The Things I Wanted To Know About Applying to Grad School

As I write this, I have just finished up my last year of my undergraduate education, and a huge part of that this year was applying to graduate school. An important thing to know about me is that I am a planner – I like to know what I am getting myself into, and my favorite way to procrastinate is worrying about things that I don’t need to worry about yet. What this means is that for the first three years of undergraduate, I procrastinated by spending absurd amounts of time reading about getting into graduate school.

Now admittedly, I did the same thing during high school: for three years, I procrastinated by reading about and thinking about getting into college. What inevitably happened when I reached the point of actually applying to college (and then to graduate school), is that I immediately felt like I knew nothing.

I spent a lot of time reading about how to win fellowships, secure good letters of recommendation, how to make a good impression during interviews, how to write strong statements of purpose – you name it, I read it. I even read my way through all of Nature’s Career archives, and then through all of Science’s Career archives. I exhausted every page of Google results, read hundreds of blog posts and articles – and I still had questions and felt frustrated.

The advice felt too general, too broad, things felt too opaque. So when it came time to actually do anything, I felt like all of my endless reading had been mostly for nothing.

So of course, now that I’m on the other side, I think I’ll take a shot at writing the advice that I was trying so desperately to find, and maybe one day it’ll help someone.