The Three Tenets of the Grad School Application - or How I Got My First Grey Hair

You know those lists they make you write as kids on the first day back from summer vacation? You're supposed to highlight your three favorite moments, events, or pieces of wisdom from the summer. It usually involves the park, the pool, or a hot sticky sidewalk with blue-flavored sugar liquid stuck to your shins or melting on your sneakers.

Applying to grad school is nothing like this. If I wanted to make a stretch, I could find one resemblance: the anxiety. But even there, the difference is superficial (or, GRE word: perfunctory). As a kid, your little mind was full of anarchy and sun, and the idea of organizing a coherent thought in a thesis and support format was so overwhelming that you probably couldn't think of a single event that made the summer memorable. As a graduate applicant, the list will be so long you'll start memorizing it like vocabulary words.

To save you the time, below is a list of essential items I have discovered over the last six months of this process, and more as I go forward. Some are self-evident, where others I would have sang songs and done little dances with a rain stick in an abandoned parking lot just to get a fortune cookie's idea of what was going on.

1) Do not wait until you graduate to start working on this list. This is not a two-month list; it is not a list that should wait until the very last moment. Getting into graduate school is not the same as getting into undergraduate. The effort and preparation required are significantly greater. Any application materials and tests should be well thought out at least six months in advance of the due date...which differs from school to school. Procrastination may have served you well on that triple-decker midterm, but it isn't going to work here.

2) Cultivate your references (assume you'll need three or four) while you are in classes! If you are doing particularly well in a class, make sure to keep up the work and build a relationship with that professor. Being memorable is important (in a positive way, of course...being that kid who's fifteen minutes late every day and cuts behind the professor before immediately beginning to argue in favor of fascism is NOT the way to get a great reference). Your professors want to see you succeed (thus, the career choice); let them know what your plans are for Graduate school, let them know that you enjoy the class and the relationship and would like to be able to use them as a reference later, and most professors will be happy to help you out.

3) The GRE is a prerequisite for many graduate programs. Do NOT wait until a few months before the deadline to take this test. If at all possible, you want six months to study before the test, and another six months to retake before your application deadlines. While this test claims to measure your reasoning skills, it presumes a basic knowledge of binomial algebra, factoring, ratios, solid and linear geometry, basic geometry, probabilities, and Rates/Averages. It also requires an extensive college-level vocabulary, but I point out the math for two reasons: one, I find that the presumption that we all know this stuff is based on the idea that we are all traditional students that will graduate at twenty two and finished high school in a linear fashion, and two, because many English majors are not prepared for the work that goes into this portion of the test. The school of your choice may or may not care about your math score--but many humanities departments have minimum overall score requirements in order to be eligible for additional financial aid, or sometimes even admission. Why limit yourself by being unprepared? Get a Baron's GRE book (they over-prep you, which helps to relieve test anxiety and give you a good shot at a great score), a couple hundred blank index cards, and start studying!

This advice is brought to you courtesy of my own grueling grad school application process; I hope it is of some benefit to those of you just diving in. Stay tuned for more enlightening propaganda from your favorite writer bum, at home in the Queen City.