Tell Me About the Smoke-Filled Committee Room, Please

December 9, 2010 5:29 AM

Have you ever sat on an admissions committee for a PhD program? What's it like?

This isn't a get-me-into-grad-school question as much as it's trying to put a face on a generally anonymous process.

If you've been on an admissions committee, what has the experience been like? Did you enjoy the process? What was on your personal checklist when you looked at applicants? What was the attitude like in the room? If you disagreed with other members of the committee, how did that play out? How did you sort between the people who eventually got in and the people who didn't?

posted by awenner to Education (18 answers total)

Best answer: I sat on the admissions committee for my doctoral program (in physics) about seven or eight years ago. The bulk of the work was reading applications, of course; every application had to be read by one faculty member and one student. (There were equal numbers of both on the committee.) I enjoyed the process — I was only in my second year in the doctoral program, so my memories of going through the process as an applicant were rather fresh, and it was interesting to see it from "the other side".

The main things I looked at when I opened a folder were: (a) GRE subject score, (b) undergraduate transcript, (c) letters of reference, and (d) statement of purpose. Of these, the letters of reference generally influenced my decision the most, with statements of purpose somewhere behind. The first two could give me a rough idea of whether the student was motivated and academically driven, but it's really the latter two that could speak to whether the student would do well in graduate school.

After reading each folder, we assigned it a numerical (integer) score on a 1-9 scale. (1 = admit and offer prestigious scholarship; 9 = sorry, dude.) Each folder was read independently by a student and a faculty member; if the numerical scores differed by more than 1 point, a third person was also assigned to read the folder, and the applicant was discussed in the next committee meeting. Generally, these meetings were collegial; there wasn't a strong student/faculty divide, and people were open to being corrected and revising their ratings.

Once all of the applications had been read & rated, we had to decide where to draw "the line". From previous years, we had a good idea of roughly how many students we had to admit in order to get an incoming class of a certain size (about four times as many, in our case.) On the 1-9 scale, the line ended up being somewhere between 3 and 4. The borderline cases were the most contentious, of course, but even then they generally remained civil.

I think the general perception in the room was that there was no way our process was going to be perfect. There would always be some students we rejected who would have done just fine in graduate school, and there would always be some we admitted who would wash out. However (we reasoned to ourselves) all of these students have applied to multiple programs, and an application that's just below the borderline according to us might be above the borderline according to a committee at an equally good school.

I hope this helps — I'll be happy to answer any follow-up questions.
posted by Johnny Assay at 6:07 AM on December 9, 2010 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for that answer!

If applicants had contacted faculty, how did that play out in your consideration?
posted by awenner at 6:27 AM on December 9, 2010

This isn't a get-me-into-grad-school question as much as it's trying to put a face on a generally anonymous process.

Can you clarify what your goals are / why you are asking? Are you a prospective graduate student?
posted by advil at 6:30 AM on December 9, 2010

Best answer: I've been on an admissions committee as well. My comments are similar to Johnny Assay's: it's a fairly tedious amount of work.

For us, the first pass was done by one of the administrative assistants: making sure the people applying to the program had actually met the qualifications.. you'd be surprised how many people apply that don't meet the requirements (and don't even attempt to address that fact).

Next, the committee would take a pass through all the applications. We'd separate them into several piles, the best pile being the "No question: admit this person", the next being the "Some possible issues, but shows promise", the third being the "fringe cases", and the fourth being "Ummm, no." The first pile was generally small, and also used as the "refer to the Fellowship Committee" pile. This pile was the people that had everything really in order: (a) good test scores, (b) transcripts relevant to the field showing that this person wasn't going to need brushing up on fundamentals, (c) samples of their scholarly writing that showed that this person could indeed write (if they can't, a PhD program is really too late to learn!), and (d) outstanding letters of reference with no qualifiers ("Good, but often distracted" being a common one)

Nest, the second pile (the "shows promise") pile would get read over again, and basically split into the "good" pile and the "borderline" pile. Then we'd make a few passes on the borderline pile. Usually setting a threshold on test scores. Then stripping out the ones that couldn't seem to write (see above comment). Then the ones with too many transcript questions and weak letters of reference. The ones that had a decent background but no idea what they wanted to do, or the ones specializing in something are department didn't do were next (If you couldn't easy answer "which professor should this guy be working for?", that wasn't good).

Finally, this would leave us with a relatively small pile, which each member was asked to rank (similar to Johnny's post). Anything with inconsistent ratings was discussed, and then applications were accepted starting with the highest ranked ones until the numbers of accepted applications hit the right number.

One thing that will differ a lot between schools is how MS vs PhD is handled... At my school, the big decision was whether to let someone into the graduate program (MS or PhD). If they got an MS at the same University and decided to stay for a PhD (in the same or another program), that was a "change of status" and not an application for admission), and was handled by a different evaulation group (with generally easier standards). That group generally had done their work before the Admissions Committee met, so that only really affected the number of available positions.
posted by kaszeta at 6:32 AM on December 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

And seeing awenner's followup question.... It wasn't uncommon for some of the better students to have a member of the committee advocating for them, either directly (because they had been in contact with the student), or indirectly (they don't know the student, but one of the other professors not on the committee said something on that student's behalf).
posted by kaszeta at 6:34 AM on December 9, 2010

Response by poster: I am a PhD applicant, with applications due in the next few days. I'm about as comfortable with the whole process as I'm ever going to be. I'm relatively satisfied with my statements of intent, my references are (I hope) decent, and there's not much I can do about my test scores or my GPA. I've contacted faculty at places I want to be, and I'm having current students in my field look over my application.

At this point, I'm really just curious about what happens when my application packet arrives at its final destination. If I have goals in asking the question, it's really to get a sense of how my efforts might be received. And it's also just to make sure there's no dartboard involved.
posted by awenner at 6:48 AM on December 9, 2010

To answer your follow-up question: it wasn't exactly common for students to have someone advocating for them on the committee, but there were a few. Most of these fell into the "personal knowledge" category. However, students in our program generally weren't expected to join a research group until they had been in the program for a year or two. If there's more of an expectation that you'll join a research group immediately upon your arrival, then I wouldn't be surprised if faculty advocacy is more common.

And yes, the admin assistants did an initial pass through the applications. I don't know precisely what criteria they used in their initial pass (my guess would be something like "has submitted all of the documents and has a GRE subject score above the 25th percentile"), but I do know that we committee members only actually saw less than half of the applicants. Which was still something like 250-300 applications.
posted by Johnny Assay at 6:48 AM on December 9, 2010

What field are you applying for your PhD in? The process (and applications) are a little different in every field.

In science, for example, your grades and test scores mean less than having really solid research experience and excellent letters of recommendation.
posted by chrisamiller at 7:38 AM on December 9, 2010

I am the chair of a Ph.D. admissions committee. I agree with people's comments above about the general criteria (at least in the sciences -- presumably in other fields the writing sample would matter.) I enjoy reading the applications a lot. I don't enjoy telling obviously qualified students that they haven't been admitted to our program. This, for me, was the big surprise of graduate admissions -- the number of people who would write a good Ph.D. with us is far greater than the number we admit.
posted by escabeche at 7:45 AM on December 9, 2010

Since the question of what it's like being on a PhD admissions committee has been answered reasonably well, I'll focus on three other points.

First, your question of contacting faculty. I get 1-2 of these every week, but a lot of these are form emails that are clearly copy and paste. If you want to impress me, read some of my papers and ask smart questions.

Second, you have probably 60% control of your destiny in getting admitted. We have to turn down a lot of highly qualified individuals, due to funding issues, desired growth in certain areas, match with faculty research interests, and so on. At the top tier, a lot of the applicants "walk on water", having multiple publications already and a track record for doing research.

Third, when you get admitted into graduate school, make sure you don't go in with an undergraduate mentality. This is one of the biggest misconceptions that we see over and over. Grades don't really matter, your research does. You need to be a self-starter, not waiting for people to tell you what to do. You need to be a voracious reader, rigorous, and be willing to put in a lot of hours to get things done.

I have a short blog entry on common misconceptions about graduate school here:
http://confabulator.blogspot.com/2010/11/four-common-misconceptions-of-graduate.html

Also, I'd highly suggest Phil Agre's Networking on the Network. It talks about the need for becoming part of a community while being at graduate school, something that many graduate students overlook.
posted by jasonhong at 8:00 AM on December 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I haven't sat on our admissions committee yet (I intend to next year), but I have talked to my peers who have sat on the committee. They told me that they did not use an explicit cut-off for GPA or GRE scores, but instead looked to see whether poor scores were noted in the statement. Even if they were not well justified, saying "I don't know what happened" would keep someone in the running whereas no acknowledgment of it would put them out. They also explicitly prioritize having a very diverse program, so race/ethnicity certainly factors into the process.

This is a research I school and one of the top psychology programs in country.
posted by emilyd22222 at 8:19 AM on December 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

I haven't sat on an admissions committee myself, but I've talked about it with many who have. What surprises me the most about what I hear from them is the variability of the criteria used by different readers, where from the outside it might look like there's a fairly uniform idea of what matters most. In my corner of the humanities, the overall picture is that the writing sample and the letters of reference are paramount, followed by the statement of purpose and the transcript and then everything else. But in practice, some committee members use different criteria, whether it's favoring people from their favorite kind of undergrad institution (whether that be Ivy or liberal-arts college or flagship state university or seemingly "disadvantaged"), or insisting on only straight-A students, or even looking askance at low GRE scores. (Most people in the humanities think GREs are pretty much irrelevant, but the story went that there was one senior faculty member would draw a big heavy circle around them and make an exclamation point in the margin, signifying "no way.") In fact, if you know a department's faculty well enough, you can often easily tell who was on the committee just by meeting the entering Ph.D. class; people tend to admit students who reflect their own priorities, their personal vision of what's important to study and who has the right kind of mind to study it. Just superficially, it's not uncommon to see all-Ivy/Oxbridge incoming classes some years, almost-all-state-U/SLAC classes other years, for instance, depending on who was reading the applications that time around; but often you can meet someone and nearly instantly recognize from their interests and personality who they were admitted to work with. Being a good "fit" for the people in the department and especially in the specific subfield probably matters more than you think as an applicant.
posted by RogerB at 8:36 AM on December 9, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks everybody. This is great. I'm applying to Poli Sci PhDs, for what it's worth.

Another question: who sits on the admissions committee—junior faculty or senior faculty? Tenured or non-tenured? Is admitting students seen as a job people try to get out of doing, or does it lend you academic prestige? Escabeche, what does it mean for you to be the chair of the committee? Can you (or have you ever) overruled a decision? Would you rather be doing something else?

I guess I'm looking for a window into the academic community as it relates to me at this stage in my career, and there's surprisingly little out there. Probably because there's so much anxiety about just getting in, I haven't seen too much written about the nuts-and-bolts from the other side of the table.
posted by awenner at 8:36 AM on December 9, 2010

All those questions will have radically different answers depending on the department and the institution. Some places, there are one or two upper-level grad students on the committee as well as faculty; other places, only tenured or almost-tenured faculty. Some places, faculty fight to get on the committee and to keep rivals off of it; others, they don't care much. When they want to be on the committee, it's not really for the "prestige" so much as the perceived control of the intellectual direction and composition of the department. Admit a few graduate classes in a row of one kind of student while rejecting another, and you can generate a lot of new work and buzz in Subfield X, while your colleague can't get enough students to take her courses in Subfield Y.
posted by RogerB at 8:45 AM on December 9, 2010

I think there's so little out there because this varies quite a bit from department to department, and is a matter of local culture (probably at least as much as it varies by field). I'll tell you a little bit about my department, which I think is fairly different from any other I see reported on above. Every TT/tenured faculty member does admissions, and students are admitted under a particular primary advisor. So students absolutely must have an advocate (and more than one, really) in order to get admitted; students who are overall strong but didn't figure out who they wanted to work with, or who aren't a good fit with any particular faculty member can lose out at this stage. In my experience so far there isn't a lot of disagreement, since we don't really require unanimous votes on everyone, and my colleagues do think pretty similarly; we also have an in-person interview before someone is fully admitted so the initial decision is not the final. For us, test scores are typically not important unless they are very high or very low, and letters are very, very important. SoP/writing sample also can play a role depending on the person, since students have to jump right into research and these can provide some metric for how plausible that would be. Grades are important in key classes, but what the key classes might be vary across potential advisors.

Since we all do it there is no issue of prestige, but being involved in this process is really important for shaping the immediate future of the department, even if you aren't admitting any students yourself in a given year.
posted by advil at 9:18 AM on December 9, 2010

I do polisci but haven't reviewed applications.

No doubt things vary across departments, but in general I would not expect any particular bias by rank. Juniors and seniors both.

In many departments, admissions is part of serving on the graduate studies committee. It's more in the "pain in the ass" category than not, just because it does take a lot of time. But people understand that it's important time, if that makes sense -- people tend not to resent being on it the way that they might resent being on the committee that's forced to compile a whole pile of generally useless statistics for the university's re-accreditation. There's no particular prestige attached to it.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:26 AM on December 9, 2010

who sits on the admissions committee—junior faculty or senior faculty? Tenured or non-tenured? ... Escabeche, what does it mean for you to be the chair of the committee? Can you (or have you ever) overruled a decision?

In my experience, the faculty members ranged from young, not-yet-tenured faculty to senior, twenty-years-of-service faculty. All faculty had to serve on a certain number of committees (which may have been less than one, I'm not quite sure) per year in my department, and the admissions committee was one of them, along with the committees for the Candidacy Exam, Colloquia, Teaching Activities, REU Program, etc.

From my perspective, the chair was there to facilitate discussion and keep things moving in the meetings, and to sign the official letters of acceptance/rejection. All of the decisions were done by dicussion & consensus, and the chair never officially overruled anybody (as far as I know.)
posted by Johnny Assay at 11:09 AM on December 9, 2010

As others have explained, there's a range of normal practices, and all will vary depending on your specific institution and program.

Application materials like tests, recommendation letters, grades, etc. aside (at a certain level of general competence everyone left is minimally admissible), the big deciding factor for my School is whether we'd be able to offer you a program to meet your research interests.

Are there faculty there with knowledge/interest in the same topic? Are there resources at your institution to pursue that interest? If not, there's likely no benefit to attending, and an offer of admission would be frustrating to all involved - we'll deny applicants for this reason above all others, and discussion around this topic occupies most of the time in admissions meetings.

In short, make sure that you're a good fit for your chosen program.
posted by owls at 11:32 AM on December 9, 2010