Visiting grad schools

<p>Perhaps this thread will be useful to other readers planning visits to their grad programs. This is the first grad school I will visit and I'm interested to learn from others' experience</p>

<p>For those who have had good, effective visits to new campuses: How many days should I plan on being in the city? How many of those days should be spent on campus? What are the most important things to do at the university? </p>

<p>I have thought about: sitting in on one or two classes; speaking with enrolled students and arranging times to talk with the two professors I'm most interested in working with; visiting the library; generally looking at the town; and walking through nearby neighborhoods to get a sense of where I could live if I do enroll. Is there anything else I should be doing?</p>

<p>I'm interested in this topic too.</p>

<p>I'm an undergraduate student hoping to visit graduate schools before I apply. So I cannot actually give any advice based on my experience. However, I would spend 1 or 2 days on the campus and 1 day in the city in case of my top-choice schools.</p>

<p>Also, what I think is important is visit the admission office to know the atmosphere of the admission staff (even though I may not be able to meet a member of the admission committee).</p>

<p>One question lastly. How can I arrange to talk with the professors with whom I am interested in working and do not have any relationship? Is it like to try sending them emails?</p>

<p>Sometimes you can coordinate meetings with professors via the admissions office, but I've had really good experiences getting in touch with professors personally via e-mail (and even phone calls down the line). It's given me a chance to introduce myself and get to know them and their background and then get into arranging a meeting when the time comes to go visit the school. The great thing about that too is that the more you are able to stay in contact with some people, the more likely they are to remember you when in fact you do arrange a visit AND during the application admissions process (it's never a guarantee, but anything you can do to stand out from the other gazillion applicants shows initiative and helps your cause). Showing interest in a program and a professor's research/background etc. really is a good way to demonstrate beyond what the school has on paper who you are and why you want to be in the program.</p>

<p>I know it's probably not always possible at every school for every program to do this, but it never hurts to try... and establish contact as early as possible into your interest in the program. Hope this helps.</p>

<p>(I'm sorry if this is not the right place to continue talking specifically about visiting professors.)</p>

<p>Ramy906:
Thank you for sharing your experience. I have arranged to visit some professors to talk about graduate work. Your story encouraged me :)</p>

<p>So now, I am wonderging what I can/should ask professors. I have thought about some topics such as if the department has, or is planning to have in the near future, a research group in the particular field of my interest. I came up with several other questions like this about research. But I somehow feel there should be more possible topics to talk about. So what do you think is the most important thing to discuss when visiting professors?</p>

<p>I think the most important thing is to discuss what they are currently working on...I've had one phone conversation with my potential advisor already and he spent a lot of time talking about the new lab and what results are being produced from it.</p>

<p>Another thing to be sure to ask is how long it historically takes their students to complete their degree objective. This is very important to know when you are committing to a graduate program. I would actually ask this of the advisors current students because if they are having a terrible experience, they will certainly steer you clear of the department/advisor (at least I have been trying to do that with my current advisor). </p>

<p>Another must ask is what projects they have lined up funding for the next couple of years. Funding is a must for most disciplines, so making sure your potential advisor is active in grant-proposal writing is a must. </p>

<p>Something to do quickly before you go is to do a search of peer reviewed journal articles of your potential advisor. I hadn't done that with my current advisor and got kicked in the butt for not doing so. I found that my advisor had only 2 peer reviewed journal articles published since he began his career, plus he's been a professor for 20 years. Of these articles, I think he was only first author on one of them. I hadn't noticed before I committed that most of his 'publications' were actually abstracts (obviously not peer reviewed or having much intellectual merit). </p>

<p>Get to know your potential advisors current students. You can learn a lot from them not only about the program but your advisors reputation and work ethic. Also, if you commit, you will likely have to spend a lot of time with these students and want to make sure you will get along with them alright (which I don't think is usually a big problem...you usually become pretty good friends wtih them actually).</p>

<p>i would say spend 1-2 days ... you will not get much of a sense about the city because couple days is not enough usually to do that - some things like how clean it is are rather obvious, otherwise you really have to rely on what others tell you about the place</p>

<p>for me the most important things have been:
talking to a couple professors i liked
talking with their graduate students asking how life in the group goes asking students about their professor
searching out articles published by the group to make sure that it is not all pseudo-science
asking professor about the schools he or she once attended for graduate studies
asking professor about department, for example, if there is a lot of cooperation among the professors (which sometimes means you can get rec letters from two or more professors if your potential advisor collaborates with someone else)
asking students about rent, transportation, parking, and good areas to live
asking them about how much time a year you have for travel (some professors do not let people go away for extended periods of time, say, more than a week)
partying with students if such option is available because it'll might you a good sense of what kind of people populate the department and if you fit in easily</p>