<p>Thought I’d start a thread similar to the ‘job search’ one for those of us with kids applying to grad schools. Maybe we can support each other through next few months…</p>
<p>My story is:</p>
<p>DS will be applying for PhD in STEM field. Has done well in college and has good research experience and should have good letters from well known profs. Quite sure he wants to go to grad school and has worked with grad students last 3 summers so has a good idea about what that’s like. </p>
<p>However, I’m frustrated that he seems completely lackadaisical about studying for subject GRE (in 3 weeks) which is known to be very important in his field. Many foreign candidates score perfect scores as they apparently work very hard at it. He did not do all that well on the sample test he took. Also has done minimal research into various programs, schools to apply to and profs he may want to work with. Hasn’t done anything with his SOP and has a full fall semester with 2 grad classes, a varsity sport and presumably finishing and writing up his summer research for publication. Don’t see that he’s going to have a lot of extra time this fall to devote to grad school applications. All he’d need is a perfect girlfriend to come along about now to top it off.</p>
<p>He is driving this bus, but I’m afraid he may end up being the rabbit taking a nap at the end of the race and miss the finish line.</p>
<p>What kinds of experiences are y’all having with your grad school bound children?</p>
<p>DD took 5 years off between undergraduate and graduate school. perhaps your son needs a break between undergrad and grad school to work and prepare a strong application?</p>
<p>I think it’s very difficult for a college senior to be fully involved in academic and extracurricular activities and to give adequate attention to graduate school applications or a job search at the same time.</p>
<p>Some kids schedule themselves into the easiest possible courses – and may decrease their participation in extracurriculars as well – during their senior year, so that they can free up time for applying to jobs or graduate programs. They sacrifice the present for the sake of the future – basically, wasting their last year of college in pursuit of whatever will come next.</p>
<p>Your son isn’t sacrificing his present. He’s playing a varsity sport and doing very challenging academic work. Could applying to graduate schools at this time be too much for him? And if it is, could he get a short-term job for next year and apply for graduate programs then?</p>
<p>It is extremely common for students to work for a year or more between college and graduate school. In some instances, they work at career-track jobs, but getting these kinds of jobs requires as much effort, if not more, than applying to PhD programs. (One of my kids went into a PhD program right after college and the other went into a career-track job. The job search was far more time-consuming.) </p>
<p>Getting a short-term, non-career-track job may be different. For example, the researchers your son works with now might welcome him as a full-time technician in their laboratory for a year, and he would be under less pressure then than he is now. Although he would be in a dead-end job, he would be getting additional practical experience in his own field, and he would have sufficient time to devote to the grad school application process. </p>
<p>I don’t know how my daughter was able to pull it together, she tends to be disorganized and overbooked, but she did. She took the GRE over the summer so got that out of the way. Didn’t do the subject exam and it is now recently defunct so perhaps that was never important in CS. I bet the subject GRE is much more important for international students to do well on.</p>
<p>She put her application together while doing a semester abroad that was crammed with all math courses (and Hungarian language). She was also continuing work on a group research project that began in the summer, and having to communicate and send work back to the group. She should have spend more time on the personal statement, but it got the job done. I remember there was one iteration with some really strange stuff in it about doing math on mars with rocks, that I think I convinced her to take out. She seemed to find tons of schools to apply to, but many were schools with professors who came to her school to speak or who worked with her research prof. She was only really zero’d in on one prof, the others just had groups she could work with. She ended up at the uni with the one prof she’d made contact with. In the end she put in a ton of apps. Probably not necessary to put in the four top schools but worth a try and one of those she didn’t think was a good match my sister paid for. In the end she was accepted to 3 10-15 ranked schools.</p>
<p>She also put in for an NSF fellowship grant that likely wasn’t worked on enough. Did not get.</p>
<p>The opportunity to go directly to the PhD program with the financial advantage of that means he should target good fit schools where the profs will want to work with him. It was pretty obvious that the uni’s she got accepted to were those match schools. I think a large part of it will come down to the research and the LOR. But that app should be strong and point the way. Oh, she also made a very good CV, and he should make one if he doesn’t know that.</p>
<p>I only recently marveled that she had no backup plan if no acceptances. I’m sure she wouldn’t have had a problem, but we never talked about plan B! She’s 5th year now and I’m wondering how it will all work out.</p>
<p>May I join this thread? My D is a senior preparing to apply to grad school and I am very worried. She has entirely too much on her plate. Five courses, a thesis, a job, and being a TA. She is also taking the GRE this month. Someone please shoot me!</p>
<p>JMO as someone who recently went through the grad school rat race and is now going through the process of trying to decide whether or not to apply to a PhD program, if your S is PhD material, and really wants to start his program next year, he will get everything done. </p>
<p>My parents weren’t involved at all. They only knew I was working on apps when I would come home and talk to them about it. They had no idea whether or not I was working on them outside of that. Perhaps he is working on them and just not sharing that information?</p>
<p>romani, would you give me some sense of what you had on your plate last year? You know how I am. I am freaking out about this (because it always has to be something with me!). I just don’t have any idea what is normal and what is not. If you could take pity on my I would be very grateful.</p>
<p>We went through this last year with DS. He was fully committed to doing a PhD in Math right out of school. He played a varsity sport and was finishing undergrad in 3 years, so he too had a busy year. One thing that made life more difficult was he was on the fence between doing pure and applied math. DS was more on the pure side, DH and I hoped he would go applied figuring there were more job opportunities and the admissions were less competitive. He applied to 10 schools with a mix of applied and pure. DH and I offered to do “grunt” work of creating application accounts at schools and filling out forms if DS picked the schools, did the SOP and CVs and got recs. It ended up being more of a 3 person project. GREs, GRE subject, tailoring SOPs for each school, making sure references were submitted on time, getting transcripts in (some require official, some not), some required descriptions of every Math course ever taken (including books and chapters!), checking applications over and over to make sure everything was complete, checking after submital to make sure schools thought they were complete; it was a full time job! I don’t know how kids could do this on their own while in school.
We had to nag DS quite a bit at the beginning about getting his SOP, CV and references. We encouraged him to contact professors directly, to no avail. I have a feeling boys are worse than girls in this regard.<br>
Then the waiting part. Holding breath over GRE scores. First round picks go out, no word. Some rejections. More waiting. More waiting. Didn’t hear from most schools til the bitter end. He ended up with 5 offers with full funding. Then it was the agonizing decision.
I think his application would have been stronger if he was more specific; “I want to study X with professor Y and we have already discussed this”. He matured greatly during the process, and by the time he had to make a decision, he was probably where he should have been to start the process. He knew he could take a 4th year undergrad and try the process again, but he was content with his options. He started in pure math this week. Completely happy.</p>
<p>Certainly, ZM. For fall, I had 6 courses (17 credits), a senior thesis for my anthropology degree, worked 40 hours a week (24 at one job, 16 at another), had my first football season tickets (and we SUCKED… huzzah! lol), was doing a civic engagement project with a local school, and most of my apps were due by early January. I took the GRE late September or early October. What’s nice about the GRE is that you get your scores instantly for 2 of the 3 sections (“unofficial scores”) so you can quickly see whether or not you need to take them again. [Let me emphasize that I am <em>not</em> normal or typical… my mother calls me the alien child.] No, I didn’t sleep a lot…</p>
<p>For spring, I was again doing pretty much all the same things except no civic engagement project, sub a bioethics thesis for an anthropology thesis, and was traveling to various grad programs that had accepted me. I think I only had 15 credits, too. </p>
<p>I coped by making sure that I set very firm deadlines for myself. I ranked the schools I was most interested in and did the SOPs for them first. I was extremely lucky that I got an acceptance + nice package very early on in the game so I was able to relax a bit knowing I had a fallback. I also had an incredible advisor who, while not in my field, kept encouraging me every step of the way.</p>
<p>Many of my friends are taking gap years- to better do their apps and to give themselves a break. Some are doing year-long research projects in that gap in order to enhance their resume. PhD programs are BIG commitments and they want to make absolutely sure it’s what they want to do before marrying their program for a while.</p>
<p>Since D graduated in Dec her senior year she essentially had some time to work her grad apps for entrance the following fall. She was also working full time her senior year and for the months following. Music is an entirely different nut to crack and has its own challenges --especially the continued study after school to prepare her audition rep. She had decided that grad school was going to be on her nickel so her motivation was extraordinarily high. Since money was a big motivator , 4-5 hours of daily coachings and practice where not a problem. She stayed in her undergrad U location so that she could keep her full time job ,still study with her teacher and have access to her music “support group”.I certainly don’t think she would have had the same success if she had not had the time off between.
With the exception of helping her coordinate her travel arrangements,I did not do a thing . (but yes I did worry)</p>
<p>I was one of the tortured souls over on the other thread. S2 lived at home for nine months while looking for a job that suited him (after passing on a job that he thought did not).</p>
<p>S1 is a grad student in pure math. He pretty much handled the whole application process on his own with the help of his advisor. He talked to DH a couple times to get his thoughts (DH is a STEM department head at a research U) but that was it. I knew his list of schools and a bit about the NSF Fellowship application. I didn’t really think it was my place to manage or otherwise get involved with the process the way I did when he applied to colleges four years earlier. He’s a very capable adult.now.</p>
<p>He got into his first choice program and won one of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. (I still marvel that this is the same child who put all his shorts in summer storage before he left school at the end of freshman year.)</p>
<p>Your son sounds like myself and the rest of my friends that wound up going to grad school. :)</p>
<p>I found the researching schools part a lot easier than when I was looking at undergrad schools, since there were, realistically, only about 25 places I’d need to wade through websites of professors. It was pretty easy to rank them with preference for faculty, and then decide which were actually worth the time to apply to.</p>
<p>My d. was taking 23 credits (by choice), writing a thesis, taking part in a year long faculty-student graduate seminar (which required original research), playing in the orchestra, singing in a choir, learning a new language, and applied to 9 graduate schools. (She took the GRE over the summer.)</p>
<p>I think the key was excellent, even extraordinary support from her college’s career office (they had several counselors devoted to nothing but graduate school applications.) Together they made checklists and tmelines, talked about prof recommendations (in her case, they had to be in two fields), ordered the GRE scores, worked on rewriting the personal statements again and again, figured out if there were profs at the graduate schools she should contact in advance (there were), and helped assemble the packages.</p>
<p>It was a HUGE success. She was one of four students accepted in her current graduate program, out of a couple of hundred applicants, the only one admitted who didn’t already have a masters degree, and she is now in her sixth year, paid well, and living in a palace in Venice.</p>
<p>I am on the same page with those who say if this is the right thing for our student/s to be pursuing, at the right time, they will get it done around their other obligations. I would be say be happy for your college students who are so fully engaged their senior year and leave all details to them. This is their bus and they need to drive it. Waiting a year can only yield more experience relevant to their graduate school decision. If parental reminders or involvement beyond moral support are involved, I would view it as an indicator that it may not be the best plan. YMMV. Graduate school requires a highly independent adult, frequently navigating less hospitable bureaucracies. </p>
<p>I say this as someone who had a very busy daughter who applied to highly competitive grad schools her senior year. Her idea, her efforts, her consultation with people in the field and career services. Incidentally, the average age in her programs was very late twenties. I wondered if it was best for her to go without the work experience that many of her peers would have and if her age would be a disadvantage, despite multiple internships in her field. I was hoping admissions would know best, because we were ambivalent. In this case, they did, though it will be interesting to see how the current job search unfolds. </p>
<p>Don’t ask about who helped make it manageable financially; that involved other players :).</p>
<p>Mini- may I have the address of the palace in Venice?</p>
<p>S2 completed a masters in public policy this spring.</p>
<p>In high school, for college applications, I felt like I was holding his hand tight and tugging him along.</p>
<p>When applying for his MPP programs, I was totally in the dark.</p>
<p>He took the GRE his junior year, and I know he did very well but never learned his actual scores–all he said was that they were much higher than his SAT/ACT, to his great surprise and pleasure, and those had been high to begin with. </p>
<p>He researched appropriate programs (he wanted pure MPP, not MPA) with the help of his professors and applied to eight top-20 programs. He was accepted at 7 and never, ever heard from the eighth.</p>
<p>He chose not to go to the highest ranked program, but the one he liked best and suited his purposes most.</p>
<p>He graduated in May, and immediately after graduation (and a Birthright trip to Israel) began his dream job.</p>
<p>My advice re the GRE: have a GOOD idea of the schools you want to apply to when you go in. Sending the GRE to multiple schools is an annoying expense and I believe you get 4 (ish) sent free on the day that you take it.</p>
<p>(Just looked it up- you do get 4 free on test day)</p>
<p>I agree with Romani that your son may be working on things and just not telling you. Many, maybe even most, students who are applying to grad/law/med school will do so during their senior year of undergrad. It’s not unusual, in my opinion. Four of my five daughters did it and, to be honest, I had nothing to do with their planning/research, testing, or applications.</p>
Right down to the “rabbit taking a nap” part… will watch this thread with interest.</p>