To help you understand the breadth of issues that you will encounter in choosing, applying to and paying for graduate school, and provide you with the overview you will need to work your way through the various stages of this process.
To provide you with a clear "pathway" to the best resources available to help you make informed decisions through the multi-stage process of selecting a program, completing a winning application, arranging an optimal financing plan and excelling in school.
During the course of our ongoing research and analysis, we've identified the best resources in each of seven subject areas (see above) and grouped these in Section II: "Graduate School: The Best Resources to Help You Choose, Get In and Pay." Use this section to identify those resources which are best suited to help you take the initiative in graduate school selection, admissions, and financing. We always recommend several resources that we believe can do the job well, so you'll have the freedom to choose resources that are convenient for you to find and meet your specific requirements.
For those who want to learn about the single best resource we've found to deal with a specific topic typically encountered when choosing, applying or paying for graduate school, we've grouped a number of outstanding resources together in Section III: "The Single Best Resources For Selected Graduate And Professional School Topics." Use this section if you've got limited time or a limited budget. In any case, we suggest that you peruse the recommendations we make in Section II.
Finally, in Section IV we've provided descriptions of "Resources of Interest to Specific Groups." Several dozen resources have been developed for the benefit of, or contain substantial sections focusing on, certain groups of students: persons of color, women, international students, and disabled students. We've provided this separate section to create a "shortcut" to all the resources we've found with these areas of focus; we list them in order of overall rating.
This guidebook contains a complete listing of all the resources we've reviewed, in Section V "Resource Reviews." In this section, we've arranged our full-page reviews by subject, to facilitate comparisons among all the resources we've reviewed on a particular subject. These reviews are ranked by Overall Star Rating (1-4 Stars) within each subject, so that the best resources are always listed first.
We've also provided a variety of indexes, which list all the resources reviewed in this guidebook alphabetically by title, author, publisher, media type, and subject, so that those who might be interested in a title they've heard about can read our evaluation of that particular resource. Our subject index will be especially useful to those who want to find all reviewed resources focused on a particular subject.
Good luck to you! On graduation day, looking back down the road you had to travel to receive your hard-earned degree, you'll mark this early research as the beginning of a challenging but tremendously rewarding life experience.
