Picking a School

Picking which graduate schools to apply to and which one to accept is an important part of the process. My undergraduate mentor, Dr. C, had the philosophy that you should apply to ten schools. Two of the ten would be your far reaching schools that you think you don't stand a chance of getting into. Another two of the ten would be safety schools, schools that your very sure you could get into. The remaining six schools would be divided amongst schools that are in between your safety schools and reach schools. The second part of his philosophy is that you should go to the best school that accepts you. Even though this is sound advice, it didn't really suit my personality and I sought out advice from other professors on what to do.

I was all for Dr. C's strategy of picking ten schools to apply to, but I quickly ran into a problem that I still regret not getting help with to this day. I had decided on which schools I was going to apply to, but the majority of the schools require you to pay an application fee. My professors said that you can usually get around this fee by applying directly to the department rather than to the graduate school. There was also a problem because when I tried to contact the departments, they would just tell me to apply to the graduate school which meant paying the fee. There was only one of my ten schools that would let me apply directly to the chemistry department and the other nine I would have to pay a fee. These fees are not cheap, they range from $50 to $90 depending on the school. Instead of planning on applying to all ten of my schools, I know how to prioritize which to apply to first because I was running low on money after paying for the GRE tests and testing materials. My main regret that comes out of this is that I was unable to apply to my reach schools. At the time, I did not think that I would regret this decision because I figured I would get rejected from some of the schools I applied to and my logic was that if I was rejected from those schools then I would have been rejected from my reach schools. This was fine for a while, but then I starting getting the acceptance/rejection letter

from schools and I was accepted to all of the programs that I applied to. In my mind, this meant that I would have stood a chance at getting into some of the ivy league schools, but due to the fact that I did not have the money, I was unable to apply to those schools. My regret is that I did not ask family members to loan me money to pay the fees so I could apply to my reach schools. I still got accepted to some very good schools, but I did not hit a wall that would tell me the limits of my potential. Many would say that hitting the limit of your potential is not a good thing or is impossible, but I had been successful in everything I tried and I did not yet know where my boundaries of what I can and can't do are. This would later come back to bite me once I started graduate school and discovered my limits in a stressful and painful way.

The other part of Dr. C's philosophy I did not agree with so much. He was taught and would teach that you should go to the best program you get into. This is great if you want a career that is the best you can achieve, but graduate school (if you are going for a Ph.D.) is five years of your life. These five years should be filled with happy memories, not memories of spending day and night in the lab, surrounded by science all the time. You can't put yourself through that for five years and still expect to be the same person you were when you first started. I wanted to attend a school in a location that I liked. I don't like big cities so I wanted to avoid that as much as possible, and I wanted to stay relatively close to home so that I could drive home in a half a day to a day of driving rather than needing to fly. These factors made it so that my top tier schools looked unappealing to me. All
they had was the science and nothing else to offer me. I ended up picking one of my "safety" schools because I met a wonderful PI during visitations and I don't regret picking my school at all. I think you can excel in any program so long as it suits your personality and needs. I came from a small public university that wasn't known for its science, but I was able to become published as an undergraduate and got accepted to top tier graduate programs. This means, to me, that so long as you have the motivation and the support of those around you, you can do well no matter what the school. I will not of the name of a big university attached to my degree, but if I excel in other areas such as awards and research, I will not need the name.


These are the philosophies of my mentor along with the input of some of my other professors that I had to balance. These factors played a part in which schools to apply to and which to finally go to, but a large factor that helped me choose a school was the visitation weekend. The visitation weekend ended up being such a vital part of the process that it will deserve its own post.