Serious question about graduate school

JHS
Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:44:23 +0000

A lot of places have terminal master’s programs that are pretty much designed for this kind of problem – smart people with spotty records, or people coming out of unreliable undergraduate situations. Those things make it really tough to get into a funded PhD program, but you can go pay for a master’s (sometimes with some funding, sometimes not) and basically put yourself in a strong position to get accepted in a funded PhD program.

In other words, expensive, but a means to an end, and often an effective one. And because the programs are pretty big and not funded, they are much easier to get into than PhD programs, especially right out of college. I only know a few students who have taken this route, and in some cases the issue wasn’t mediocre grades so much as under-preparation (e.g., a CS person who wanted to get a PhD in math, but really didn’t have enough undergrad math to be a competitive candidate). But my impression is that if you can show any meaningful potential (and the ability to come up with meaningful tuition), they will overlook whatever flaws are there and give you a chance to prove yourself.

I don’t know about Harvard and Stanford. But I know MIT and Chicago have various programs like this in math and social sciences (and humanities, too, at Chicago). I’m sure other places do as well.