Here's the story of how I applied to grad school. And I mean "how" in the most technical sense possible. If you're applying to grad school, or planning on it, hopefully you'll find some good specific advice for how to get through the process with some sanity in tact. This story is specifically about math grad school, but of it is probably pretty universal. I want to stress that I'm not trying to help you decide where to go, or how to write your personal statement. These are just the specific things I did to keep the overwhelming amount of data under control.


Before I was actually ready to think about where I wanted to go, I made a file of information I'd gathered. You can see what it contains, but I'll explain its progression. First I generated a list of schools to consider. I did this by asking professors who knew me where I should go, asking friends where they were looking, thinking of schools that I thought were abstractly good, etc. That list had probably 20 schools on it. Then I struck out all the schools that I knew I wouldn't apply to. In my case that was mostly geographical considerations — I was ready to leave the east coast. I also vetoed any schools which gave me an irrational bad feeling. A friend had bought the US News and World Report grad school rankings, so I added each school's rank to my list as a pair: (overall math ranking, combinatorics ranking). Then I sort of triaged them into schools that came up a lot and/or felt great, schools that seemed decent, and schools that felt pretty low-priority. At no point so far was I thinking about whether I wanted to actually go to these schools, because that seemed like too big a question.

After making my list, I started going to the web pages for each school's math department. I just wanted to collect factual data: application deadline, webpage about the PhD program, department size, number of students and faculty in my prospective areas (combinatorics and algebra). I also made a note of anything unusual (some schools needed extra applications for the university or for TAships), or otherwise things to remember. In hindsight, I probably should have also listed school size, since that's somewhat important to me. Apparently I also collected contact information for department administration people, but that never ended up being useful. After getting this data, I put stars next to the schools that felt good, and question marks by the ones that didn't.

As my data collection was finishing, I began applying to the schools which felt the best, both academically and personally. I started with the earliest deadline among schools I thought were worth applying to, but generally did the easy part for a bunch of applications at once.

As I started the application for a school, I made a note of that in my file. When you're thinking about beginning applications, you should be prepared for them. Applications are mostly tedious, so I recommend watching some TV while you type in your name, address, GPA, pet's name, whatever mindless stuff they ask for. They also ask for way more information than you can reasonably be prepared for. That's why virtually every school's application lets you save it and come back later. One friend told me about a school with a single long page to submit all at once (for a Computer Science department of all things!), but that was bizarre and unusual. For most schools, you should start the application early, just putting in whatever you can and feel like for now. All the applications required a password with lots of crazy restrictions, meaning I never actually knew my passwords. My solution to this was storing all the passwords in the browser on my laptop, and praying that nobody stole it. I definitely had a nightmare about that. For sanity's sake, I recommend coming up with one ultra-secure password (16 characters, with at least two capital letters, two numbers, etc), and then getting a tattoo of it. That password should work for most of your applications. Inevitably, one school will require at least 10 characters, and another will only allow up to 8, so you can't win them all.

There are some key exceptions to the tedium which are worth approaching systematically. Most schools ask for information about the math courses you've taken. They're inconsistent about what they ask exactly, but often they let you attach a page about it. I started a spreadsheet containing what they seemed to want: course title/number, instructor, grade, text, description. Since I took courses in more than one place, I listed location as well. I went through my transcript for these courses, and then looked up the official course descriptions to figure out what they were supposed to teach me, and cleaned it up to get what they actually taught me. After getting it into the form I wanted, I saved it as a PDF for schools who let me upload it. I also printed out a copy for myself, so I could use it for the evil schools that make you type it into their application manually. That way I wouldn't have to keep switching between two windows.

The most daunting part of the application is the statement of purpose. My major issue was that the prompt seemed so open that it was hard to begin. My solution: collect all the prompts together. Now I had plenty to write about (especially thanks to UCSD!), and could write one good personal statement to send to every school, with the last few paragraphs tailored to the school. Before sending it out, I gave it to people I trusted for grammatical/style proofreading (thanks Brandi!). Each school's version was stored in a folder for that school, along with anything else I had generated for them.

By this point, I was finally ready to submit an application to my first school. I carefully checked that everything was complete and that all the information pertained to that school, and then cautiously hit submit. Nothing exploded? Phew. The process must have gotten less stressful as more applications got finished. I set up a folder for all grad school related emails, so I could always find them.

Throughout this process, I never spent any time considering what my "dream" school would be. That sounded like a hard question, and it seemed like picking a favorite before you've heard back was like counting your chickens before they hatch. Just not a safe idea. Instead, I waited for acceptances to come in, visited, and took notes about random stuff (proximity of Chipotle to campus, things to do around school, etc). The actual notes didn't matter, but reading them helped remind me how I felt while I was there. Of course I also took some notes about the department, but none of that ever seemed helpful.

As I got my offers from schools, I made another file recording important things, like how much they would pay me, whether they offered summer pay, when school started. Again, none of this apparently impacted my decision. I picked one of the lowest-paying schools, probably the lowest after adjusting for cost of living. You aren't supposed to do grad school for the money — everyone qualified to get in is qualified to earn more somewhere else. But it felt good to have all the data in one place.


So there it is, those are my tricks. It worked for me — I got through it all without too much stress. Keeping everything straight is the type of thing that really does get to me, so that's saying something! Hopefully some of these techniques will work for you.