GRADUATE SCHOOL:
Making Your Decision

After you've gone to the schools and gotten your final lists of acceptances and rejections, you'll have to make up your mind. Most schools will want to know by April 15. That is because several years ago approximately 300 graduate institutions agreed to have April 15 be the day by which you have to have made up your decision. Besides making sure that you'll have the decision over sometime, this also means one other thing (completely unrelated): Pay your taxes early. I'm not kidding about this. If you wait until the last moment, not only will it make your decision harder, but you may discover that you're strapped for cash because you've been trying to pay off your bills from visiting all those schools. The federal government is not very nice about waiting for it's money, so try to get them out of the way. Don't forget about your state taxes (if your state has them) either.

If by this point you already know that there's exactly one place that would be the best for you to goto, congratulations! Don't sign the acceptance papers quite yet; wait until close to the deadline; they may decide to offer you more money.

If you haven't made up your mind yet, don't panic. There's still a lot that you can do to try to figure it out. Also, keep two things in mind. 1. After a certain point, you cannot make a wrong decision. Chances are good that there is no one perfect place for you to go to, and anything that you do will be fine. You're just trying to optimize. This may not make you feel a whole lot better, but keep it in mind; it really is true. 2. No decision that you make will make everyone happy. Aside from the obvious people (those at the schools you reject), someone will think that you've made the wrong decision no matter where you decide to go. Accept that and when the first person expresses that you've made the wrong choice, try not to let it bother you.

If you haven't made up your mind, try to narrow it down to two or three based on general factors like I've been talking about, then you can concentrate on the last ones better. Basically, just keep trying to make your list shorter, and if you do it long enough you'll get down to one (it won't be fun, though). So how do you pick? Talk to people. If you're really undecided, try sending mail or calling the people you've talked to at other schools. If you surf web pages, you may be able to find people who have links to both communities and who would be able to give you good advice about the differences between the two. Talk to your professors again and ask them for advice. Ask the schools for information about where their graduates go after graduation; some schools may already have a list that they can just mail to you. At a certain point you'll have all of the relevant information, but it's hard to know when that point is. Sometimes it helps to just keep talking about it anyway. It's going to be different for each person, but one method that has been suggested (and worked for one of my friends) is to flip a coin. If the coin comes up for one school, and you're disappointed, then you know where you want to go.

That's all folks

I hope that this page helped you to some extent. Good luck in grad school, and if you have any ideas about how this page could be improved, feel free to send me mail

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