Demystifying graduate application process
Demystifying the American Graduate Admissions Process
Karthik Raghunathan
Graduate Class of 2010
Stanford Computer Science kr@cs.stanford.edu Abstract
This paper attempts to discuss at length the various factors (along with their respective weightage) that the admissions committee at a top graduate school in the US takes into account while reviewing a Master of Science
(MS) application.
Disclaimer
This paper is a mixture of facts, inferences and extrapolations, based on my personal experience as an admissions committee member at Stanford. All views expressed here are solely mine and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Stanford University.
1. Introduction
In this paper, I outline the various parameters involved in the complex decision making process of a Masters admissions committee in a top graduate school in the US. To clarify this further, (i) This report is mainly targeted at
MS applicants, but a lot of it can be extended to PhD applications as well. In most cases, the requirements for a PhD admit will just be a stricter version of those mentioned here. (ii) I do not have a specific list of universities in mind when I say "a top graduate school". Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley and CMU are certainly up there, but I am not particularly referring to any specific list of graduate school rankings. In a more general sense, I am talking about schools where the default attitude of the admissions committee is "rejected, unless strongly proved otherwise" rather than "let's give him/her the benefit of the doubt". These schools tend to follow a risk minimization policy, and if in doubt, they would reject the candidate rather than risk diluting the quality of the incoming batch. (iii) The content here is targeted only at the applicants to US universities. Though some of it might be the same, I have no personal experience regarding the admission criteria of graduate schools elsewhere. Also, since I belong to a computer
science
Karthik Raghunathan
Graduate Class of 2010
Stanford Computer Science kr@cs.stanford.edu Abstract
This paper attempts to discuss at length the various factors (along with their respective weightage) that the admissions committee at a top graduate school in the US takes into account while reviewing a Master of Science
(MS) application.
Disclaimer
This paper is a mixture of facts, inferences and extrapolations, based on my personal experience as an admissions committee member at Stanford. All views expressed here are solely mine and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Stanford University.
1. Introduction
In this paper, I outline the various parameters involved in the complex decision making process of a Masters admissions committee in a top graduate school in the US. To clarify this further, (i) This report is mainly targeted at
MS applicants, but a lot of it can be extended to PhD applications as well. In most cases, the requirements for a PhD admit will just be a stricter version of those mentioned here. (ii) I do not have a specific list of universities in mind when I say "a top graduate school". Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley and CMU are certainly up there, but I am not particularly referring to any specific list of graduate school rankings. In a more general sense, I am talking about schools where the default attitude of the admissions committee is "rejected, unless strongly proved otherwise" rather than "let's give him/her the benefit of the doubt". These schools tend to follow a risk minimization policy, and if in doubt, they would reject the candidate rather than risk diluting the quality of the incoming batch. (iii) The content here is targeted only at the applicants to US universities. Though some of it might be the same, I have no personal experience regarding the admission criteria of graduate schools elsewhere. Also, since I belong to a computer
science