Decision
This is the fourth and final post in a four-part series on applying to graduate school. Today’s entry details the decision process.
Congratulations!
After a tedious application process, nail-biting waiting period, and grueling interview schedule, you have been accepted into a graduate program…
or two…or seven.
Now what?
Since submitting your last application, the ball has been completely out of your court. Admissions committees, faculty members, and others have been deciding what comes next for you and your application. However, now that you have been accepted into one or more programs, the power dynamic shifts and you now have the final say in what happens next.
After hearing back from the schools I had applied to/interviewed with, I had an exciting list of opportunities to choose from. Although I was extremely grateful to have options, the weight of the choice that I was making certainly added stress to the experience, and I took longer to reach a decision than I had originally anticipated. In today’s entry, I will describe the tools and methods I used to ultimately decide on a graduate program and school that I felt confident in and excited about.
By way of background, my decision process may have been a tad more complex than others experience. For starters, my husband applied in the same cycle as I did, so we were juggling the “two body problem” of finding the best fit for us together. Moreover, we applied when our son was 6 months old, so living long distance was not a sustainable path. These considerations weighed heavily into where I ultimately decided to pursue a PhD, so keep that in mind as you read further.
Step 1: Identify the programs you will definitely not attend.
Many applicants have a couple of “back-up” schools they apply to in the event that they are not accepted to any of their preferred programs. If you have been admitted into some lower-tier or “back-up” programs as well as some more competitive schools, then your first step should be identifying which of those “back-up” schools you will definitely not be attending and notify them. Informing schools that you know you will not be attending early on the decision period gives them the opportunity to extend acceptance letters to other students, and possibly even scholarships. There is no reason to hold your spot in line for a school you know you will not go to.
Step 2: Decide which factors matter to you.
Make a list of everything that you will factor into your decision. This list will not be the same for everyone, but there should be a lot of overlap between individuals.
Here is the list of considerations that mattered to me as I approached the decision of which graduate school to attend: advisor, research, coursework, classmates/cohort quality, funding amount, funding security, cost of living, set up for success, partnerships school has with other schools or companies, career opportunities in that city after graduation, prestige of school, every day lifestyle in that city, available adventures, weather, quality of life for families, proximity to family/airports, and excitement about living in that place. I blocked these considerations into four overarching categories: education & research, finances, long-term opportunities, and location.
Step 3: Determine what matters MOST to you.
Now that you have your list of what is important, it is time to rank these considerations. Re-write them, but now order them from most important to least important. It is fine if there are ties.
With your considerations in ranked order, you can assign each one a score reflecting how important it is. For example, if you said that being set up fir success was the most important and funding security was the second most important, now you should give a numeric value to each of these categories to reflect how much more important being set up for success is than funding security. When I did this exercise, I gave myself 100 total points to work with for each overarching category (education & research, finances, long-term opportunities, and location) and then assigned values to each category such that all of the values would sum up to 100. I also did this within each larger category (see Figure 1).
Step 4: Score each program/school across each category.
Once you feel confident in your ranked and valued list of points that matter to you, it is time for the exciting part: scoring each school/program! The way I set up this part of the exercise was as follows: 1) In a spreadsheet program (Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, etc.), I put my overarching categories in column A with associated subcategories in column B; 2) I listed each subcategory weight, which should sum to 100 within each broader category; 3) I gave a score for each subcategory, ranging from 0–10; 4) I assigned a broader category weight, which weights sum up to 100; 5) I created space in two columns for a category score — which I calculated from the data in the subcategory section — and a space for overall score; 6) I created a spreadsheet for each school/program I was still considering.
Step 5: Calculate the total scores for each school/program.
Once you have category (or subcategory) scores for each school/program, you can multiply those scores by the values (or weights) that you gave each category to get a weighted score for each category. Then sum all these weighted scores within a school to obtain a final school score. While it is not necessary, it can be helpful to divide the weighted scores by 100, depending on what you used as your total for the values. This just puts the scores back into the same scale you were using before.
Congratulations: now you have a score for each school!
Step 6 (Optional): Sensitivity Analysis
This step is not necessary, but can be helpful in the face of uncertainty. When you score your schools, there may be scores that are difficult for you to assign. For example, if you are considering a school in a city that you have never been to before, you may not know how to score certain aspects of the school’s location. To get a total score for the school/program, you will need to assign a score in spite of this uncertainty, but one way to be more confident in your scoring is to try a couple of different scoring options and see what they do to your overall score for that school/program. To continue the example, if you have never been to Pittsburgh but are considering Carnegie Mellon, perhaps you think that the location score will range between 5 and 9 out of 10. If this is the case, you would want to plug 5 in as the score and then see what your overall score for the school is, and then do the same plugging in 9 to see how much impact this change in the score has on the final score. In epidemiology and other fields, this technique is called a sensitivity analysis, and it helps mitigate ambiguity in the data.
Step 7: Choose a school.
When I ran through this exercise, two schools scored substantially lower than the other two I was comparing. This was a great indication to me that I should focus my attention on the two other schools, which scored very high and very similarly to one another.
How do you decide between two (or more) close schools? In reality, it probably does not matter too much which of the options you choose. You have analyzed your opportunities and both are likely to lead to happiness and a successful career. One thing you could do is spend some time improving your input data and updating the scores you used in the scoring exercise to develop a better understanding of how well this school will suit you. This could look like contacting current students, chatting with alumni, or visiting the schools. Regardless, it is very likely that you will be happy at any of the schools you scored highly, and once you can back that up with your data, you don’t need to agonize over the decision. You are in a good place :)
Example.
Figure 1 is an example of the program I used when I was applying to schools. As you can see, this school scored very high (9.7/10).
Final thoughts.
Of course, going through this exercise may still be too simplified for all of the nuances and considerations that impact which graduate school you will attend. As I mentioned earlier, I applied at the same time as my husband, and we were not willing to live apart during our programs. This led to us choosing a unique collection of programs, where we are both enrolled in our top program but I am doing mine remotely (thanks to an amazing and supportive set of faculty at my institution). The most important thing is that you do what is best for you and your family. My hope is that this scoring exercise will help you see what that best option is.
