New DiscussionWhy is the graduate school placement not that good?

jy2013

Looking at the post graduation surveys conducted by the Johns Hopkins career center, I don't see many graduates attending top ranked schools in the respective major. For example, from 2007-2011 for neuroscience majors, only 5 got into Harvard, 3 into Columbia, and 23 in JHU (but I accredit this to JHU being the native school). For 4 years of graduates and 236 total graduates, I don't find this assuring as I'm planning on majoring in neuro and going onto graduate school.

Here's the link:
http://pages.jh.edu/~careers/NewMattinProject/majors/2007-2011_major_break_out/Neuroscience 2007-2011.pdf

Any thoughts? One explanation I found is the response rate of surveys is only 60%, but naturally people that do well postgrad would respond right?

Blah2009

Not sure what you're talking about as That grad school placement is outstanding considering hopkins, harvard, penn, columbia, yale, northwestern are all superb schools. Most likely chose hopkins med from that list as well. These same kids may have gotten into harvard for grad school as well but chose hopkins med, a reasonable scenario. You're mistaking admittance for matriculation. You're also mistaking the proportion choosing grad school. It's not like 50 graduates attending jhu, harvard, penn, duke, yale etc. out of 236, as only 117 chose grad school as an option anyways.

jy2013

I agree the schools you listed that graduates attend are superb; however, the number of graduates attending those schools seems to be small when looking at the big picture of four years. Or am I expecting too much for wanting to see bigger numbers for top schools?

Blah2009

Yes, you are. Do some research and you will see comparable placement statistics for schools like penn and other top privates.

Blah2009

Here is an example:

http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/files/Class2013CareerPlans.pdf

Penn has 2,035 graduating seniors. Ignoring students choosing penn grad, we have 3.5% of all graduating penn seniors attending Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Cornell. JHU, Duke, Princeton, and Yale (sum up the numbers at the end of the above pdf enrolling at these top schools divided by the number of respondents or 2035 students). Keep in mind, this is for Penn as an ENTIRE graduating class for all majors within arts and science. You'll find comparable numbers if you add up JHU's placement for a given year for all arts and science majors as well.

For reference, 3.5% of 236 neuroscience students is 8 for Hopkins. So for Hopkins to place similarly to Penn and other top privates (assuming normalized distribution over 5 years), it would need to place only 8 Neurosci students to Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, MIT, Cornell, etc. etc. over 5 years. Needless to say, Hopkins shatters this barrier.

Blah2009

^and another correction, those Penn stats are actually for the entire graduating class including engineering and wharton and not just arts and sciences as I previously though.

So include JHU's grad school placement for engineering if you want an apples to apples comparison - eventhough JHU compares well without engineering. You'd have to use proportions and not absolute numbers as JHU is nearly twice as big as JHU for graduating seniors.

jy2013

Thank you Blah2009, this is more reassuring. I don't like how the career center surveys post graduates. For each major it doesn't show the employment or graduate schools for every year and the surveys as a whole don't show the number of students going to each school or employer. It's hard to compare the grad placements as a whole for JHU without looking through every major.

Blah2009

Rest assured if you do well at jhu, you will have your absolute choice of grad schools. Amongst my jhu friends, 3 of us got Ph.D.s at Stanford, 1 MD from Columbia, 2 Ph.D.s from Harvard, and 2 from MIT. And this is just amongst my friends in the same class. I suspect the surveying is underreporting.

Blah2009

What i recommend you to do is focus on jhu and not on potential transferring as you might have. Going in with other intentions might derail your future goals.

YanksDolphins

Agree. I had PhD offers from Princeton and Stanford, and just among my friends, they got offers from Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, Chicago, among others. Conditional on you being sufficiently qualified to get into top schools, you will. Said another way, JHU won't get you into top grad schools if you don't have a very high GPA and don't have research experience; if you do, you will get in (you may be thinking that this will be the case anywhere but this isn't so; at lower-ranked places even if you have a 4.0 and research the faculty writing your letters aren't as well-known or respected so they may be given less weight).

jy2013

@YanksDolphins One more question. In your experience how is the job placement at Johns Hopkins? Do engineers get well paying jobs and do big companies like google and microsoft hire well?

YanksDolphins

As I wasn't friends with many engineers, I don't know much about the engineering departments or their job placements. I didn't know of anyone with a job at Microsoft or Google.