How to be a good graduate student

[nibot]

How to be a good graduate student, and other stories.

How many programs do you think it is appropriate to apply to? (and how is that question best phrased?)

Comments

[probablevacancy.livejournal.com]

If I were you, I think I would apply to a smaller number of schools, the good ones that you'd really like to go to. It seems that you have ways of keeping yourself gainfully employed, and if you have good projects to work on, what's the point of dropping that to go study somewhere that sucks? So, I guess what I'm saying is, no safety schools. As for how many *actual* schools to apply to, I got no clue.

"To how many programs do you think it is appropriate to apply" is grammatically correct, but clunky.

[emidala.livejournal.com]

three. I applied to three. princeton, harvard and brown. three is a great number!


actually, forget that, just apply to princeton. it is the only place to go, anyway!

[ephermata.livejournal.com]

(I don't think we know each other, but I just went through this
last year, so...)

I second the "only apply places you would want to go." Grad school is the next four or *more* years of your life. Why spend it somewhere you aren't psyched about?

That being said, when I applied, I decided to err on the side of applying to more places rather than fewer; I had a low GPA and wasn't sure how competitive I would be as an applicant. In addition, my interests are sort of "narrow but multifaceted" - there were a lot of places that had people who were excellent in something I am very much interested in. So I ended up applying to ten places: Cal, Stanford, MIT, CMU, Harvard, Purdue, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, and UCSD.

In retrospect, that was a lot, just from the point of view of organization and filing applications. I know for a fact that I never completed my Columbia application, and I never heard from Princeton. Ah well. I would have been happy at any of those places, but as it happens I made it into Cal and I decided to come here. Been loving it ever since.

I also went to Harvard as an undergrad. I'd be happy to give you my perspective on the place if you're considering it for grad school. You should be able to find my eecs.berkeley.edu address from my user profile.