The campus visit - part one

The most important thing to keep in mind when visiting potential PhD programs is that everyone you run into--including other applicants--might be a future colleague, and anyone in the department can probably have a say in your admission. There are plenty of other useful insights related to campus visits, but this is paramount. Be kind, respectful, and professional to everyone.

At my PhD program, the admissions committee asked faculty members, administrators, and graduate students to email our impressions of the applicants. This is where we would write that Jingfei seemed very familiar with the methodological challenges of researching metabolic pathways in green jujubes, and that we were able to talk effortlessly for an hour with Carlos about recently published studies on catalytic nanostuffs. Even in programs that might not formally solicit feedback, you can bet that people confer. Below are some of the less positive comments I've heard:

• (By far the most common:) The student seemed full of himself. He was more interested in describing his accomplishments and abilities than learning about research in our lab.
• She had no clue about the basics of our work. It's not clear why she's applying to our lab/program.
• When talking with him, it was not obvious what excites him about research or why he is pursuing science as a career.
• She was a little lame for not going to the evening social.

The last comment was actually made by a faculty member in my department. The committee fortunately dismissed the criticism as irrelevant. The comment does, however, highlight that people will be evaluating you not only for your scientific potential but also for what kind of colleague they think you would make. Your character matters. I'll discuss this in more detail in another post.

What other applicants think of you obviously won't have a huge effect on your chances of admission, but it's still useful to think of the other prospective students as future colleagues and potential collaborators. I know two people who met as applicants at one school, earned their PhDs at two other schools, and now occasionally review each other's grants and manuscripts as faculty at different universities. It's a smaller world than you might think.