Help with persuading parents to let me attend Smith

Momwaitingfornew
Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:21:20 +0000

You can probably get an online schedule of events to see what’s going on during reunions and commencement. The night when they light paper lanterns throughout the campus is beautiful, provided that the weather cooperates. And you MUST take your father through the new Ford Hall (and there may be tours) to see the state-of-the-art science/engineering facilities. It doesn’t matter that you don’t intend to major in science. He needs to see that this isn’t a backwater college.

There are several different answers to the question whether Smithies go right into PhD programs. Few go directly from Smith to graduate school without any time off from academics, but many do so without additional schooling after working for a year or more. Some earn a master’s degree first. As TD notes, a master’s degree is rarely needed to enter a PhD program, but that doesn’t mean that some entering students won’t have one. In the US, master’s degrees can be professional (such as in engineering and business) or remedial/strengthening (for a student with a lower GPA or not enough research/course preparation) or terminal (students aren’t expected to continue with those studies) or, as TD says, acknowledgment of satisfactory graduate work without completing the dissertation required of PhD holders. Some students apply to master’s programs because they think that they must do that first before they can apply to PhD programs.