What is important for your grad school application? - a UVA perspective

A few days ago, I've asked a professor on the admissions board what is important on a grad school application. Before you start reading, be aware of a few facts.

1. Grad school admissions can be even more subjective than undergrad admissions. Therefore, the points presented here may not be universal.
2. UVA is a public school, so there are considerations that most other private schools do not care.
3. I will elaborate a little bit more on some of the points that the professor raised. That will mainly be based on other sources I gathered on the internet.

Here is the conclusion. Basically, there are two most important things: PGRE (Physics GRE), and GPA.

The idea behind why these are important is, in fact, fairly simple. After two years in grad school, you will need to take a qualification test (or simply, the qual). The format of the test varies from school to school, but the point is the same -  that is to see if a student is capable of becoming a PhD candidate. Grad school is place to train potential researchers, and they want students to pass the qual. For that, they will need some kind of reference. And you guessed it: PGRE and GPA.

The next thing grad schools consider is your potential to become a good researcher. Note that I said potential here, but not ability. Some students might not have the chance to develop the ability during their undergrad years, and most grad schools are well aware of that. Therefore, another way of saying this is that grad schools like smart people.

Some schools have a certain cutoff for PGREs, and your GPA reflects how good you are as a student during your undergraduate years. So make sure you be stellar - or at least try to be - in those two.

Many people stress a lot about recommendation letters. It seems that at UVA, recommendations mainly have two usages: (1) check for consistencies in the application, (2) bump up less-than-stellar scores/grades. This implies that here if you have a 990 out of 990 in your PGRE and a 4.0 GPA plus as long as your recommendation is not crappy, you are almost guaranteed admission. (The scores are an exaggeration, but you get the point.)

In even more competitive schools than UVA where the average GPA and PGRE scores are so high, the recommendation letters play a much more important role. The professor did not say much about this, but I will talk about this in some later post.

How about other stuff?

Grad courses, gradership, teaching assistanceship, publications, club positions... These are not that important. If you need to spend ALL your time developing the "perfect" application, do actual work in research-related stuff and get a good recommendation from your supervisor.

Grad courses are cool, but usually professors like to take in smart people, and they fully recognize that a lot of smart people don't take grad courses. The best thing a grad course can do to your application is to compensate for some bad grades.

Being a grader or TA would help you get a place in probably a high school or community college, but that is not very relevant to grad schools. Instead of having someone being able to teach, they would rather have someone better at doing research.

Publications now. This can be a tricky one. A lot of people boast about having tons of publications, while many others get none and still can get into the top schools. Unless your publications show extremely substantial work (which is highly unlikely for an undergrad) and you are one of the very few first authors, your publications will not affect you much. Of course, if a professor at your target school likes one of your publications very much, that is a different story.

Don't even bother to mention that you are the president of the knitting club. Grad schools like interesting people, but that is the very last thing they consider when they have two applicants with nearly identical profiles. You can be interesting and grad schools do like this, because this is someone they will work with for the future 6-8 years. As a professor, would you prefer someone interesting or boring if they are equally qualified for the position? You know the answer. My point here is that I really don't know how to convey this message effectively in your application, so I would leave that out and hope that a professor might mention that in their recommendation, which would be strongly than you writing about yourself anyways.

This time I have discussed if a piece material is essential in your application. Later I might talk about individual materials a little more deeply.

Or maybe something completely different.