<p>what's a deal and how do you deal with it? especially writing down reaches on match or safety school applications?</p>
<p>Here’s the deal. Except in some fields like Vocal Performance, the information will ONLY be used for an administrative process called “benchmarking.” The Director of Graduate Studies in the department to which you are applying will put this information into a database, and use the aggregated information when the department or the graduate program is under external review. </p>
<p>In other words, the information will have NO impact whatsoever on your admission, but it will help me (the DGS) do my job. </p>
<p>In recruitment-oriented fields like Vocal Performance, things are a bit different. The DGS wants to see which other programs you’re applying to in order to determine your prospects elsewhere, identify a pattern in the types of folks with whom you are aiming to study, and use that information to assist in recruiting you.</p>
<p>I think that in fields that interview, the information is probably also used to decide with which other programs a given program’s interview weekends can and can’t overlap.</p>
<p>I would guess that it is a way to attempt to define a student’s likelihood of accepting an offer. I would also guess that it wouldn’t be an issue until you had an interview and the question might come up then about which schools you are interviewing with. For the purposes of the application, I wouldn’t stress out about it.</p>