Before you start applying for graduate schools, you want to know what you’re looking for from your experience of earning your masters. Are you looking for a highly competitive school that only takes the best in their field, or are you looking for an experience that will put far less pressure on you? No matter what you’re looking for, you want to make sure that you know what you want to get from the experience and how qualified you are for the programs to which you’re applying. You only have two years to earn this degree, so you want to make sure that you get the most out of your time, money and effort. Here are five factors to consider when choosing a grad school.
- How Prestigious is the School?
Whether you’ve already started applying to schools or not, you want to make sure you know what kind of reputation is held by each of the schools to which you’re applying. If you want to go to a highly prestigious school, then you’re going to want to make sure that you have the GPA and the test scores they expect from their applicants. Not only that, but you want to make sure that the prestigious, upper echelon type of school is what you’re looking for in grad school. If you plan to earn your doctorate, then it could definitely be beneficial.
- How Prestigious is the Program?
If you’re looking for a highly reputable school that will help you get into a highly competitive doctorate program, then you’re going to have to make sure that it’s not only the school you’re going to that is prestigious. You’ll want to know how prestigious the degree program is. If the school is well known, but the program you’re applying for isn’t, then it may not get you very far in the long run.
- What are the Financial Benefits?
If you are looking at multiple acceptance letters from your grad school applications, then you’re definitely going to want to take the different financial benefits into account. Not only will some schools be willing to give you more financial aid for your classes, but some schools will be willing to pay you more for the classes that you’ll be teaching. Each acceptance letter will detail the financial aid package they are willing to offer, and this package should definitely influence your final decision quite heavily.
- Who are the Faculty?
Not only is it important to know how strong the school’s reputation is for the program you plan to enter, but you want to know a bit about the faculty you’ll be working with. You want to have an idea of how they like to work with their students, the work that they’ve published, and their reputation within the field of study as a whole.
- What will You Do with Your Degree
The direction you plan to take your work will also have a huge influence on where you want to study. Earning your degree from Villanova University will take your career in a completely different trajectory than Brown University, so make sure you know how your degree will be setting you up for your future.