grad-school application timeline -- Virtually Advising Q+A

The Q: I am currently a junior in college. My major is Industrial and Management Engineering. I would like to know when I should preparing for graduate school and what I schould be doing to prepare.

The A: You can theoretically start preparing for grad school whenever you like, but generally the best time to get the ball rolling is around 18-24 months before you plan to start grad school. Start slow and basic: Think about the reasons you want to go to grad school, and be sure your priorities and goals are in the right place. In your case, if engineering is your passion, grad school is a pretty smart move if you're looking to hone your professional skills and make yourself a bit more marketable.

Next you'll want to start moving toward more concrete steps forward. Start thinking about the various educational options available to you; investigate the assorted programs offered by different schools. There's a tremendous amount of variety even within industrial/management engineering programs, so you'll want to explore all the avenues available to you and begin considering which fits your needs best. Talk with advisers, professors, and industry pros; look over grad-school guides. (I think Peterson's puts out a book specifically about engineering grad programs.) Make up a long list of programs that most pique your interest, and slowly narrow it down over time to a handful of schools or so.

Around the same time (perhaps later this fall or next spring) you'll also want to start seeking out your recommendation letters. They're a key part of the application process; admissions committees use them to gauge your potential to succeed in your field, your passion and dedication, the quality of your relationships with professors and peers, and the professional/educational experience you've gained thus far. You'll likely want to gather three or four such letters, from your favorite engineering profs, mentors, professional colleagues, etc.

Late this year/early next year is also a good time to start poking around for fellowships or other scholarships, if you're interested in them. Some of them have early application deadlines, but regardless you'll want to get all the information you can on them now so you don't need to rush during next summer/early fall, when you'll be filling out applications and writing personal essays.

You'll need to take the GRE at some point in the process, of course -- probably about a year and a half before you plan to start grad school, just to be safe. You can take the general GRE just about any time of year, any day of the week. If you're gunning to enter grad school next year (when you're a senior), this fall's a pretty good time to start preparing yourself. Again, talk to advisers, check out GRE guides (like those offered by Princeton Review or Kaplan) and Web sites (like www.gre.org), maybe even take a test-prep course, and do as well as you can.

Again, assuming that you want to start grad school in two years (during the fall after you graduate college), you'll probably want to start mailing out your completed applications late next summer. The spring of your junior year -- and the summer after it -- are all about collecting applications from the grad schools you've decided you want to attend, getting your materials (GRE scores, rec letters, transcripts, etc.) in order, finalizing your personal essay, dotting your i's, crossing your t's, and sending everything away. After that, it's a game of waiting, waiting, stressing, waiting some more, calling and harassing admissions offices to be sure they got your application, waiting some more, and then hopefully being called in for interviews and campus tours. Most grad schools will send you their final decisions in the late winter or early spring, six months or so before you'd start at the schools.

And that, in brief, is the process; hopefully I haven't left anything major out. You've picked a lovely time to start thinking about all this, so don't bother getting stressed. Take it slow and steady, be sure you're confident about each step you take, and you'll be just fine. Here are a few quality Web sites to gander at for more advice and info:

gradview.com (a pretty cool all-around helper resource)
http://www.gradview.com

gre.org (official GRE Web site)
http://www.gre.org

Peterson's grad-school section (some solid advice and a grad-school search engine)
http://www.petersons.com/gradchannel/default.asp

How Not to Apply to Grad School (one of our home-grown columns)
http://virtuallyadvising.com/content/gradapply.shtml

Best of luck, and write back anytime if we can be of more help.

—Myles Helfand, General Advisor