Dear Mr. Boyd,
I’m sorry you were frustrated with your experiences at the CRC, but would like to recommend other resources on campus that will probably be of more use to you. The CRC advice must, by its nature, be rather general—you could do as well reading their website. You will find much more specific information in your own department.
Have you spoken with your own research director? They have the most information about what is going on in their field, what graduate programs expect of you, and what graduate programs might be good matches for you. Once you have that information, you can find on the programs’ websites what they expect in terms of GRE and other preparation along with your application.
No research director? That’s ok, but it’s really advisable to try some research before grad school, since that is what working for a PhD: learning to do advanced research. Most graduate programs will expect you to have done research as an undergraduate. They don’t expect papers in top journals at your level, or even need any paper (though Wesleyan is very good at getting undergrads published as co-authors on research papers).
What they want is for you to have test-driven yourself as a researcher, to see if the research lifestyle is really for you. Some people thrive on delving into the unknown, and can survive long periods of uncertainty, troubleshooting, and lack of results, in return for those occasional blasts of joy when everything works simultaneously and you get that crucial bit of data. Other people discover they really can’t live that way, feeling like they are floundering. A graduate school with a limited number of funded slots would prefer you not discover you are in the latter group, and leave after 8 months, if you could have discovered it during your undergraduate career.
Some people discover that they don’t have the communication skills to work out well in the team that represents much of modern science. The lone scholar in their garret, communing with their books and instruments, seeing other people only at occasional meals, is a thing of the past. Working with others, doing your piece of a larger project, learning techniques from lab mates and then passing them on to newer members is the way of the present and future, and that requires people skills, like patience with negotiations (like scheduling shared equipment, or order of authors on the paper) that some have ascribed only to the other two divisions. Again, you learn this by practice, and better at the undergraduate level.
If you do not have a research director, or are not on good terms with them just now (another thing that can come up in grad school) then go to your faculty advisor, or a professor you have liked in a course, and ask for an appointment to discuss ideas about graduate school. Talk with the office staff of your department, too. They are the ones who receive and post or file all of the recruitment materials that graduate programs send to your department, along with summer research opportunities, and sometimes funding sources.
I hope this letter does not come out sounding canned, because I have given this as a lecture to many cohorts of Hughes, and more recently, McNair Summer Researchers, often in joint sessions with Mike Sciola of the CRC.
For further information, I highly recommend my colleague Eric Aaron’s webpage on resources for Wesleyan University Students Interested in Pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science http://eaaron.web.wesleyan.edu/csphdresourcesv02.html. A lot of it is relevant to other sciences as well. I would start with an excellent, if slightly dated, essay by Phil Agre at UCLA, Advice for Undergraduates Considering Graduate School http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/grad-school.html.
In the McNair Program, we have a lot of information on applying to grad school, including GRE prep books, and a recommend calendar for what to get done during your junior and senior years to have your application strong and complete one time. The McNair program provides guidance and funding for low income, first generation college students and students from certain groups under-represented at the graduate level (African-American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, or Native American) interested in going to graduate school for PhDs. But you do not have to qualify for our funding to drop by the McNair Office in Butterfield B 315, to look through our library, pick up a calendar and other literature, and chat with Associate Director Santos Cayetano about possibilities.
Don’t forget the CRC. They will be very useful to you again when you want to call or email a recent Wes student who has gone on to a program you are considering, to ask their opinions now that they are there, or find sources of funding in their databases. Most PhD programs in the sciences will only admit as many students as they can support on teaching and research assistantships, but a separate research fellowship is always nice if you can get one. I will leave you with the most important advice I got at the beginning of my senior year: remember, the Berkeley and NSF applications are due in November, before everything else. Get them done, and then you can tweak them to apply to the other places after that.
Good luck on your search, and in graduate school. If all goes well, while the alumni office is hitting you up for $$, we will be inviting you back to give a research talk to our undergraduates, during which you can recruit them to the graduate program at your own institution.
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