Retrospective: The Importance of Choosing Wisely

The list of schools you choose to apply to is important. Even before you start applying in the months of November, December, and January, the very act of choosing is important. Why? The list is a malleable thing, right? If you don't like this school, just remove it, and if you like that school, just add it? Which is true. In fact, I was constantly tinkering with my school list weeks, days before I was set to start applying. I added a couple schools at the last second on a whim. I removed one on another whim. There's no doubt that choosing where to apply to is more art than science; these are the realities of applying to grad school. And if I had unlimited resources with unlimited man-hours, I would have applied to every last school in the country. But that's the problem -- who has over a thousand bucks to spare? Who has forty, fifty hours of free time to spend on applying to grad schools during the holidays? Resources are finite, and when applying, even if it is as many schools as twelve, thirteen, fourteen, you truly have to make every one count.

Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way. As wise man Tom Kealey says, there are many factors that one should keep in mind when compiling a list, each of which have varying degrees of importance, depending on the individual. But they are (in no particular order): funding, location, faculty, prestige, length of program, size of cohort. Give or take a few factors, depending on your personal preference. For me, funding and location trumped the list, which I imagine it probably did (and will) for many individuals. But let's forget about the what was most important to me. I think at the end of it all, there's an exceedingly important question everyone has to ask themselves before sinking the time, money, and energy into applications, a question that I did not always ask myself in compiling my schools list: When faced with a hypothetical acceptance from a particular school with no other acceptances, would you be able to, hands down, take that offer? This question obviously scales with what's important to you on the list. If funding is vital, then you'd have to ask yourself the same question, except include the "worst case scenario" funding situation -- ie, accepted to Columbia, but with no funding. Would you still take the offer with no other prospects on the horizon?

I know this seems like an exceedingly obvious question to ask, building a "worst case scenario" situation, but I can't tell you how difficult it was to be this honest with myself in creating the list. There was a tremendous pull to just throw any school that met my minimum standards on the list, and let them sort it out in the end. The problem was that this strategy was unreasonable when it came to application time. Was it really realistic to spend around $80 on application fees, printing materials, postage, and countless man-hours on a school in another state, another timezone that ultimately provided little to no funding? For me, such a scenario was unrealistic. While it's true that the first application is really the hardest, each following application did not become linearly easier to compile with time. If anything, the complexity of assembling all the materials stayed the same -- I simply became more adept with putting it together. And yet, I cannot tell you how many hours I spent checking and rechecking each item to make sure I had every "i" dotted, and still made significant mistakes; one on my manuscript, another on my applications. Mistakes can and will happen.

I guess what I'm saying is that my list could've been better constructed, with what I now know and what I have experienced. I don't regret the outcome, not for a second. Yet I wonder what my application season would've looked like had I omitted Syracuse (for location reasons) and Western Michigan (for funding reasons) from the list. If every other school had rejected me, save for WMU, I doubt that I would've been able to attend without a sniff of funding. If Syracuse had accepted me, I wonder how easy it would have been for me to say yes, based on personal situations. Would I have been better served to add the University of Minnesota and Southern Illinois in place of those schools? Who knows. Choosing between 2-4 acceptances is tough enough. Having to choose between waiting for next year's application season and an unfunded offer (or worse, a fully funded offer that you can't attend for personal/locational reasons) is tougher.