Getting Admitted into Graduate School
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Admission into a graduate program is a process that actually begins much earlier than your senior year. If you understand the actual criteria for admission, and develop and execute a plan to meet those criteria, you will be well ahead of the game before your applications are due. But if your planning for the graduate admissions process has not been deliberate before your senior year, it is not too late to find a path to an advanced degree in physics.
The first thing you should do in your planning is make sure you experience a full and rigorous curriculum in undergraduate physics. To find success in graduate school admissions you must have certain courses under your belt. Depending on what college or university you attend, this may or may not be under your control. If you are at an institution that does not offer certain courses, then you are at a decided disadvantage.
What are these “certain courses” and when should you take them? At a minimum your undergraduate course work should include courses in intermediate mechanics and intermediate electromagnetism. These two courses are generally to be taken in the junior year. They mark the beginning of a serious physics major. In addition to these two courses, a solid course in mathematical physics sets the foundation for being able to speak the language and learn the techniques of physics. At the same time an experimental physics course is needed to understand the fundamentals of experiment planning, basic instrumentation, electronics and electro-mechanical coupling, as well as data collection, data processing, and data presentation.
But perhaps the one course that is “make or break†is quantum mechanics. If your department is not offering a thorough course in quantum mechanics, your chances of getting admitted, much less being successful in a graduate physics program, are greatly diminished.
Well before your senior year you should investigate your department’s undergraduate program to be sure it is offering the coursework that will place you in a competitive position for graduate school. If your undergraduate program is not doing its part to put you in a competitive position, you should petition the administration to improve the program, commit to making up whatever deficits there are via guest studentships or summer courses (though hardly no college offers upper-divisional courses in physics in the summer); or you should consider outright transferring to a different program altogether.
Throughout your physics training you should go beyond plugging and chugging numbers into formulas. You should know how and why formulas are derived, what the implicit assumptions are, and what their limitations are. You should be able to apply basic physics principles to explain to others how things work, and why some things do not work. And if not in your coursework, definitely in your research internships, you should be able to read a physics research paper and work through its arguments, experiments, calculations, results and conclusions; and critique, extrapolate and reapply them to a different problem.Of course it helps to have good grades. But good grades are not a guarantee of admissions, and lack of good grades does not mean you will not be admitted somewhere. But we will come back to grades later. It is safe to say however that early in your college career you want to learn and master good study and time management skills.
The next thing you want to do early and often in your undergraduate training, if you know you want to go graduate school, is to get work experience in an actual research laboratory. Actually this advice works no matter what your career objective is. To be successfully hired in a competitive environment it is crucial that you have work experience in the environment/sector in which you want to work.
For academic research there are many opportunities to get work experience as an undergraduate, especially if you are at school that has a graduate program. You can work as an assistant as paid or unpaid intern, as part of an independent study course, or as a summer research experience for undergraduate (REU) program. Every semester, from the time that you decide to be a physics major, hopefully at the end of your sophomore year, to the time you graduate, including the summers, your academic schedule should include should include some kind of research experience.
Why is a research experience so important? First, a research internship puts you in the most important environment of graduate school, the research lab. As part of a research group, even as an undergraduate, you can see if the lifestyle is for you. It also brings you into close contact with successful near-peer role models, i.e., the graduate students and postdocs in the group. Knowing and studying successful people like these will help you learn the tacit skills that are all too important for getting into graduate school.
Importantly a research experience will hone your practical problem-solving skills. By “problem-solving†we are not talking about typical “homework†problems. Rather we mean problems that defy easy quantification or even qualification; that involve ambiguous situations, and require nuanced judgment.
Your courses will give you a toolkit for solving these kinds of problems, but in graduate school you will have to apply these tools to some new problem that no one has ever considered before. Demonstrating that you can do this is probably the most powerful thing that you can show on a graduate school application.
[More on internships]
Successful research internships will make it easier to get letters of recommendation from people that have observed you doing the most important job function of a graduate student, conducting research. A powerful letter of recommendation from a postdoc or even a senior graduate student that actually worked daily and closely with you in the lab is much, much better than a letter from a professor who taught a class in which you got a good grade. [More on letters of recommendation]
Having gone through a solid curriculum with exposure to “certain courses†and having working experience in a research environment indicate a certain readiness and intellectual maturity and aptitude that are really the key criteria for getting admitted into any graduate program. Two other key indicators are the GRE (General and Subject) and your personal statement.
The quantitative part of the General GRE uses the foundations of high school math to test your understanding of basic concepts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis; to reason quantitatively; and to solve problems in a quantitative setting. The rest of the test, the verbal and analytical parts, measures your abilities in verbal reasoning, critical thinking and analytical writing. These are skills that should be part and parcel of your physics courses and your research internships. Despite the level of the math content, you should spend several months practicing for the exam, i.e., understanding the format and presentation style of the questions.
The Physics GRE on the other hand test contains concepts that you likely did not learn in high school. The Physics GRE measures your exposure to and comfort with the concepts learnt in a comprehensive and solid undergraduate curriculum. If your curriculum lacks “certain coursesâ€, you will be at a decided disadvantage on the Physics GRE.
The test consists of 100 five option multiple choice questions. The topical coverage is nominally classical mechanics (20%), electromagnetism (18%), wave phenomena and optics (9%), thermal physics (10%), relativity (6%), atomic and nuclear physics (10%), quantum mechanics (12%), laboratory techniques (6%), and mathematical methods and specialty topics (9%).
You will have 170 minutes to complete the exam, or on average 1 minute 42 seconds for each problem. Obviously this is not a test where long derivations are required. Rather quick reasoning and basic innate knowledge is what is being tested. The Physics GRE problems will certainly not be like your homework or exam problems. But in the spirit of planning early you should be practicing Physics GRE problems as you go through your physics courses so that you can see what and how you should know physics for this particular exam.
The last piece of advice we will give here is on your personal statement. You should write your personal statement with the utmost of care, taking days if not weeks to give it a final polish. Make sure your personal statement is clearly written and absolutely devoid of grammatical and typographical errors. An outstanding personal statement can overcome deficits in course exposure, grades, lack of research experience or less than stellar GRE scores, but nothing will overcome a poor personal statement. Failing to treat this part of your actual application with appropriate seriousness will undoubtedly and absolutely sink your chances of getting admitted.
Your personal statement should focus the reader on your solid preparation (your data), and then indicate that you have the knowledge, skills and ability to succeed at the next level. The admissions committee will use your personal statement to judge your innate aptitude, your topical knowledge, and your intellectual maturity. Coupled with your letters of recommendation, your personal statement should draw a picture of who you are and whether or not you have the professional demeanor to succeed in graduate school.
Seriously consider having a specifically tailored personal statement for each program to which you apply, as a major idea that you would want to convey to the readers is that you can to fit in specifically to their program. In the opening paragraph, say why you are applying to this particular program. Presumably you have used the internet to research graduate programs, and that you are applying to a particular graduate program because you find some of the work going on there intellectually attractive. In your personal statement you want to convey that you have researched the program to which you are applying, and that you have mapped your skills and interests onto what is available in that program.
Be sure to include only relevant information, and exclude any irrelevant or inappropriate information. Do not waste time and space describing the classes you have taken and the kinds of grades you have achieved, the readers will have your transcripts to learn about that. But if you have completed some extraordinary coursework, like graduate-level courses, it is probably worth the space to discuss that in your personal statement.
You probably should not discuss any specific course grades, e.g., if you got a C in mechanics in a sea of otherwise A and B grades. Whatever happened in that one course is probably irrelevant by comparison. If you are still bitter about the grade, that is not an emotion that you want invading your personal statement. If you have a negative thing to say about that professor, remember he/she is likely a colleague or even a former classmate of one of the readers. In any event, every professor has had a less than pleasant interaction with a student over a grade. You do not want to remind them of that while reading your personal statement. Remember, your goal is to write a personal statement that will leave the reader with a positive and memorable impression of you.
But if you have a lower than competitive GPA, your personal statement is the place to address it point blank. You have to explain why your GPA does not reflect your true abilities, and despite your low GPA why you should be admitted and how you expect to be successful in a graduate program. The same goes for less than stellar GRE scores, no research experience, or no exposure to “certain courses†in physics.
To this end, you should be sure to discuss your personal statement with the persons that you are asking to give letters of recommendation. Whatever explanation for low grades, low GRE scores, lack of research experience or whatever, you want to have your recommenders concur with it. In general the messages in these letters and your personal statement should complement one another. You certainly do not want elements of your credentials described in different ways. For instance if your name is on a published research paper and you discuss that prominently and proudly in your personal statement, you do not want one of your recommenders downplaying your role in the work, or the quality of the work itself. And of course the kind of person your recommender describes should be consistent with how you describe yourself in your statement.
So just remember there is a smart way to apply to graduate school such that you can get admitted somewhere with any set of credentials. You just have to have a well thought out plan, and execute it starting as early as possible.
