Domain rankings--is there such a thing?

geraniol
Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:47:46 +0000

Those comments will be based on the faculty and expertise in the discipline at the school. Look through the faculty lists, and even at the biggest schools, some disciplines are very poorly represented. Generally, each department will have its strengths and weaknesses. USNews somewhat ranks specialties (in a general way) for their grad school rankings, and in my field (chemistry) they are acceptably accurate/maps onto my personal impressions.

If you’re going for a PhD and you know there’s a particular discipline you want to specialize in, then the differences matter. Sometimes a lot. For example, in my field, if I wanted to work on molecular machines, I given the schools you’ve listed, I would go to Northwestern or UCLA because there are multiple very prominent researchers working on that at each of those schools. If I wanted to study polymer synthesis, I would probably go with Cornell followed by Northwestern. At the PhD level, you should seriously consider the advisors available to you at each school - what stage of their career are they in, what specifically are they working on, would you learn what you want to learn in their lab, etc.