{"id":883,"date":"2011-04-11T19:44:11","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T02:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ups.edu\/studentlife\/?p=883"},"modified":"2011-04-11T19:44:11","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T02:44:11","slug":"the-road-to-graduate-school-part-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/2011\/04\/11\/the-road-to-graduate-school-part-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"The Road to Graduate School, Part IV"},"content":{"rendered":"

Visits\u2026 I mean interviews\u2026 I mean\u2026 wait what?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah! Getting an interview means you\u2019re past that first hurdle. They love you so much on paper that they want to meet you! That first interview invitation was one of the best moments of my life. For the first time, I knew it was going to happen; I was going to go to grad school. It\u2019s a lot like that first undergraduate acceptance letter only somehow better because they’re only sending it to like 50 people (whereas undergraduate institutions send out 1000s). So yes you should feel special and yes you should feel proud if and when this happens. \u2013high five-\u00a0 <– This is me sending you a preemptive high five for when it happens. Save it for later. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Anyway, there is a bit of an issue with this part of my \u201cRoad to\u201d blog. I really don\u2019t know how to title it. Here’s the first problem with the title: Grad school visits\/interviews aren’t really interviews. Here’s the second problem with it: Grad school visits\/interviews aren\u2019t really visits. And now you\u2019re thinking, \u201cWell, Kim has finally lost it and isn\u2019t making any sense!!\u201d Seriously though\u2026 it\u2019s very confusing and I had no idea what I was in for on that first interview.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s the thing. Part of visiting a grad program is to decide if you really want to go there. I mean you\u2019ve only seen them on paper\/the internet and that\u2019s just not the same. This is the time where you see if your apprehensions about location are true, if you \u201cfit in\u201d, and if the science is all it\u2019s cracked up to be. You can tell a lot about the overall feeling of a program just by spending those one or two days with current graduate students. You can also see if that professor you think you want to research with is as awesome as you thought (or not\u2026). The first thing to remember about visits\/interviews is that you need to be happy there<\/strong>. You\u2019ll be at that institution and in that program for 5+ years for a PhD and the visit is the only chance you\u2019ll get before moving there to really see what you\u2019re getting yourself into. This isn\u2019t just school; it\u2019s your life and we all know no one plans to spend 24\/7 alone in a lab.<\/p>\n

The other part of this process is the interview. The second thing to remember about visits\/interviews is that every program is a little bit different<\/strong>. Some really don\u2019t focus on the interview. Their mentality is that they only want to pay for people to visit that they know they want to accept. These are the places where unless you totally screw up, you\u2019re in. Now for other programs, it really is an interview. They\u2019re paying for say 60 people to come out and will only offer for 30, maybe even only 15. And you can try to figure out which program fits into which category but trust me, it\u2019s never accurate. Past graduate students\/your professors knew how it was once done at a given program. It may not be the same anymore. And current graduate students don\u2019t really get told how their program\u2019s administration figures things out. They\u2019re too busy trying to graduate, ha. The moral of this story is to treat every visit like an interview<\/strong>. Be yourself, put your best foot forward and what happens, happens.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s yet another problem with my advice. DON\u2019T FREAK OUT! Yes it\u2019s an interview and that\u2019s scary. But if they reject you after that, then you probably wouldn\u2019t have been happy there anyway. It\u2019s all about matching people to programs. You have to want them and they have to want you. I guess that\u2019s how I reconciled the visit\/interview idea. I went in like it was an interview but toned my fear down a bit by realizing that being myself was the best way for me (and the programs) to find the \u201cright\u201d students for them. You don\u2019t really want to go to a place that doesn\u2019t really, really, REALLY want you there, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Visits\u2026 I mean interviews\u2026 I mean\u2026 wait what? Yeah! Getting an interview means you\u2019re past that first hurdle. They love you so much on paper that they want to meet you! That first interview invitation was one of the best … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[155,183,374],"class_list":["post-883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kim-dill-mcfarland-11","tag-graduate-school","tag-interviews","tag-visits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studentlife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}