Shelley Batts has all the right answers [Guide to Getting Into Graduate School for the Sciences]. You need to read her entire posting but here's the short version to tempt you ...
- Spend your spare time doing research.
- Cultivate awesome letters of recommendation.
- Take the relevant classes, but have a few other interests too.
- Have a reason why you want to do research.
- Read the literature, know the basics, and a few tough surprising facts.
- Know your interviewers, and their research.
- Shell out the money for a GRE tutor if you are a nervous test-taker.
- Apply to schools based on labs, not the US News and World Report Rankings.
- Email professors you are interested in working with.
- Follow the funding.
- Good scientists don't always make good mentors.
- Don't be afraid to get out if it isn't working.
- Stand up for yourself, and keep at it.
- Share most of your ideas, but keep a few to yourself.
- Apply for NRSAs.
- Be curious.
- Know some science lineage.
- Know who won the Nobels that year, in your field.
- Email the students in the program, and in the lab.
- Find out where/what students from that program are doing now.
- No second-choices. Nothing but science will do.
- Be professional, talk shop, ask what projects their students are doing.
1 comment :
What is "science lineage"?
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