Applying to Grad Schools
Graduate School and Graduate Fellowships
If you plan to attend graduate school (whether for engineering, medicine, law, or business), you should begin preparations during spring term of your junior year. These include scheduling appropriate entrance examinations, identifying admissions deadlines for the graduate school(s) you hope to attend, finding several individuals who can write informed letters of recommendation, and preparing applications for graduate fellowships.
Most graduate programs have application deadlines in early fall of the year before admission is desired. The best source of information on graduate admission deadlines and requirements is, of course, the graduate office of the particular program for which you intend to apply.
Standardized Entrance Exams
The majority of graduate programs will require you to submit results from a standardized admissions exam. For engineering and science programs, this will be the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). For medical, law, and business school, this will be the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test), the LSAT (Law School Admissions Test), and the GMAT (Graduate Management Admissions Test), respectively. You should schedule this exam well before you plan to submit your applications. The exams are given every few months, and it may take a couple of months to receive the results of the exam.
Letters of Recommendation
Most graduate programs, and graduate fellowship applications, will require you to submit 2 to 5 letters of recommendation. These letters should be written by individuals who are familiar with your abilities and who are able to comment on specific accomplishments. Those who can write for you might include UROP supervisors, your academic advisor, your SB thesis supervisor, supervisors from summer jobs, professors with whom you had close interactions in classes (for example, lab or design section instructors), or professors in whose lecture-based classes you made a strong (and, one hopes, positive!) impression. Your recommenders are usually going to be busy people, so request the letters well in advance of application deadlines. It is generally helpful to provide a recommender with your resume and a summary of your accomplishments and your goals for graduate study.
Graduate Fellowships
A wide range of graduate fellowships are available from both the Federal Government and various private foundations. Fellowships provide money to cover tuition and expenses in graduate school, which provides greater freedom to choose projects and programs. Students are often unaware that they are well qualified for these. The application procedures are relatively similar to those for graduate school, although a few fellowships will require your university to nominate you. A variety of fellowships are described on the GSO External Fellowships page.
A graduate fellowship deserving specific mention is the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF awards approximately 1,000 graduate fellowships in this competition each year, in the general areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master's or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are at the early stages of their graduate study. For further information, visit http://www.nsfgradfellows.org/.
