Adviser: This is EducationUSA Iran. This podcast continues our coverage of admission and what the admission committee is looking for when receiving an application. Our speakers are from Kansas State University.
Professor Mick: I can give you just a series of short things that I look for in an applicant. I have three things listed here and these are the major things that I look for. First of all on the transcripts I look at the GPA [grades] obviously, but I also look at the classes they’ve taken. For example, we require maybe one semester of quantum, one semester of mechanics. If students have gone over and above that then that’s a plus.
On the vita [academic resume], I look for whether they’ve done any research in the field they are interested in or any related research in physics, and especially if they have a publication in a refereed journal. That’s a very powerful message that they are really interested in physics and they can do research and they are probably, not certainly but probably, going to do well in our program.
On the statement of objectives, yeah it’sI look for only specific things in it. I am not interested so much in why they’ve chose physics or what they did in their childhood, although sometimes it can be interesting reading. What I look for is whether they’ve looked in our website, whether they’ve really thought about the program we have, and whether they discuss specific projects—and if they’ve done that, I know that they’ve kind of tailored their application to KSU and they are more likely to come here.
There are some things I don’t look at so much. As a second tier, I guess I look at the letters of reference, but really I’m looking for red flags here so if there is a good letter of reference, I just shunt it off to one side, don’t think about it anymore, but if there is a red flag in it, then that’s a big deal.
We’ve talked about seeking diversity in our program; we don’t like to have too many admitted from a particular country. Also, if we get an applicant from a country that we haven’t seen before… I think recently we had one from Sri Lanka. We hadn’t had any from Sri Lanka for quite a few years so for me it raised that person up a little bit more because we like to consider different countries. As an example where this worked well in the past, about ten or eleven years ago, we started getting applications from Nepal and we got a whole series of really good students from this tiny little country that had a very, very small proportion of their population actually doing physics. The number of people in Nepal doing physics is hundreds and hundreds of times smaller than the number in China and yet we got several really good students from there. So that’s the reasons we try to do that; we are always looking for new sources of students to tap.
On the question of gender, one of the things that always interested me is we have a reasonably good distribution between male and female in our graduate program and I think that’s because we have international applicants who were distributed reasonably well among male and female. If you look everywhere else in physics, in our undergraduate program, in faculty, in members of honor societies, and so on, it is heavily distributed towards men. Until you look at graduate programs that have a big international presence and that seems to have more of a balance between men and women.
Administrator: Some programs, if they have a large number of graduating teaching assistants, do look at the speaking part of TOEFL because Kansas State University’s board of regents, our governing body for all state institutions, requires that we submit evidence of communication skills not only for of graduate teaching assistants but also of faculty. If they are really going to place them in a graduate teaching assistantship and they are international students, they have to have a minimum of 22 but they also know that the higher that score is the less likely they’ll have difficulty communicating. We all, even those of us from different regions of the U.S., sometimes students do have some difficulty understanding the first day or so. But they really do look at that speaking part of the TOEFL if they are looking at placing the student in teaching assistantships because they want to make sure the student can perform in that role. They bring all their first year Ph.D. students in as graduate teaching assistants so that is part of the three components that the grad school looks for admissions. They have to look at that and make sure that they then can meet the standards, or they will have to do is a speaking test when they arrive and if they know already in advance and can use that, that can also help them, making sure that’s not just one more hurdle the student has to go through when they arrive here.
Professor Mick: This is a big deal and it’s very country dependent. In India and Pakistan, we normally have very fairly good English speakers but from China where the language of education is not necessarily English, we often have poor English speakers and so if you are advising someone who comes from a country where the educational language is not English, they really have to work on their English hard! And that can really help them once they get here.
Prof. DePaola: For the Mideast it is also not too much of a problem. It’s been mainly the East Asia, Far East Asia, where we’ve had difficulties. Neither Mick nor I mentioned TOEFL in our evaluations but in fact that does come into play. It’s not just to make the graduate school minimum, if they are from those countries, China, Korea, this kind of thing. We do look at the sub-scores in the TOEFL.
Adviser: To be continued. This is a production of EducationUSA Iran.com
|
