Urm

Graduate School
1

<p>Do URMs have a betterr chance of getting accepted into a PhD program?</p>

2

<p>I would say no. It is surely of much less importance than it is in undergraduate admissions.</p>

3

<p>Graduate schools also care about diversity, though the boost given to a URM is not as substantial as in undergrad. I say this because a good portion of the schools I applied to had me write a “diversity statement”. Here are the instructions for writing this from Northwestern’s application:</p>

<p>“The Graduate School at Northwestern University considers having a diverse student population a key element to the educational experience of its graduate students. Diversity presents itself in many different forms such as: socio-economic status, race or ethnicity, gender, nationality or place of origin, disability, unique work or life experience, etc.”</p>

<p>Clearly, a URM would qualify as a promoter of diversity, and this is favored. However, based on the characters I saw at each admitted student open house, there appeared to be very few admitted URMs. I would conclude from this that perhaps the boost in a URM’s application is quite minimal. It’s also possible that very few URM’s applied…I don’t know. This is just my best guess.</p>

4

<p>I agree that a URM will probably not see the same boost in chances for grad school as for undergrad. </p>

<p>That said, you will find that there are often fellowship opportunities specifically earmarked for “enhancing diversity”. Often these will have MUCH lower standards than other fellowships. </p>

<p>For example, at Ohio State, the “Dean’s Distinguished University” fellowship requires “3.6 on a 4.0 scale, a 75th percentile average on the GRE general exam’s Verbal and Quantitative components, and a 4.0 on the Analytical Writing component”. </p>

<p>The “Dean’s Graduate Enrichment” fellowship requires only: “3.1 on a 4.0 scale, a 40th percentile average on the GRE general exam’s Verbal and Quantitative components, and a 3.5 on the Analytical Writing component”.</p>

<p>In fairness, the DDU does offer a slightly larger stipend.</p>

<p>Still, this suggests that in some cases, standards may be relaxed considerably for URMs, at least in terms of financial assistance.</p>