Reply to How much does undergrad matter if planning on going on to a Ph.D.

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "How much does undergrad matter if planning on going on to a Ph.D."

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My child is a junior and I'm wondering how much your undergrad school matters if you are planning to go on to get a Ph.D.  - If so, what  specifically does matter in college selection? [/quote]

GPA extremely important. Plus prior research experience.

So, a top (4.0) student from U of Oregon will do better than a 3.8 kid from Harvard. Top SLACs will have faculty more involved with their students, more research opportunities, mentoring etc. All of which helps too.[/quote]

I think this depends.  I'm a prof at a R1 that is highly regarded in my field in STEM. We have a hard min of 3.0 GPA and a soft min of 3.5 for PhD admissions (meaning if you're below a 3.5 we need to understand why and it needs to be offset by other factors).  But over 3.5, we're looking at the quality of the undergrad institution and what we know about past students coming from there in terms of preparation.  One thing about SLACs is that we usually don't have a lot of students applying from the same school in a given year so they are less in competition with each other.  
GRE is more of an "are there any alarm bells here" from low scores than valuing the highest scores--though very high scores are attractive.  But middling scores don't really help or hurt your chances much.

Research experience is critical--so do the 'optional' capstone project and try to get involved in faculty research.  It's so common now that if someone doesn't have it we want to know why.  LoRs from undergrad faculty are very important also.  Fit with faculty research interests matters a lot so it's best to identify several faculty at a school that are doing work of interest to you than just choose a particular program based on reputation.  At many programs it's the faculty who advocate for candidates who meet all the threshold criteria as it's often the faculty who generate the lines of PhD funding through their grants.[/quote]

I'm a humanities prof at an R1, and I endorse everything STEM prof said here.  We have eliminated the GRE requirement and softened our GPA floors a bit in the wake of the pandemic and as we try to diversify our graduate student population, and both of those changes mean that we now place even more emphasis on prior research experience and ability to articulate research ambitions.  One of our interview questions is often along the lines of "explain a research project you'd like to carry out and how you would do it." We are looking to see if the candidate is prepared to conduct research, **and** we want to see if their interests are aligned with work going on in our department.  Of course, we also care about Letters of Recommendation.

I have spent a lot of time on PhD admissions over the years--was Director of Grad Studies for 5 years and on the committee even longer--so I've seen us admit students from all kinds of institutions, but I'd say SLACs, unselective LACs, and other small schools are the most common.  (I've also spent a lot of years teaching in our own undergraduate program, where most of our students get zero research opportunities and don't build significant relationships with tenured and tenure-track faculty.  It's just the nature of an R1, in most fields.  There are exceptions of course.)

I have to disagree with a PP's insistence on the honors college at a flagship public.  I also teach in the honors college on my campus, and there is no collaborative research going on between faculty and undergraduates in the honors college.  There are other special research oriented programs on campus, so it's worth checking out what every school offers.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics