Reply to Seriously, has anyone outside of Virginia ever heard of JMU?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Not true. Graduate admissions committees DO care where you did your undergrad. You are more likely to get into a highly competitive grad program if you went to a high prestige / highly competitive undergrad school (in other words, not GMU or JMU).

Yes, there are exceptions, but if you are planning on an academic career you'd better go prestige school all the way.[/quote]

Maybe this is field dependent, because in top tier STEM fields, where you went to undergrad is extremely secondary to graduate admissions compared to your undergraduate research experience, your letters of recommendation, whether you have published, whether you have won nationally competitive awards (Goldwater, for example), and your academic record.  I know plenty of people who went to Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and Caltech (the top 5 schools in my field) who didn't go to super elite colleges, some of whom are now faculty members.  In fact, probably about a 3rd of the people admitted to top tier graduate programs come from "less elite" schools, depending on how you rank "elite" (i.e. regional schools and less competitive private liberal arts colleges).  While this indicates that the pool of talented students is larger at elite schools, ~1/3rd is not an "exception."[/quote]

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