MS or PhD? GRE? GRE Subject? TOEFL ? TSE? Resume? Statement of Purpose?

1 DECIDE PROGRAMME
- MS or PhD?
2. CHOOSE A SECTOR OF INTEREST
3. TESTS
- GRE?
- GRE Subject
- TOEFL
- TSE
4. RESEARCH ABOUT UNIVESITIES
- Number of Universities to apply to?
- Selecting Universities
- Contacting EDUFRANCE
5. ACTUAL APPLICATION PROCEDURE
- Application Forms
- Status Table Format
- Transcript of Academic performance
- Letters of Recommendation
Whom to get recommendation from?
- Statement of Purpose
- Resume
- Financial Statement
- Photocopy of GRE/ TOEFL/ TSE Score sheets
- Other Documents - papers and certificates
- Precautions to be taken while sending the admissions material
- Importance of different application components
6. WAITING THE WAIT
- The process your application goes through
- The Scholarship business
7. SAYING YES
- What if your application is rejected?
8. PREPARING TO LEAVE



1 DECIDE PROGRAMME

MS or PhD?

First of all, PhD does not mean more money. The richest dude, Gates, was a college dropout, so may be you are wasting your time even in the undergrad school. PhD can potentially take you higher with lesser amount of effort later in life as compared to MS. But with some hard work later, MS can surpass any Joe PhD. In terms of what you would have to pay is that, as things stand today, 2005, there is almost no financial support from universities for MS at the time of admission. Depending on different college you may get support later but that's just counting chickens before eggs are even laid. For PhD, more often then not you'll get financial support at the time of admission itself. Why is it so? Well .. all these universities and professors who support students pay from the research grant they get from different funding agencies. Now these funding agencies want results for their money and thus there is certain amount of pressure to deliver on professors and thus they want student who can be committed to their research for a longer duration of time and thus probably deliver better. Academic work for MS is like undergrad but of course more advanced, for PhD its mostly research. As far as credentials required are concerned, PhD is tougher to get into because firstly, there are fewer seats, at times even one or two in a particular field, and secondly, because of funding, some morons blindly apply to PhD increasing the competition. Do not apply to PhD ONLY because you may get funding here.

2. CHOOSE A SECTOR OF INTEREST
- Go through internet site of edufrance and try to get the best suitable programme for you

3. TESTS
Graduate Record Examination
Already lots of resources are available on net about GRE so I am not going to reproduce all the information. Following are the links which might be useful:
1. http://www.gre.org/gendir.html General Test Official Site
2. http://www.greguide.com A big site with tons of info.
3. http://www.800score.com/gre-guide.html Another famous site for GRE
4. http://www.wordhacker.com/en/download.htm A useful software which may help
5. http://www.testmagic.com/gre/ Excellent stuff on GRE
6. http://www.petersons.com/testprepchannel/gre_index.asp GRE Practice Tests
7. A free sample test from KAPLAN A must
Practice CDs for GRE are available from ETS - The official version, KAPLAN, Princeton Review, Petersons etc. You can get them easily in CD markets in Delhi or Mumbai.

Books for GRE:
1. Barron's GRE
2. The Big Books
3. Norman Lewis' book

Graduate Record Examination - Subject Tests
Cost: $150
Tests are administered in following topics, click for more information.
Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology
Literature in English
Biology
Mathematics
Chemistry Physics
Computer Science
Psychology

GRE Subject tests
1. http://www.gre.org/pbstest.html Subject Test Official page
2. http://gradschool.about.com/cs/gresubjecttest/l/blgresubject.htm An introduction

The Test of English as a Foreign Language
Cost: $140
Links:
1. http://www.ets.org/toefl/ The official TOEFL site
2. http://esl.about.com/cs/toefl/a/a_toefl.htm An introduction - not great.
3. http://www.testmagic.com/Knowledge_Base/TOEFL/ Excellent stuff with few tests.
4. http://www.petersons.com/testprepchannel/toefl_index_grad.asp Tests & sample questions
5. http://www.ets.org/toefl/learners/cbt/sampletest.html Very Useful downloads
Practice CDs are available from ETS-official version, it will be mailed to you within a few weeks of your registration.

Test of Spoken English
Cost: $125

Links:
1. http://www.ets.org/tse/ The official TSE site
2. http://www.englishjobmaze.com/exam-tse.htm An introduction
3. http://www.testmagic.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=39 This forum link is THE best
4. http://www.ets.org/tse/sampletest.html The sample test that one MUST go through


4. RESEARCH ABOUT UNIVESITIES
Number of Universities to apply to?
Have a short break after the tests and then get right back into the game. The first job now is to decide the that how many universities you want to apply to. Though as prepared we may be with our research and everything about universities, there is a certain random element which is out of our control and thus applying to a larger number of universities, strangely, does improve your chance to get into a good grad school.

5. ACTUAL APPLICATION PROCEDURE
1. Application
Generally, most the universities have an online application process so you need to fill out the online form and pay the application fee (via credit card).
2. Transcript of Academic performance
This is basically the report card from all the colleges you have attended.
It need to be official i.e. on college letter head with proper seal and signature and also needs to be sealed in an envelope.
3. Letters of Recommendation
These are supposed to tell the admissions committee about what a few experienced people who themselves have been through graduate school and who have had a chance to work with you closely and observe you think about you. So the important thing is to get the recommendation from someone who knows you and your capability to work.
4. Statement of Purpose
One of the most important section of you application is the statement of purpose or personal statement. This is a channel through which you can talk to the admissions committee and tell them why they should admit you. People believe that one should write very hi-fi flowery language in the SoP which is completely wrong. It needs to be a true representation of your abilities and for that no flowery language will do any good. Write it in a straight forward manner. I do not want to elaborate much about SoP here because it is very well documented around the net. Here are few links which might be useful:
1. http://www.statementofpurpose.com/ Name says it all
2. http://www.infozee.com/application-issues/essays-sop.htm Some sample essays
3. http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/gcallaghan/graduate/winningstatement.htm Useful stuff
4. http://www.accepted.com/grad/personalstatement.aspx The Do's and Don'ts
5. http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~whuang/other/purposeadvice.html A very interesting account by a professor at RPI with some advice to faculty also.
6. http://www.greguide.com/sop.html Even this one is pretty decent
7. http://essayedge.com/ This is paid ... if you can pay.
8. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Flats/5353/classes/purpose.html Another guide but for Psychology
9. http://info.gradsch.wisc.edu/admin/admissions/purpose.html An official account as to what it should be. This is what a typical university expects.

DO NOT read any body else's SoP before you write yours because once you have read other's SoP, there is no way you can maintain the originality in your own.
Take sufficient time to complete it. Start at least a month before SoP would actually be required. Go through revisions.

6. Resume
Some of the universities also ask for applicant's resume. It is yet another channel for communication but this can only be used for factual description. In fact resume, when used cleverly in conjunction with SoP, provides you a chance to improve your SoP. The way to do this is that you mention every factual detail about you academic or otherwise life that you would like the admissions committee to know in the resume. Now when writing the SoP do not duplicate any information you mentioned in the resume and this will give you more space for talking about boring factual details. You can tell admissions committee about the inside stories about those facts in the SoP. Again, like SoP, there is tons of resources available for Resume on net. Following links may help too:
1. http://www.resume-help.org/college_admissions_resume_example.htm
2.http://www.ishaglobal.com/info/Admission_College_Resume_Sample.htm I am not sure whether this is free or not.
3. http://gradschool.about.com/od/curriculumvita/ This is useful.
4. http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/resumes.shtml Very useful.
You can check out my resume on About me page. I do not know how far they conform to the guidelines mentioned in above links.

7. Financial Statement
This is a very important part of your application

8. Photocopy of GRE/TOEFL/TSE Score sheets
Some universities mention that they wont except photocopied scorecards and must be sent original scores through ETS. Without any respect for what they say, you must invariably include a photocopy of your scorecards with your admission material. Reason being that ETS is notorious for delays in delivering of score or not delivering them at all and thus in such situations the admissions committee can at least proceed with the photocopies and you can sort things out with ETS in the meantime.

9. Other Documents - papers and certificates
You can also include your papers or some certificate if the university explicitly asks for it. The best way to show such stuff is to put these papers, reports etc. on a website and include the URL in the resume.

Precautions to be taken while sending the admissions material:
1. For addresses and names on various envelopes use printed labels.
2. Make sure to indicate your name, email address and identification number (if any) on each and every document that you send out.
3. Use a binder clip to group all the recommendation letters together.
4. Write a short and crisp forwarding letter. Make sure to include each and every piece of paper that you are sending in the letter. A sample is here.
5. Arrange the material inside the envelope in a plastic bag (to protect stuff from water) in the order mentioned in the forwarding letter.
6. Do not include any document other than asked for by the university. Nothing pisses the overworked clerk at the university than thinking about what to do with extra documents. Photocopies of scores is an exception to this rule.

Importance of different components of your application
What I am going to mention here is based on my personal experience and my discussions with some people involved in the actual process. The most important thing, interestingly, is a hypothetical product, your_GPA x reputation_of_your_undergrad_school. As the reputation of your undergrad school is something which you cannot exactly quantify, but still you at least have a good idea about it in your own country. Further, the reputation of your school is somewhat beyond your control so that makes your GPA very important, or rather the most important thing. This is so because your GPA tells the admissions committee about your cumulative evaluation over four year by eminent faculty members who themselves have been through grad school. Next to GPA comes publications if any, in scholarly journals or conference proceedings. Here the reputation of the journal or the conference is of utmost importance. In fact if you have really decent publication it can even make up for your GPA. These publication are given so much importance because grad school is basically about research and publications are a proof of your expertise in research. Keep in mind that doing mere internships at fancy labs and center would not help much unless you can corroborate that experience with publications. The GRE and TOEFL scores are only marginally important and are generally used only for cutoff purpose in initial stages of the process. The recommendations become important based on two things - who wrote it and what he wrote. Now the fact is that very few manage to get recommendations from Noble laureate or Turing award winners so generally the person recommending you would not be known to the person reading the recommendation so what is written in the recommendation becomes more important. It should ideally not just be about your grades and you being the favorite student. Yours SoP is as important as you make it. Its a little lower in the order of importance list because, things like GPA and GRE scores are required to be sufficiently high so that committee even reads your SoP. But once your other credentials are strong enough that committee gets to your SoP, it becomes the most important component because through this you can talk to committee and make them look at you beyond some numbers on your resume.

6. WAITING THE WAIT
Once the university receives your application, it will send you an acknowledgement email. It will contain information about whether you application is complete or not or incase something is missing, they'll ask you to send it. Keep this email very securely as it may contain identification information for your application which can potentially be misused.

7. SAYING YES

say yes to all offer to choose best in last


8. PREPARING TO LEAVE