Preparation
Coursework
In your first and second years, choose your major and take courses you enjoy. Try to take an upper-level seminar in your field during your sophomore year. Focus primarily on these types of courses in your junior and senior years.
Get advice from older students on choosing courses with the best, most devoted, and most challenging professors.
Additionally, choose courses that are generally considered rigorous and a good preparation for your chosen field, even if they are not specifically in your major. For example, in psychology, this would mean taking biology, computer science, and math courses as these would all be useful preparation for a psychology PhD and they are considered to be rigorous.
Research Experience
Research experience is the best preparation for graduate school, and these days is virtually a requirement for admission. If you are interested in science, start working in a laboratory in your first or second year of college. In any field, make sure you complete a senior thesis. Additionally, it is recommended to complete a semester or year-long project your junior year that may be as intensive as your senior thesis, or may lead to work on the thesis.
In order to find these opportunities, ask professors from courses you're taking if they are interested in hiring a work-study research assistant or taking on an independent study student. Interview the professors to see if the projects they propose are interesting to you.
Extra Curricular Activities
Unfortunately, most of the time extra-curricular activities are essentially ignored in your application. The only extra-curriculars that are directly beneficial for admission are academic-related ones. Extra-curricular activities in areas like the performing arts are not helpful (unless you are applying to a music/dance program, of course.) However, I still recommend you do any and all activities that you love while you are in college. This is your last opportunity to devote so much time into your non-academic passions. Additionally, your experiences in these areas are likely to indirectly benefit your career by making you more able to manage your time, work with other people, and be organized. In short, whatever activities you participate in, do them because you love it, not because you expect any of them to "look good" to a graduate school.
Researching Graduate Programs
You should start looking into specific graduate programs as soon as you decide you want to apply to graduate school. You should devote an enormous amount of time to this over the summer before you choose to apply (or earlier, if you can).
It can sometimes be hard to know where too start looking, even if you are confident in your specific research interests, which many of us aren't before we apply. Here are some ways to start looking:
Ask professors for advice
This is a great first step. Your professors know people at other schools and know the general strength of programs. They can give you a longer list of schools that match your interests as a preliminary pass. On the other hand, sometimes professors' knowledge is a little bit outdated, especially if you are pursuing interests that differ from theirs. Also, not everyone has great mentors who can help in this process.
Ask graduate students for advice
An advantage of asking graduate students for advice is that their knowledge is likely to be up to date. However, they will be less knoweldgeable in general as compared to professors.
Look at papers in your field
When you find a research paper that is particularly interesting to you and on a topic you'd like to study in graduate school, look up where the professor is currently teaching. If you find that several of the professors who've written articles you like are at the same school, definitely apply to that school!
Look at a list of schools, such as us news and world report
At the library check out the most recent list of US News and World Report to see a list longer than the top 5 of programs in your area. This report will provide a very general list of the top programs in your area. Do not pay any attention to the specific order of the ranking, and don't be reluctant to consider schools that don't even rank in the top 50. These rankings are highly flawed for a number of reasons. You should just use the list to teach you which schools have graduate programs in your field.
Research programs online
Once you have a list accumulated either through professors, papers, or us news, look up each school's website in your department. From there, see what individual faculty members are interested in by clicking on their profiles or looking up their papers. Read over the program requirements for graduatation. Take notes on the program and on the professors whose interests best match yours. Be thorough, and be prepared to do this process for 50 schools. This is why you should start early!
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