Will REU help for graduate school admissions?

b_r_um
Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:33:40 +0000

The REU won’t help you per se, but what you get out of it might: experience, letters of recommendation, possibly a publication. I did an REU at Cornell and I ended up with such a poor relationship with my adviser that I didn’t even consider asking him for a letter of recommendation. Luckily I got to work with a professor at Penn the following summer (not through an REU or any other formal program) and was much happier and more productive in his research group.
I don’t know how competitive the REUs in your field are. My adviser at Cornell mentioned that he got ~300 applications for 6 spots. One of the REU students asked what he had done to make his application stand out, because that might be valuable information for graduate school applications. The adviser’s response: “Oh, it’s nothing you wrote. Your letters of recommendations stood out.” Another random observation: everybody there had several graduate courses under their belt already.