Career Services
Best Sources to Learn about Graduate Programs
Professors
Your best source. Professors know you and they know which programs favor students from your school. They know the relative quality of graduate programs in their fields, and they frquently have colleagues and friends at graduate programs where you might like to apply.
Other Students and Alumni
Students and alumni have similar information. Alumni at graduate programs typically provide candid information about the quality of the program and the faculty.
Peterson's Guides
Peterson's guides have every accredited program in the United States. They're a little dense and a bit dry, and if you want to learn about programs there's no more complete resource. The Reed College library offers a full set of Peterson's guides, and the Career Services office reuses the previous year's set in our library. Or, try their website at www.petersons.com
Specialty Guides
Consult your faculty for specialty guides in your field, for example, Graduate Programs in Neurosciences. Or, use the subject search engine at amazon.com, or the subject search engine on CD from Books in Print, available from your university bookstore. Some associations also print guides to graduate programs. Find out about them by looking up the association's HQ phone number in the Encyclopedia of Associations; then just call them and ask.
Academic Journals in Your Field
Top students should get grad school ideas directly from the academic journals. The best programs generate the best and the most articles, so look in the journals for writing and/or research that interest you. Then find out where the article writer teaches.
Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States
This is the best source for unbiased, multivariable analysis of graduate programs. It is the result of a National Research Council-funded study, limited to the top programs in 41 major subject areas. This is a much more sophisticated resource than the "beauty pageant" unilinear rankings of business magazines (see below).
Educational Rankings Annual
A compendium of data from other sources. Expensive, but can be very useful. Check your library.
The Gourman Report
Another "ranking" book, with methodologies that are never fully explicated. Can be useful.
The Business Magazine Rankings
Business magazines are in the business of selling business magazines. Their editors usually know less about higher education than they know about automobiles, which is not a lot. These "rankings" are not useful per se, but you can get ideas to investigate further.
World Wide Web
Online data are voluminous but shallow, and can be downright misleading (for example, some sites list schools in order of having paid a subscription fee). Use the Web to investigate schools you're already interested in, in this order: university-department-faculty-specific faculty members' research interests-his or her advisees (i.e., currently enrolled graduate students). Also, watch carefully for information on related labs and institutes that interest you more than the main department. Try www.gradschools.com for some basic information on which schools offer what graduate programs.
Adapted from Graduate Admissions Essays by Donald Asher (Ten Speed Press, 2000)
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