with different obligations, depending upon the school), and everyone is going into academia and there are still tenure track jobs for everyone (no post docs needed).</p>
<p>“And no, parents should not “be seen” if they accompany their student on a visit”
Parents should not accompany them in the first place! Would you “accompany” your adult child on a job interview?? didn’t think so…
Any college educated person who is thinking about applying to grad school should be able to handle the trip themselves. There’s plenty of time for parents to visit later on…</p>
<p>In the physical sciences, at the top 50-100 universities (so cutting a very broad swath), it would be typical for students to visit before being accepted, and possibly even before applying. For one thing, a student’s interests are often narrow enough that a university will only have 3-4 professors in that particular field. So the student would be well advised to meet them, to see whether any of them seem like reasonable potential supervisors. Also, given the odds that the student will spend about 5 years in the Ph.D. program, a student would (usually) want to see the general area before committing, especially if the grad school is in an unfamiliar area of the country.</p>
<p>We will pay for prospective students to visit my university, even before they have been admitted. If they are traveling an unusually large distance, we sometimes ask them to visit another university in our general area, and we split the travel costs with the other place.</p>
<p>I more or less crossed Caltech off my list when I flew in to LA to look at it, and saw the intense brown haze extending for a long way above the city. This was during the summer after my junior year in college. Then, talking to a post doc I knew at Caltech, I heard about air alert days, and he mentioned that there were days when he couldn’t go running. The air quality has improved very substantially since then! If there had been a professor there that I especially wanted to work with (more than anyone else), the trade-off considerations might have been different. But you can’t know without visiting. Also, I had a chance to talk with current grad students at all of the schools I visited, and that was very helpful in reaching a decision. </p>
<p>I’ve never encountered a student’s parents during a grad school visit.</p>
<p>As mentioned, I think this is probably very field-dependent.</p>
<p>Just an addendum: In the physical sciences, graduate course work is actually a good idea. I think starbright is in management, economics, finance, or some related field? In a number of cases, our students need the graduate course background in order to make any meaningful contribution to research. Typically, they would take some graduate courses in the junior year (possibly just in the spring of that year), then work on research in the summer and during the senior year. They could participate to some extent in projects ahead of that, and many do, but their participation rarely advances the work itself until they’ve acquired a deeper background.</p>
<p>Another addendum: When I have a really good student who wants to work with a colleague of mine at a top school, I let the colleague know about the student.</p>