All told, the process of successfully completing graduate school applications takes two academic years, sometimes more. Many students cram this entire process into one semester, particularly first gen students that do not know how time intensive these applications are. The process of attending graduate school begins the moment you decide to pursue graduate studies. Planning and execution are vitally important components in your professional life, and it’s important to start cultivating those abilities now.

When I tell students that the application process will take two years, their jaws drop. I want to clarify this point using academic work as an example. At the time of writing this book, I had just finished an academic article and had it accepted for publication in a journal. The article is about 40 pages long, which is standard in many fields, so an unremarkable project. It took 8 months for the article to finally get published. I was not writing for 8 hours a day month after month to complete the project. It was a sustained, sometimes 1 hour per day effort. Weeks would pass when I had nothing to do on the project because I was waiting on editors. This is what I mean when I explain the process will take two years. You may go for a month or more without directly working on your apps. Some days will be filled with drafting, reading, and editing. Others will feature no direct work on the materials. That’s not a problem when you have enough time allotted to the process. This is, of course, problematic for students that wait until the month before applications are due.

The reason this takes two years is because of what’s known as “the season.” Academic life is largely split between fall and spring semesters (summers are usually for writing, planning, and course prep). Programs accept grad school applications during fall (and job applications as well). The apps are screened by a graduate school/human resources, and then prepared and distributed to the department in late fall/early spring. The department will then sort the apps, make decisions, and notify applicants during mid to late spring. This is simply how the process works. Your apps need to be complete and ready to go in early fall the year before you intend on going to school. That means you need to have letters of recommendation, transcripts, letters of application, and writing samples done and ready to go. Many schools accept graduate students in fall only. The group of incoming students is called a cohort. Some schools will accept a spring cohort, but many do not. Graduate faculty plan courses with cohorts in mind, so starting in spring can sometimes mean missing vital courses in research methods. Always aim to start in the fall.

In subsequent chapters, I will provide details on how to progress through this timeline. For now, it’s enough to get a global sense of what will be happening in the coming months.

A Note on Application Costs

Graduate school applications cost money, and, often, they cost a lot of money. It’s a good idea to start putting some cash away and exploring mini-scholarship opportunities early in your application process. At the time of writing, the GRE costs 205 dollars per shot. I had to take the GRE twice because I suffer from pretty significant test anxiety. It’s not unusual for people to bomb the GRE on their first try. For one, the GRE is administered in prison-like settings on (typically) disgusting computers (during my first attempt, my mouse was inexplicably covered in what smelled like grape jelly). It’s an uncomfortable situation to say the least. It’s a good idea to try and budget for two rounds of the GRE and a few bucks for prep materials (never buy prep materials new. They can always be found used or available for free online). It’s also possible that your campus or a local organization provides scholarships for the cost of the GRE. My own campus offers a range of mini-scholarships intended to defray the cost of these tests. Many of our scholarships go unused because students don’t know to look for them.

Schools often charge anywhere from 20-100 dollars in “application fees,” which is a corporate-speak way of saying free money for the school. There are ways to have these fees waived, so it’s a good idea to investigate or inquire as to this possibility. Some schools, for instance, have a hardship waiver for low-income students.

The last glaring expense will come in the way of transcript fees. It might cost money to have your college transcript send to your potential graduate school. One of my schools charged 12 dollars per transcript. That adds up fast if you apply to 10 schools.

The bottom line is to budget what you can for the process. If you can only afford to take the GRE once, then study as best as you can and try to do well. If you can only afford to apply to two schools, then so be it. Some aspects in this process are out of your control. I’ve known many students that could only afford a small batch of apps. They applied to the schools they could afford to apply to and then saved up more money for the next season.

The Timeline: Fall 1 

This is ideally a student’s first semester as a junior, but I even recommend to sophomores that they begin this process as well. It can begin before this semester and often extends after it. This semester should be a semi-formal process of discovery. Many students attempt to rush this process, which inevitably means they aren’t able to produce effective documents. Part of the application process is defining who you are, and that kind of reflection and introspection takes time. Key tasks include:

• Interviewing faculty on their areas of specialization, asking about excellent graduate programs, discussing their work life, soliciting any advice.
• Informal program research. I recommend students start a list of possible program options to explore at a later time.
• Reading over scholarship/field histories/wikis/general resources about specializations in your field.
• Study for and take the GRE. This is the most important action you will complete in this semester. It’s important to devote significant time towards studying for this test, and it’s much easier to do that when you aren’t drafting materials.

The Timeline: Spring 1 

By the end of this semester, you should have some firm plans about where to submit and who will write recommendations for you. I place this process early because it’s very possible letter writers will back out or otherwise fail you. This semester is really about developing and finalizing your overall strategy. This semester is lighter on tasks because the process of vetting programs can be particularly time intensive. It’s always good to provide ample time to meet with faculty, as well. Key tasks include:

• Formal vetting of programs: read the website, graduate handbook, find placement information, look at course offerings, scrutinize funding opportunities.
• Study for and take the GRE again (if needed).
• Meet with faculty, explain your plans, and request letters of recommendation.

The Timeline: Summer 1 

The process of vetting programs usually changes a student’s ideas about what and how they want to study. That’s a natural part of this process, and this presents a good period to make some final decisions about your program list. After you know for certain where you want to apply, you can begin writing materials. This is also a great time to check in with faculty to update them on your progress. Many faculty accept new jobs during the Spring, and it’s important to make sure that your writers are still around and engaged. If they aren’t, this is the time to find replacements. Key tasks include:

• Refining list of possible programs, ranking them by preference/funding packages.
• Drafting letters of application (sharing this letter with willing faculty)
• Drafting a CV (sharing this CV with willing faculty)
• Requesting letters of recommendation (if primary writers have backed out/left/etc)

The Timeline: Fall 2

This is the semester when you will be submitting applications, and, if you have followed some semblance of this timeline, all of your energy will go to gathering, tweaking, and submitting applications. Key tasks include:

• Revising letter of application and CV (sharing revisions with willing faculty)
• Planning out submission time frames, making note of final due dates
• Submitting apps

The Timeline: Spring 2

Acceptances and rejections will arrive during this semester (as well as wait list offers). At this point, your only tasks is to consider your results and make a decision.

The Timeline: Summer 2

If you decide to pursue your studies, this will be the time to plan a move, say goodbye to friends and family, and begin preparing for your new program.

This timeline is a preferred model to follow for a few reasons. Graduate school applications are tricky because you have to continue to do well in school while also successfully planning and executing a strategy to earn admittance to graduate school. This timeline provides you plenty of time to work through each step. Second, you will encounter many, many bottlenecks in this process. Most commonly, this occurs in the letter of recommendation phase, but also frequently happens when a GRE score turns out to be a little lower than anticipated. My timeline builds in lots of buffer space, which allow you to completely fail at one aspect of your application process, but completely recover from that failure. It can also help you to maintain as healthy a balance between schoolwork and applications as possible.

What If I’m Too Late?!

If you are picking up this book in the Spring of your senior year, don’t panic. Most first gen students assume applying to graduate school will be similar to applying for undergraduate study. It should be, and you aren’t wrong for applying logic to the situation. The process of applying to graduate school is also often shrouded in mystery, and the objective of this book is to remove the shroud. Unfortunately, you may have removed the shroud too late. Take a step back and a deep breath. I always encourage students to not think of this as being late to this application phase, but rather early to the next application phase. Most importantly, don’t rush.

I’ve known many students that have opted to rush the application process, often for really good reasons. I worked with a student a few years ago that had moved away from home to complete their undergraduate degree. Due to the enormous stress of completing an undergraduate degree and a lack of knowledge about grad school, the student was starting their applications at the beginning of fall with about 2 months to get everything sorted. The student didn’t want to move back home only to move again in a year. Their prospective graduate school choices were closer to their current institution than their hometown. This is sound logic, and it would no doubt save time and tons of money. Unfortunately, the grad school application process is not logical.

This particular student did not perform exceptionally well on the GRE, and likely did not have enough time to refine materials and cultivate excellent letter writers. The result was spending several hundred dollars on the application process and then spending several hundred dollars on moving home. It can be much, much more expensive to do poorly on applications in a time crunch than it is to work on stability in the near term and then focus on applications in the next cycle.

If you are too late for this cycle, keep reading. I cover the logistics of taking a year off at the end of this chapter, but you will still need to develop a system for applying to grad school. Again, look at this as being ahead for the next cycle.

Project Management

The timeline above is a rough outline of each phase required to apply to graduate schools. It is essentially a project outline, something encountered frequently in the private/public sector. Charting each of the necessary moves gives you some distinct advantages.

Applying for grad school sounds easy, but it isn’t. It’s much more involved that applying for undergraduate studies (especially in the admissions era where many schools are eager to admit as many students as possible). Confronted with the reality of this plan, many students tend to break down. This may be the hardest thing you’ve ever undertaken as a student. The path forward, then, is breaking up the job into separate tasks and phases. This is excellent training for approaching the major projects you will encounter in graduate school. It’s smart to tackle papers and projects in the same way. Do your best to modify and work through this plan in some way, either by using a planner, digital calendar, or project management app. Getting used to working with deadlines for complex projects will put you ahead.

This timeline also allows for breathing room and mistakes. First, you are at a fairly transformative moment. Wrapping up a degree and considering major life moves will produce some complicated thinking. Many of the students I work with vacillate between many different possibilities. One week, a life plan may involve a professorship. The next week, that same life plan may now include starting a nonprofit. This is perfectly normal. It also means that your materials will take on these characteristics as well.

This tends to happen in every major writing project. At the time of writing this book, I was working through a set of edits from peer reviewers. I had submitted the article months before receiving the edits. Upon reviewing some of the original content in the article, I was confused. I found areas of dubious logic and messy organization. At the time of drafting, I considered the argument much stronger. Giving yourself distance from a piece of writing will also provide perspective. It’s not uncommon during the process of drafting to documents to question your earlier drafts. The takeaway is that it’s important to build in time for mistakes and reflection during this process. It leaves room for more revision, and that will lead to stronger documents.

It’s also important to build in time for mistakes that have nothing to do with you. I’ve had nothing but difficulty when trying to get transcripts from any university, even schools that use electronic transfer systems. Registrar offices at large schools will be fielding many transcript requests per day, and mistakes will happen. I’ve also had receiving schools misplace my documents. I once turned in the same form for my MA graduation 3 times to the exact same person. University bureaucracy is huge, slow moving, and prone to error. Spacing out your timeline allows you to take these mistakes in stride rather than having them interfere with your success in the application process.

Allow Time for Faculty

Students are often completely unaware of what professors are doing. That’s primarily due to professionalism. Most of the professors I know don’t air their dirty laundry during classes and don’t constantly complain to students about their work life struggles. This creates an impression in many students that we are bulletproof intellectuals that can tackle tasks at superhuman speed. We cannot.

Professors are people. We have complex lives, and our attention is usually split in too many directions. Many of us frequently have students that ask for letters of recommendations two weeks before a deadline. Try as we might to finish in that deadline, we have many other things to do. I also always have other letters to write. It’s rude and unfair to jump the queue. Initial reactions to my timeline often involve students expressing disbelief that it takes up to 9 months to get a letter of rec. It might.

The nature of academic work is often precarious. We are judged by things like publication numbers. The whims of editorial teams for journals can often disrupt an entire semester. For instance, I recently sent a manuscript to a journal. I received some initial positive feedback from the editor, then it was sent for peer review. The peer reviewers tore the article to shreds, and requested significant re-writes of the article with a very quick turnaround. I had two choices. First, withdraw the article and start from scratch. Second, I could clear my schedule and re-write most of it, seizing the opportunity for a possible acceptance. For most academics, the decision is made for us. I had no free time during this process, and I was on an incredibly tight timeline. Letter requests with little flexibility meant that I was writing letters that were lower in quality than what I am normally capable of. Giving me a few months would have remedied the situation.

Your faculty may also be in the midst of major changes in their lives. Faculty swap positions semi-often (more so now after the economic crisis has weakened tenure and higher ed in general). A faculty member that you previously discussed a letter with may have left your institution. Having some wiggle room in your timeline can allow you to track this person down. There may be other, personal issues affecting your faculty as well. We are human beings, and we are often going through complex personal issues, just like everyone else.

Allow Time for Decision Making

It is natural to immerse oneself in the application process. It can be very easy to ignore everything else happening around you in favor of another letter draft or tweaks to a CV. Come up for air every once and awhile and re-evaluate your circumstances.  It’s possible that your priorities will change in the process of writing your materials and assembling your applications. Writing a cover letter with research interests will force you to clarify your thinking on your own academic pursuits. This can sometimes result in some uncomfortable realizations. Perhaps you actually want to study in an adjacent field. Perhaps you don’t really want to go to graduate school. Perhaps your job isn’t as bad as it was two months ago, and actually shows promise. These are all real, sound, legitimate feelings. First gen students often feel ashamed or upset when this happens because they feel it was their own under preparedness that caused the uncertainty. As mentioned above, though, it’s part of doing the process. Spacing out your timeline allows you to compartmentalize tasks and reduce time and financial expenditures. Doing this in two months means there is no time for reflection, no possibility for changing course. In this plan, if you decide to change direction at the end of summer 1 there is still time to make meaningful adjustments to your course before potentially spending hours and time on submitting applications to programs you longer wish to attend. Give yourself time to think and re-evaluate information from time to time.

Taking a Year Off: Not the End of the World

Many students feel pressured to attend graduate school as soon as possible. I considered taking time off between my undergraduate and master’s degree, but was told by anyone that I asked that I should not wait. They indicated that the longer one waits, the more probable it is to not pursue school. Unfortunately, I asked a lot of people that had not gone to graduate school for advice on the issue. I didn’t have academic mentors during my undergraduate degree, and I likely assigned too much weight to non-expert opinions. Taking time off between degrees is not the end of the world. In the case of many first gen students, it can be enormously helpful.

The most common reason people delay their studies is due to poor application results, particularly through the misidentification of a safety school. In my experience, students tend to apply too quickly and too broadly, often feeling pressured to select several “safety schools” with lower admissions standards. In a rushed application process, it’s possible that a student may only get admissions offers from the safety school, which creates a conundrum. Upon closer examination of the safety school, it may become clear that it’s actually a bad choice, which results in a delay of study. That’s certainly not the end of the world. It’s better to select a school with the best prospect of fit rather than attending a program that you are not enthusiastic about (you won’t grow to become more enthusiastic about it).

It’s also very common to not get into any schools, even if you narrowed to a small list of programs. I routinely speak to students that spent months on their apps for three schools and received hard rejections from all three. It’s important to know that is common. It’s tempting to give up at this point and assume that one isn’t cut out for graduate study. I think it’s especially tempting for first gen students, many of which won’t have the academic support network to contextualize failure. Failure is a normal, constant part of academic life. Even very talented professors get their articles rejected or have issues in their teaching. The difference is that professors often have a support network through which to discuss failure while prospective students do not.

Alternatively, you may decide not to attend graduate school for a year. It’s perfectly acceptable to delay studies for any number of reasons. You may not be on firm enough financial footing to afford a move. There may be an ailing family member that you wish to care for. You may not be happy with the quality of your application materials. These are all perfectly acceptable reasons to delay going to graduate school, though they are often not presented as such.

First Steps: Taking the GRE

No one likes the GRE. Departments don’t like it because it isn’t an effective predictor of success. Students don’t like because it’s expensive and a general pain to complete. Bureaucracies love the GRE. It assigns a number to a person, which is often the most important thing that bureaucracies do for people. Admissions departments will use this score and a GPA to evaluate a candidate before your materials make their way to a department. In this way, it can act as an effective culling tool to exclude large swathes of applicants, ostensibly saving time and money for the school. Most schools have an acceptable score range. If you can, find that threshold and shoot for it, though there’s little that can be done to aim for a specific score. The strategy here is to do the best you can.

Skipping the Test?

Educational researchers have largely shown the GRE is not an effective predictor of student success in graduate school. This has not stopped the majority of admissions programs across the country from using GRE scores as primary indicators of student success. Inevitably, students of color and poor students do worse on these sorts of measures than their white, wealthy counterparts that are not first-generation students. Some schools and individual programs within schools are now allowing students to opt out of the GRE. Some schools will allow candidates to simply not submit a score during the application process. Other schools will ask for alternatives to the GRE, such as additional writing samples or an interview by phone or Skype/Zoom.

Some students take this concept and run with it, and decide that they will not apply to any school that requires a GRE score be submitted. That’s certainly your prerogative. I can completely understand it, as well. A person aspiring to study inequality in the education system may choose to reject the test due to its role in furthering problematic practices in the education system. Many self-conscious programs are embracing these ideas, and that can be an important indicator for your future studies. GRE is thus a question of fit as much as it is a question of logistics. I would never recommend a student to refuse consideration of a graduate program based on GRE alone, but it can certainly be a contributing factor.

Scheduling

Note that the GRE costs about 200 dollars, so you might need some time to save in order to take it. That’s why it’s best to take it early. You will need some time to save for application fees later. As you are planning the GRE, take note of when it is offered and where. Many universities offer testing services, but you may need to travel to a testing center to complete the exam (security is very strong for the GRE to prevent fraud, so specialized facilities are needed). Also, prepare for the worst-case scenario. My first time taking the GRE was a jarring experience. I had to drive 1.5 hours, find a place to park on a huge campus, leave my belongings in a locker, and not eat or drink for hours. It’s a rough process that can rattle the best of test takers. Under these circumstances, it’s not unusual for otherwise excellent students to perform rather poorly on their first GRE. Re-taking it is, of course, expensive, but it might simply be a necessity.

I recommend jotting down the typical testing dates available in your area for a few months. If you do poorly on your first attempt, you can plan out a second date easily. This is another reason why planning is essential. Without enough spare time, doing poorly on the GRE can effectively derail your efforts to get into school.

When taking the test, you can choose to send scores out to schools immediately, but you can also do this later in the process. The key thing is to earn as high a score as possible.

Studying

The GRE is a logic test, mostly. It evaluates your ability to think and reason (in ludicrously narrow and short windows). The test itself does not require memorization of random facts. You are generally given enough information to solve the problems. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t study. There are an ocean of books/software out there to help prepare you for the GRE. The sticker price on these texts is often absurd, but most people take the GRE once and are done. That means you can find these texts second hand at thrift shops or other used book stores. If you don’t have access to such a place, Amazon typically sells them at decent prices, though I’ve seen many of these books for 1 dollar at thrift stores. It might be worth the time to travel to a larger area and do some thrifting. I suggest that students pick up a few of these books for as cheap as possible and compare them. That will give you a broad sense of what’s on the test. Despite the test involving no memorization, it does rely heavily on certain genres of questions. If you understand those genres and how to approach answering them, your time taking the test will be easier. Run through the practice tests periodically so that you can be as prepared as possible.

Most students should plan on taking the test twice. If you bomb the first attempt, you can opt to not send your results to a school and take it again. This is a normal, expected part of the application process. The GRE is another hoop to jump through, and I liken it to removing band aid. It hurts, but it can be done quickly.