<p>airchompers, I have assumed that the OP is asking not about business schools, for which a model of the type you describe, which takes as input variables the GPA, the GMAT, and work experience and the their prior experience with admitted students from that school, makes a lot of sense. </p>
<p>I think the OP is talking about PhD programs (or masters programs in acadmic rather than professional fields). These programs are trying to determine the candidates’ ability to do research. In that case, who your recommenders are (and what they say about you) and their sense of the rigor of the program that you were in will matter a lot. Given that famous professors are, in many fields, more highly concentrated in name schools, attending a name school can provide an advantage to applicants to PhD programs. This is by no means universal, as sephiroth226 points out, many of the best engineering programs are not in name schools. But the key is their confidence in the letters of the recommenders rather than your GPA or the name of your school.</p>
<p>If the professors are what’s important, how would it compare attending a relatively unselective undergrad with strong faculty like Wisconsin or UCSD vs. a more selective school with weaker faculty like Williams or Dartmouth?</p>
<p>I think the committee selecting students is trying to calibrate however they can the applicants. They will use the recommendations, especially of those they know or have come to trust. Many of the professors at places like Williams got their PhDs from top schools but chose a teaching track with light research. They may well have a conduit back to their schools but may also have built up a reputation to the admissions committee for the department. Plus, the committee will have a general sense of the academic rigor and this will boost up candidates from Williams/Dartmouth types of schools.</p>
<p>What could be very hard is a brilliant kid from a small not well-known LAC who has great grades and great recs, but graduate departments may well be skeptical that this great kid can do at their schools.</p>
<p>It’s basically a question of signaling that you know what you’re getting into and can handle the work. If you come from a name-brand program with recommendations from name-brand professors, that’s a strong enough signal in itself that you’re “capable” of doing the work. Of course, you’ll need high grades and good recs, but those alone can be strong enough to land you a place in this case. </p>
<p>If you’re coming from an unknown school with faculty who aren’t well-known in the field writing your recs, you need to find an alternate way of signaling. Just doing “research” isn’t enough; you’d need to be actively RAing for your professors, publishing in outlets other than that cute little undergrad “research journal” every school seems to have these days, attending major conferences in the field (or even presenting at them), etc. Alas, grades and test scores are necessary but insufficient on their own to signal this (especially in more competitive PhD fields). Do everything you can to get a sense of how top-level research works in your field, then make su</p>
<p>I’ve done PhD and MA admissions for a top 10 humanities department for years. We do not formally take into consideration the quality of institution from which the student is applying. However, in our experience, very often the kids at top schools (Ivies and similar, state flagships, top LACs) have received more rigorous educations than those from no-name schools, so the writing samples on which our admission decisions are primarily based tend to be superior. In my field, a good deal of upper-level undergraduate education happens in seminar-style discussions, so the quality of one’s peers contributes to one’s education. Also, the “better” schools tend to have a more favorable teacher-student ratio and can thus assign much more writing and assess it more carefully.</p>
<p>In some cases, too, a recommendation from a well-known prof will carry weight, though most faculty even at the fanciest schools don’t have reputations that carry much beyond their subfield. In any case a spectacular letter of rec from a fancy prof won’t outweigh a mediocre writing sample.</p>
<p>All that said, fine students from lesser-known institutions can also be competitive candidates. They just need to have done more on their own. Sometimes such students begin with our MA program, do well there, and then transfer to the PhD track.</p>
<p>Clearly, some undergraduate schools are known for the high percentage of their grads who go on to obtain PhD’s (at top institutions), e.g. Swarthmore and Reed. Some are known as feeders to the top professional schools (a la WSJ rankings): not surprisingly HYPS, but Williams rounds out the top 5 and Swarthmore is in the top 10 (note universities and LAC’s are lumped together in the WSJ list, with several Ivies not making the top 10). Bottom line: top graduate and professional schools know the quality of students and academic rigor/seriousness of the undergraduate institutions in the U.S… One other point deserves mention, and that is the popularity of the graduate discipline: probably in general easier to gain admission at a top classics PhD program than economics, e.g.</p>
<p>Although i have a 3.9+GPA in math &computer science,i have the feeling that top CS phD programs like MIT and Stanford wont look at me,primarily because i am not from the kind of school where you get to work on CS research with well known pple.I will just take the MCAT and go to medical school.It seems to be less subjective in its admissions</p>
<p>I think its always better, whether you want a doctoral or an engineering program, to be a big fish in a small pond GL</p>
<p>edit: I did not consider recommendations. What I mean to say is that since graduate admissions offices do not have a quantitative way to measure how good one student is against another from a different school, they’ll just take the one with the higher GPA. If two students are equally bright, then the one who went to an easier school will have that higher GPA.</p>
<p>Perhaps it would be best to PM coase since they have extensive firsthand knowledge of the subject and then share back with us.</p>
<p>double edit: most of the people commenting here are saying the opposite of what I’d heard and believed. Is this also true for when you are applying to a job right out of undergraduate engineering? Sorry, I don’t mean to hijack this thread. Just thought the question would be appropriate.</p>
<p>What about the chances of students from unconventional colleges like Hampshire, The Evergreen State College, New College of Florida etc where narrative evaluations instead of grades are used? I’m going to Evergreen after deciding that it was a better suit than and much cheaper alternative to Brown. I’m not really looking for any specifics, just any information you all might have. Thanks. :)</p>
<p>Rairairai, the admissions comm works with the information it has. When we have students from schools that only give narrative evaluations, we read those. Some such evaluations are very helpful/insightful and others are basically worthless. But grades have the same drawback. Grading scales vary widely from school to school so by itself a GPA doesn’t tell the committee much–it just wants to see a record of excellent accomplishment and potential for growth. GRE and subject test scores are moderately important for most grad admissions committees, at least the scores that are most relevant to the discipline.</p>
<p>For science majors, I know that the research that you have done and papers you have authored account significantly for you profile. But how much research would you say makes you highly competitive for top top grad schools? Do top grad schools expect you to do research not only in the summers, but also during the school year? I certainly would want to do such a thing, but I also want to give myself some time to find the right project rather than rushing into something that barely skims what I want to eventually pursue.</p>
<p>By the way, I’m looking to do something along the lines of organic synthetic chemistry, particularly drug synthesis, if that changes anything at all.</p>
It’s possible to get into a top science PhD program only having done research in the summers, but a competitive profile would certainly include term-time research as well as summer research.</p>
<p>The ideal undergraduate research resume would be a long-term experience in a single research group, leading to an independent project resulting in a publication and a glowing, detailed letter of reference from the lab PI. Obviously, some parts of this ideal resume are more common than others.</p>
<p>Certainly not where I went to school, which is one way the quality of the undergraduate institution you attend affects the competitiveness of your profile for graduate school admissions.</p>
<p>Molliebatmit, when is the latest that you recommend starting one’s research experience? Like I said, I don’t want to waste time rushing into something I don’t really end up liking, and then having to transfer to another field. Also, I have good research experience in geochemistry in high school, but I want to end up going into organic chemistry. Is that valuable at all (to grad schools, not to impressing college professors)?</p>
It’s fine to start at some point sophomore year. I started the summer after freshman year, which seemed to be about median. Starting junior year is a little late.</p>
<p>
It could be, depending on how well you frame it in your application. It’s not really problematic that it’s in a different area of chemistry than you think you’d like to focus on in graduate school – graduate programs don’t expect you to have known since birth what subfield you’d like to study.</p>
<p>
I graduated from MIT. And what I’m saying is that schools with better resources and better departments are better at providing undergraduate research opportunities – that doesn’t necessarily track with the US News-type ranking, though it sometimes does.</p>
<p>I’m a Caltech student (going to be a sophomore). It’s pretty rare around campus for people to really start research before the summer after freshman year (typically through a SURF). I do know people who starting working in their SURF labs during spring term to get used to the lab and the general environment before having to spend 8+ hours every weekday. Instead of trying to work in a lab during the year, I would recommend trying to find a mentor to do your SURF with as early as possible (late fall term-early winter is usually fine). I would also recommend taking one of the “pizza classes” like Ch10 or ChE10 to meet professors and learn what is happening around campus in terms of research.</p>
<p>In general, I would agree with Mollie; I know that both MIT and Caltech have undergrad research programs that a good deal of undergrads take part in (UROP and SURF). That’s not to say that other universities do not have these programs, but I would imagine that they are a little less “user friendly”.</p>
GL</p>