Get Your Grad School Application Recognized - Reach Out to Future Faculty Mentors

One of the major mistakes that prospective students make in applying to grad school in psychology is solely relying on their academic transcript and GRE scores to speak for themselves. While indeed your application package may be impressive, sometimes the decision between one student over another comes down to name recognition. What do I mean by this? You may have heard advice to visit your prospective graduate program. This is indeed sound advice, but you would also like to make sure that key people of influence (ahem, professors or grad students who may be on admissions committees) are looking out for your application. How you get this accomplished is by meeting your future faculty mentor. There are a number of ways to accomplish this: Scheduling a campus visit, sending an email to inquire about their research interests, or stalking via academic conference (just kidding about that one).

Campus visits and facilitating face-to-face meetings are great ways to stand out from the competition! I would advise arranging ahead for an informal meeting with a potential faculty mentor. You can do this very easily via email. Usually busy professors can spare 20-30 minutes of time to talk with prospective students. If for whatever reason that doesn't work, do some investigative work to find out which grad students work with your mentor. Current grad students may be even better information resources to ask the "real deal" questions about classes, department culture, teaching or internship requirements, or you can even ask what they did to successfully gain admission to the program.

Sometimes campus visits are not feasible. Totally understandable. Jet-setting across the country to every grad program you're interested in can be emotionally taxing, time-consuming, or even financially impossible. The next tactic is to ask pointed questions via email. A professor or grad student may be able to answer a few specific, short and to-the-point questions in one email, but avoid sending an endless chain of emails. Be mindful of their time and busy schedules and thank them profusely for taking time out of their schedule to e-mail you.

Although the stalking comment was a joke, if you're able to attend an academic conference and a prospective faculty mentor is on the program schedule, be sure to drop in to check out their presentation, ask an insightful question, and/or speak with them afterwards. Whichever approach you choose, if you present yourself as an overall Grade A student and critical thinker about shared research interests, it is likely that your application will be advanced to the acceptance stack.

If this has been helpful and you'd like to learn more, please visit: http://acceptedtogradschool.com

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