A (My) Grad School Program shortlisting strategy
My totally non-scientific methodology of shortlisting grad programs, specifically master’s programs, that kinda works (or at least did for me)!
This blog post is in all honesty a true ramble, this was actually a text conversation with a friend of mine which I am now converting into a blog post.
Everyone applying to grad school has and for eternity (probably!) will struggle with program shortlisting. There are some who have a few very specific programs in mind and to those people congratulations you really are awesome and do not need to read this further whereas for others like me who are not constrained by having a niche interest we all try to make a list of program and divide that list into the tried and tested safe-moderate-ambitious categories. The questions that then arise are - Based on what metrics do you shortlist your programs? I understand the categories, but how do you segregate them? Based on only their acceptance rate?
So acceptance rates for grad programs are really hard to find so I didn’t even go that route. What I did was first of all compile some 5 to 6 ranking lists to their top 30s. This way, I at least had a lot of names and got a fair share of understanding of which are top 10s, top 20s, and top 30s.
Then what helped me a lot was identifying a few Marker Programs (this is a totally made-up term just so you know). So how that works and what it means is that choose 3 to 4 programs which you know your batchmates or seniors with somewhat similar profiles have gone into. And hopefully, they are a bit varied in levels - a big disclaimer here, levels or rankings are extremely subjective and ambiguous and this is not fluff but I honestly believe that it is more important for a program to be a good fit for you rather than being a top school according to some rankings.
Now, coming back to Marker Programs. So let’s say I chose program-Y as my Marker Program. I knew that people with a similar profile to me have gone to this program. Similarly, I chose program-X as another Marker Program where I knew people who maybe score a tad bit less on quantitative measures (like CGPA, experience, exam scores, etc.) have gotten admitted. And finally, program-Z where people with slightly better profiles than mine get a chance.
Now once you have these 2 things:
- Ranking compilation
- Marker programs
Then it is easy to see which all programs will tend to evaluate you similarly to your Marker Programs. For example, if NYU Courant is your ambitious Marker Program then you can find programs similar to NYU Courant in your ranking list, say UMass, Brown, and USC, and group them together as ambitious. Now, repeat this for all your Marker Programs. Get as many programs in these clusters as you can.
Moving on to the last step which involves canceling out certain programs. For me there were some programs that didn’t resonate with me because of the tracks they were offering or some programs seemed to have too small batch sizes and thus would have been hard to get an admit from. Finally, you’ll be hopefully left with your list. Put them in ranking order and then check all individual rankings and see if they are almost evenly spaced out in most of the rankings. You would want them to look something like 5, 11, 14, 20, 26… And not something like 4, 5, 7, 18, 19, 38…
A final ramble before I end this convoluted blog, all rankings are extremely different and might not give a good representation of your particular program. Some tend to look at industry perception which gives an advantage to old and established universities. Others might heavily depend on research output which tends to favor programs with large batch sizes (are large batch sizes advantageous or disadvantageous? That’s another ramble that I rather not start right now). So in conclusion there is no sure shot strategy, this is just loosely how I shortlisted programs, you might take some ideas from it and make your own strategy that suits you.
Have a great admission cycle everyone!