Chemistry graduate school admissions

I originally started this blog with the desire to write about the process of applying for national-level fellowship funding in the sciences. In the course of preparing for my Hertz Fellowship interview last year, I searched in vain for examples of questions that might come up during the interview. That's what inspired me to start the blog. In a comment on the previous post asking about my credentials when applying for graduate school, Shawn reminded me that I had not yet addressed the topic of admissions. Based on the search engine keywords that lead people to this blog, I'd say he isn't the only prospective graduate student with questions about the application process.

Shawn asked about my grades and GRE scores, but the truth is that these things are not particularly important (for the record, I had good grades and a mediocre chemistry GRE score). In terms of their relative importance for graduate school admissions in chemistry, I (and professors whose advice I've heard about applying) would rank the relevant factors as follows:

1. Research experience
2. Recommendations
3. Rigor of coursework
4. Grades
5. Extracurricular activities
6. GRE scores

In the past, graduate programs in chemistry used to be smaller, and my impression is that the students were more likely to be chemistry nerds; now, plenty of aimless college seniors end up applying to graduate school because it's the next prudential step to take--not necessarily because they really want to be in graduate school. If you think you might want to go to graduate school, you should try doing research as an undergraduate to see if it's something you enjoy. This is the single most important thing you can to do: show the professors who are reading your application that you want to do research, and that you have an appreciation for the difficulties involved. If you're an undergrad at a research university, it should be easy enough to email a few professors or talk to your teaching assistants about working in a lab. No matter where you are, though, you can do research through the NSF's REU program, a summer internship at a chemical, pharmaceutical, or biotech company, or something else such as the Amgen Scholars program (I think industry is trickier for undergraduates interested in physical chemistry, but I've heard that it can be useful to do something that provides you with experience playing with optics and operating lasers).

It's a good idea to try working in a lab early on for several reasons: (1) you will learn things that aren't taught in classes and that are often more relevant to becoming a chemist, (2) working on a project for a long time makes it more likely that you'll be able to publish your work--an addition to graduate school and fellowship applications that really makes you stand out--and (3) you will learn about whether or not you like a particular discipline of chemistry. Classes often don't give you a good picture of this (many students like organic chemistry on paper, but don't want to be working in a hood all day). If you work somewhere for a while and don't like it, you can try working in a different type of chemistry lab, and you've saved yourself the difficulty of finding that out once you've joined a lab in graduate school. Or, if you work in several labs and don't like any of them, you'll know that graduate school in chemistry is probably a bad idea.

A fourth reason to get involved in research early on as an undergraduate ties into number two on my list above--recommendations. Working in an academic lab ought to give you some contact with a professor whose word can carry a lot of weight down the line, whether you're applying for a summer job or graduate school.

I don't think the rest of the list requires much elaboration--the main point here is that doing research as an undergraduate trumps anything else you might do. This isn't college admissions, which is largely a game of amassing credentials loosely related to what you might study. Professors are selecting a pool of people who might be their future advisees, so they want people with the best demonstrated track of research experience they can get. They don't care if you study really hard for the GRE and get 99th percentile, or if you volunteer at a hospital, or if you get an A or a B in your history class.

One professor put it to me this way: If you are a C student but you publish a paper in JACS as an undergraduate, you'll be a shoo-in at any chemistry graduate school. You'll have demonstrated that you're capable of and excited about doing graduate level research, which is really what professors are looking for.