I was taught by one of my mentors that there are five things a graduate school looks for in when it receives applications. These things are, in no particular order, GPA, publications, GRE scores, letters of recommendation, and personal statement. My mentor taught me that if you were lacking in one of these five you could make up for it by excelling in the other four and still stand a good chance of getting into a graduate program. These five categories laid the ground work for what I needed to achieve to be able to go to any graduate program that I wanted.
My GPA was good, but not perfect. I had a very high GPA for someone in the STEM fields, but I did not have the perfect 4.0 that would allow me to compete in ivy league schools. My GPA did not discourage me though, it only showed me that I needed to work harder in other areas to make myself look good to the graduate schools I would be applying to. My mentor, Dr. C, knew my GPA and he wanted me to be able to go to the best graduate school I could get accepted to, so he encouraged me to study hard and do well on my GRE.
Now the GRE is another one of those standardized tests that the majority of the population loath, but schools love because it helps them weed out applicants. The GRE is the graduate equivalent of the SAT (the same company makes both the SAT and GRE as well). I knew that I needed to study hard and do well on the GRE because it can be a limiting factor in what schools you can apply to because some schools have a minimum GRE score requirement that must be reached before they will even look at your application. My desire to do well was also brought on by the fact that I do not perform well on standardized tests that will test me on aspects that are not related to my field of study. In light of this, I spent a few hundred dollars on all the test prep material that I could get my hands on (i.e. study guides, flash cards, etc.). I studied, studied, and studied some more and when I finally took the test, I did reasonably well. I did not ace the GRE, but I got scores that would allow me to apply to all the schools that I was interested in.
Well that was one GRE test down and only one more to go, the subject test. Most of the schools I was applying to did not require the subject test, but there were a few that did so I was forced to go through the extremely difficult chemistry subject test. I was happy that I was finally going to be taking a standardized test that was related to my field of study, and I was in the optimal position to take this test due to the fact that I had finished all of my chemistry courses and only had physics classes left to take so I felt very prepared for this test. When I was sitting in the room taking the test, I went through the entire test and only answered the inorganic and physical chemistry questions first because I felt the most confident on those. The next time through I focused on the analytical and biochemistry. The last time through I focused on the organic. The reason I took this strategy was because I understood inorganic and physical the best because they revolve around mathematics and physics which makes sense. Organic chemistry, or at least what they tested on for the organic portion, was largely your ability to memorize ridiculous reactions that are named only by the scientist that discovered them, two-thirds of which were never covered in my organic lecture. When I finally received my subject test scores, I was sitting at the fifty percentile mark which devastated me. This had been that first time since grade school that I did this poorly on a test and Dr. C was the first person to give me some enlightening words on the matter. Paraphrasing what he said, the majority of the schools that require the subject tests are the best schools, and the best students apply to the best schools, therefore the people that take the subject tests are the best students so I was in the middle of the pack of the best chemistry students in the country. These words that he gave me helped to lift my spirits and gave me the encouragement to finish up the graduate school applications.
The personal statements for graduate school give the school insight into your mind before they even meet you. The statements allow the school to know why you want to go to their school and these statements can be used to judge how serious you are about your graduate work. In my personal statements, I gave reasons for going such as I wanted to live in that area of the country and I wanted to work with these specific professors at your school. I repeated this same formula for every personal statement so it did not take much work once I got the first two or three written to finish off the others.
Letters of recommendation are one of the most useful things for graduate schools because they can see how others think of you. Let me start by saying if you do undergraduate research, you must have a letter of recommendation from your PI. Their letter will be the strongest of all your letters and if you talk about undergraduate research in any other part of your application and the school does not see a letter from your PI, they will start to formulate reasons why your PI did not write a letter for you which can hinder your acceptance to the graduate program. The other letters of recommendation can come from other professors and mentors. I tried to pick people that could talk about various aspects of me. My PI was able to talk about my research and some of my classes, I picked another chemistry professor who was in charge of the TAs so that he could talk about my TA and tutoring abilities, and I picked a physics professor because I had a physics degree and he could talk about my physics experiences.
Last, but not least, publications. Publications as an undergraduate can be a hit or miss in my opinion. Part of it comes from how hard you work on your research, part comes from the motivation of your PI, and part comes from luck. I was semi motivated on my research, I worked in one group for a little over two years and then my project was finally complete and I was able to publish it. Then my senior year I decided to try a new area of chemistry and worked in another research group and one of the projects I worked on their became published. This meant that when I was applying to graduate schools, I had two publications under my belt from different areas of chemistry. This put me far above a lot of the other applicants that would have one or no publications at all. This showed that I can do multiple fields of research and it showed that I was a dedicated researcher. Again, a large part of what got me these publications were my PIs and luck. I was lucky to have such wonderful and amazing professors that would let me go the route I wanted even if they knew it wouldn't work. I was also lucky that these professors gave me the opportunities to work on these projects and put in a lot of hours themselves in writing and editing the paper.
I have explained my thoughts and experiences on these five aspects that graduate schools look at. I didn't excel at the personal statements and my GPA wasn't perfect, but I was able to make up for in the other three areas. These were my experiences of applying through chemistry, but I think they can be carried over to many of the STEM fields for those that are also considering a graduate school.
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