Podcast 8: Questions to the Admission Committee
This is EducationUSA Iran.
In the previous podcast, we had coverage of admission requirements in an interview with the admission committee at Kansas State University. In this podcast, some of our international advisers at EducationUSA ask questions to the admissions committee.
Adviser Iran: Can the student contact the faculty member or the department that they are interested in applying before sending their application for advice? What are the ways that you prefer to be contacted?
Prof. DePaola: The email address that is generally given is to a secretary who spends an awful lot of her time working with this and then what she does is—if it is not a routine question that she can simply point to a webpage and say this has got all the answers to your question—anything more than that, she forwards the email to me and I respond to the student.
Professor Mick: We prefer to be contacted by email unless there is a specific reason that the student wants to phone in. If there is, then that’s also fine.
Prof. DePaola: The main reason for that is that we are not playing telephone tag, but also maybe it will take me some time to put my fingers on the information the student wants and so with an email I can do that and then get back. So, it is best for the student if I am contacted by email but as I said it generally goes to the secretary, she forwards it to me or whoever is the sitting head of the committee and then we respond.
Adviser India: When a student gets a response from a faculty member or the department, sometimes virtually saying, yes we would be interested in seeing your application, does that mean it’s a yes from the department or are you just encouraging the student? Because they tend to take it as a yes.
Professor Mick: It is definitely not a yes!
Administrator: It is just saying that we are responding to your inquiry; hope this information helps you in making your decision of whether apply to K State.
Professor Mick: So if a student phones up and ask if they have enough background to apply and if we say yes…
Professor DePaola: That means you have enough background to apply.
Administrator: It doesn’t mean you are accepted.
Adviser India: Sometimes it is understood as that for students. They come back and say, you know x university professor has written back to me so I think there is an encouraging sign but the other, y professor, hasn’t written back.
Prof. DePaola: This actually happens a lot. We’ll have a student that has read a paper from professor x, and then that student will contact professor x and professor x knows nothing about the student but simply knows that this student is interested in his/her work and says; great, apply! And that does not mean you are in, it means great, apply, and that’s it.
Administrator: Some programs, some of our admission directors or secretaries are very responsive others are less responsive so that doesn’t mean that they are not interested but from the student’s perspective an answer conveys, “Ok I feel comfortable, I got one response and then if I need something else I know they will respond.” But even if they didn’t respond that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t apply if they are really interested in that program. From my perspective it yields that prospective student a feel of how valued students are by that program. But that’s my personal bias.
For our U.S. students, when we help with them we encourage them to talk to the department. Read the website and if there are questions definitely encourage them to contact the person, not only the program to find out issues about the admission process. If they are really interested in that faculty member and they have some inquiry, it’s good for that faculty to know that person is interested and what they are interested in because they can influence somewhat, a little bit, the admissions committee, if they really feel that they have had a good dialogue and know what the student is interested in and if the student is in that top rating and they know that professor really would like that student then that helps the admissions committee as well.
Prof. DePaola: If I may, we spend a huge amount of effort trying to find students who are interested in our program because the greater interest in our program the better retention and the better job they’ll do. But there is also another issue that we have to deal with. We make so many offers, we have so much money to work with, we make so many offers and then students will turn us down. A certain fraction of students do turn us down and we have to wait until April 15th before we can make a second round of offers at which point many of the students who were interested in our program, whether they wanted to or not, now have had to commit someplace else. So it’s really important to us that we make offers to students that we are fairly confident will accept our offer. The more contact the students have with us, with particular faculty members that they want to work with, the better are the chances that student really does think of us as the primary school that they are interested in—their first choice. So, it does influence us in that sense. It’s not going to trump overall raw ability perhaps, you still have to meet our standards, but it does help you break into the top crowd if we get the strong impression that the student is interested, really, in coming to KState. At least in our program that does help us.
Adviser India: What would be the indicators for you that the student is really interested?
Prof. DePaola: Well, the student has been communicating a lot with a particular professor, asking him questions about his research, met him in a conference and has just kept up correspondence, not just at the time of admission but even before then been in with this professor. Or maybe the professor will be visiting India, and was at a conference there and met a student that was in a master’s program and wanted to come to the U.S. for Ph.D., and spent a lot of time talking with this professor about his research and that professor reports to us. This is a good sign. This says for the student we are maybe not the first choice but we are up there and we have a good chance of having that student accept our offer. This is important for us so that helps.
Adviser Iran: What do you suggest, what are the tips and things that students can do, especially in countries that there are a little bit of difficulties with surfing the web?
Prof. DePaola: That’s going to be really hard for that student not just for our program but everywhere. And really, unfortunately, the answer to your question is: the web! In our department we try not to be everything to everybody in all disciplines of physics. We selected a handful of disciplines that we do really, really well in, and so it is not difficult for a student to look through what we do and say well, I am not interested in any of these things! Then that student should move on. And an awful lot of schools are doing this in physics. Now, you can always have a situation the student comes here thinking that he is really interested in cosmology and decides, Gosh!... this is not really what I thought is going to be. It looked much cooler in Science Magazine than it is here; I am really interested in condensed matter physics! That’s ok; we don’t hold the students to what they had indicated a preference in. They are very welcome to change. The happier the student is with his or her research topic the better the student will do and the better our research will be as well.
Administrator: What I would advise is to start with Petersons.com, with the broad field and then find the universities that have that and then Google those specific universities. Gradschool.com and Petersons.com are probably the two most frequently used search engines for graduate schools. And by putting the field in you can get a list of the universities that have the Ph.D.s and master’s program and then go to those specific universities and to those specific programs. Those are the two most broadly used websites for that.
The other way is, have them talk with their faculty. Their faculty has been engaged in research and they’ve attended international conferences. They know what universities are participating in international and national conferences because they are seeing them, they are interacting with them and they are a good resource for the students as well. Because then they have met the individuals. They know what is going on at Kansas State or KU or whatever university it happens to be and they get a feel of this is one area and if they ask questions, or more importantly if the students can go to those conferences especially if they are in for the Ph.D., that will really help them to see what is going on not only in the U.S. but other countries. It helps our faculties identify potential individuals.
This is a production of EducationUSA Iran.com
