Why Haverford Sciences are phenomenal: Part 12(?)

srrinath
Sat, 21 Mar 2009 22:13:04 +0000

not sure if i’m qualified to reply (the only ‘credential’ i have is extensive research over time but that’s pretty much common of most responders on this forum).

anyway, the whole graduate school thing is largely dependent on a person. the thing about statistics is that they’ll show you nothing. with top graduate schools, wherever you go, it’ll always be the minority getting in. if you’re looking for statistics on where the ‘average’ student from your choice schools get into, you’re unlikely to find them simply because there’s such a diversity of skills and employers/adcoms/etc that often you can’t draw any sort of statistical correlation between two things.

having said that, which graduate schools you go to is largely dependent on your performance at an LAC and in some cases, what you do in an extracurricular basis while you’re there. for the hard sciences (by that i mean pure phy/chem/bio and so on), having research internships and working research relationships with professors is really important and that’s where being in an LAC will help you out. for two reasons:

(1) there aren’t graduate students around to ‘steal’ research places from undergrads
(2) LACs are often small and communal and hence, it’s easier to develop relationships with profs that’ll help you get those research opportunities

i’m sure you know that haverford’s sciences and its research opportunities are among the best in america and the percentage of them who go on to PhDs is also pretty high. however, notice that most of the time they won’t give you stats on whatt graduate school a person would get into. that’s because it’s really hard to say. often, graduate admissions to the top programs are in the range of 10% and below (not too sure about chemistry but other fields are something like that). so you can rest assured that if you’re going to get accepted/rejected, most times it won’t be the quality of your undergrad classroom academics that is the key factor in keeping you in/out but rather the other (subjective and non-subjective) factors.

graduate schools also tend to pay more attention to standardized testing (in the case of sciences, i think it’s the GRE) so once again what college you come from won’t help you or hinder you significantly.

hope all that rambling helped.