Looking Ahead to Graduate School

Approaching The Decision

The first thing you really need to decide is whether you actually want to go directly from college to graduate school, or whether you will want to take some time off in between to explore other interests, travel, or just decompress and reflect on what your college years have taught you about the world and your potential roles in it before you commit to your next journey. That decision is an intensely personal one - but one that nevertheless tends to be influenced by factors that many people experience. We'll look at a few of these factors here.

Countering the Will of Your Parents

The primary influence is likely to be the will of your parents.

"We never took any time off after college," they will argue. "You had four years of college to screw around and find yourself. It's time for you either to get your graduate degree or to go out and get a job and start earning some money."

Sound familiar?

Or how about this one: "If you don't go directly to med school [law school, grad school], you'll get bound up in something else in the world and you'll never go back." (To which we have to be restrained from yelling out, "Yeah, so?")

Or this one: "If you go now, we'll pay for it. If you take time off, though, you're on your own."

Whatever the argument used against you, remember one thing"and one thing only. It is your life, and this is your decision. Once you make the decision to apply to graduate school and you get in, the direction of your life will become much more certain and much more immutable. Each graduate school experience comes with an enormous set of commitments and a well-worn path of expectations that will consume your weekends, your vacations, and your summers.

There won't be any time to write a novel once you're in med school.

There won't be an opportunity to hike the Appalachian Trail, spend a summer (or longer) backpacking across Europe, or drive across the United States with your friends. You can't go back to your old job as a summer camp counselor, work in the Peace Corps, do Teach for America, try to make it with your rock band, or follow your dream to perform Shakespeare in summer stock theater.

When you commit to graduate school, you are setting your course for the future. And closing the doors to a lot of other things you've always wanted to do.

Are you ready for that?

If you know you're not, no amount of parental influence, pressure, or bribery should push you to the contrary decision. You need to know you are ready to go to graduate school. And you'll know when you know. If you're not charged up to spend the next four months holed up studying for the GMAT, MCAT, or LSAT, you're not ready.

"I would advise people to not rush into grad school," Carolyn warned. "I think it is valuable to gain some real world experience before going back to school."

Ignoring Your Peers

Familiar with lemmings, are you?

Lemmings are little half-blind rodents that burrow underground and blindly follow each other. In some places, entire families of lemmings are wiped out when the lead lemming goes right off a cliff and all of the others just follow that guy right off the same cliff without ever looking up.

Hmm . . .

So if seventeen of your friends have all decided to sign on to a two-year management consulting gig on Wall Street, . . . or your two best friends have de­cided to take the LSAT, . . . or your boyfriend has decided to apply to medical school . . .

That's right. It should make absolutely no difference to you.

Listen up. This is your last chance to get it right.

Recognize that the world is full of unhappy successful people - doctors who should have been teachers; lawyers who should have been writers; and middle managers, clawing their way up the corporate ladder, who would have been much happier taking their college rock band to the Jersey Shore for the summer in an effort to test the appeal of their music. All these people got to their junior or senior year and grabbed the ladder, propped it up against the wall, and just kept right on climbing.

And you guessed it - much later, they discovered that the ladder was propped up against the wrong wall.

Instead of ending up divorced and lying on a psychologist's couch in the throes of a midlife crisis twenty years from now, take the time to hear the call of your life and to answer it. Forget what you're supposed to do. Figure out what you want to do - and go do it.

Graduate school will always be there for you.

Gathering Information

Even if you think you're ready to go off to law school, med school, business school, or grad school, don't just sign up for an LSAT, MCAT, or GMAT prep course and dive right in to your preparation. It is not enough to have simply taken your premed requirements, come from a long line of lawyers, or done well in your psychology major so far to justify a decision to go to med school, law school, or graduate school (respectively).

You need to actually test the hypothesis.

If you are thinking about graduate school in a different area, your best bet is to avail yourself of the advisory materials available in the relevant undergraduate departmental office. Each of these offices is likely to have a whole set of materials to help you explore whether an advanced degree in the subject is the right choice for you, what exams you will need to pass in order to apply, how long it will take to earn a master's or Ph.D. degree in the subject, and what you can reasonably expect to do with each degree once you complete it. Naturally, the director of undergraduate studies in the particular subject area is also an excellent resource on the subject. Make an appointment during his or her office hours to further your knowledge before you throw yourself into the application process.

Preparation For Entrance Exams

If you've made the decision to apply to graduate school directly out of college, you will need to be extremely vigilant about meeting the various application deadlines for your chosen discipline. Medicine and law impose the greatest burdens, as you will need to begin preparing for the LSAT and MCAT no later than December of your junior year. This means you'll need to assure yourself of your readiness to apply before then - and then decide on your method of preparation for either of these two exams by the time you take your fall semester finals during junior year. Proper preparation for either the MCAT or the LSAT takes months, not weeks - and you need to stay on top of things to ensure that you have proper time to prepare.

If you are interested in going to business school, remember that the vast majority of successful applicants have actually worked in the business world for several years prior to applying. It is possible to go to business school directly from college - but you will be facing an uphill battle to do so. You also need to score very solidly on the GMAT to give yourself any shot, and as with the MCAT and the LSAT, proper preparation for the GMAT will take time. Consult a copy of Business School Confidential to apprise yourself of a suggested study strategy and timeline for taking the GMAT.

If you have decided to go to graduate school, chances are you will need to take both the general GRE and the specific exam for the subject you are going to study on the graduate level. For example, to apply to graduate school in psychology, you must take both the general GRE and the subject-specific GRE in psychology. So you will need to study for not just one but two entrance exams. We recommend using a study schedule for the general and subject-specific GREs similar to those we recommend for the LSAT and the MCAT - meaning that your preparation for these exams must begin immediately after finals in the fall semester of your junior year if it is your intent to go straight through from college to graduate school.

Researching Schools

So you're in the second semester of your junior year, studying hard for the graduate school entrance exam of your choice. Guess what? You have more work to do.

You need to figure out what graduate schools you're going to apply to!

You can put this off for a little while - say, until after you take the exam . . . but you can't wait forever. Before you leave campus at the end of your junior year, you'll need to have researched all your schools and decided which ones you'll be requesting applications from.

Why?

Because if you are applying to med school, you need to file what is called your standard primary med school application "in the Js" (June or July) after your junior year in order to maximize your competitiveness in the application process. Wow - see what we mean about sneaking up on you?

You'll have a little bit more time for law school, business school, and most grad programs; if you are applying to law school or business school, you'll want to have all of your applications in by the end of October of your senior year to maximize your competitiveness. The same is true for most graduate programs, though you should check with your individual programs to be certain of the deadlines, as your mileage may vary. What this means, obviously, is that if you intend to apply to law school, business school, or graduate school right out of college, you'll need to do your homework over the summer and request your applications before you return to college in the fall. A general treatment of the admissions schedules for these various programs appears at the end of this article.

Trust us"if you are already back on campus for senior year and you're just starting to think about applying to graduate school, you're too late for this application cycle.

Requesting Application Materials

The last piece of the preparation puzzle involves requesting your application materials. In this age of the Internet, most schools now have their application materials available in downloadable form on their Web site. Therefore, once you have chosen the schools to which you intend to apply, monitor their Web sites for the first date that the new season's application materials will be available.

On the designated date, download away and get started. Applying to grad school can be even more time-intensive than applying to college was - and you have to do it while writing your senior thesis and finishing your major requirements.

Campus Confidential Mentors and Uber-Mentors:

Campus Confidential contains the collective advice of a a diverse group of people who have traveled the road to college. Some are recent college graduates who can counsel you on the college experience as it is today. Other are a few years removed from their college days and can provide a longer view of the decisions you will need to make before, during, and after college. Here is a little bit about the mentors and uber-mentors in these articles.

Dan Bissell – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Portland, Oregon

B.A. Middlebury College cum laude, 1993. Major: Geology

M. D. University of Colorado School of Medicine, Adler Scholar, 2002

Tom Teh Chiu – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Brooklyn, New York

B. A. Yale University, 1993. Major: double major in Chemistry and Music

M. M. Juilliard School, 1995

M Juilliard School, 2001

Jim Bright – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Winston-Salem, North Carolina

B. A. Duke University, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1997. Major: History

Amanda Cramer – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Paso Robles, California

B.A. Cornell University Phi Beta Kappa, 1993. Major: Mathematics

Graduate study in food science – Enology, University of California at Davis 1997-2000

Zoe Robbins – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Gouldsboro, Maine

B.A. (1) Wellesley College magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1997. Major: Economics

B.A. (2) University of Pennsylvania, 2001. Major: Nursing

Carolyn Koegler – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Hopkinton, New Hampshire

B. A. Tufts University, cum laude, 1993. Double major: History and Spanish

Erik Norton – Campus Confidential Uber-Mentor

Boston, Massachusetts

B. A. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993. Major: Mathematics

Lyndsee Dickson – Campus Confidential Mentor

Concord, New Hampshire

B.A. New York University, cum laude, 2004. Major: East Asian studies

Kevin Donovan – Campus Confidential Mentor

Somerville, Massachusetts

B.A. Boston College, honors in the major, 1993. Major: English, Minor: Creative Writing

Tiffany Chan – Campus Confidential Mentor

Concord, New Hampshire

B.S. New York University, 2005. Major: Communication Science

Erica Eubanks – Campus Confidential Mentor

Memphis, Tennessee

B.A. Tennessee State University, National Deans List, 2003. Major: Criminal Justice

Dave Irwin – Campus Confidential Mentor

Carlisle, Massachusetts

B.A. Middlebury College departmental honors, 2004. Major: American Civilization, Minor: Education

Chase Johnson – Campus Confidential Mentor

London, England

B. A. Duke University, with Phi Alpha Theta distinction in history, 2005. Major: History

Aaron Paskalis – Campus Confidential Mentor

Magnolia, Massachusetts

West Point Military Academy, then transferred to UMass Amherst

B. A. University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2005. Major: Legal studies