If you follow the advice in this book and take advantage of the helpful information available at MyGraduateSchool.com you will greatly improve your chances of getting into the graduate school of your choice with or without having excellent grades. Applying to graduate school can be quite the challenge for any student, but it can seem particularly intimidating if you are one of the many students that do not have spectacular grades. Although grades are an important component of your application, grades alone will certainly not get you a free pass into the graduate school or program of your choice. There are many other important factors that no one tells you about, ones that can make or break an application. If you take the time to learn about and understand why you are being evaluated in a variety of ways in the first place, you can then use this to your advantage. This book will take you through, in a clear, step-by-step fashion, all of the measures that you will be evaluated upon and how you can take advantage of each one of them to come out ahead of the competition.
I supervise graduate students and serve on graduate admissions committees at Concordia University in Montreal, Qc. I also am an academic advisor for the Psychology Department and hold frequent workshops on graduate school and the application process. Something that I hate having to do as part of my job is denying certain students entrance into our graduate programs. Many wishful applicants are rejected each year. I often consider that many of these rejected students are probably well-suited for graduate school but may never find out because their applications were unable to convince me that they truly have what it takes. I feel sorry for these students, but there is nothing I can do about their inability to sell themselves.
Occasionally, one comes across applicants who do an exceptional job of demonstrating that they possess attributes necessary for success in graduate school and in a related career afterwards. Those are the applicants who are accepted. You should be one of those applicants, and there is no reason why you can't be if you are willing to make appropriate use of the information and advice in this book.
Whether you are in your freshman or senior year, the time to begin planning for your graduate-school application is now. Don't wait until you are in your final semester of your senior year to begin taking the steps outlined in this book. Some of the recommended steps take a good deal of time to implement. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to improve your chances of getting into graduate school. Conversely, the sooner you begin, the easier it will be. But don't panic if you discover that you do not have enough time to take advantage of all of the strategies described in this book. There are a great many things that you can do "at the last minute" to improve your chances.
If you have weak grades and no notable and relevant accomplishments, then you might decide after reading this book that you don't have a realistic chance of getting into graduate school this year no matter what you do. Consider it a blessing that you figured this out before you wasted your time and money, and experienced much anguish. If you are serious about getting into graduate school, then you have plenty of time to take advantage of the advice in this book and prepare for application next year.
For more information on applying to graduate school and advice from me and other experts, I strongly recommend that you check out this web site: http://MyGraduateSchool.com
How I got into graduate school with mediocre grades
It took me five and a half years to complete a four-year program and finally earn a B.Sc in Psychology. My grade-point-average (hereafter referred to as GPA) was not very competitive when I applied to graduate school -- my average was between B and B-plus. Still, I was accepted into a Master of Science program and later into a Ph.D. program. Things went well for me in graduate school. Within sixteen months of becoming a graduate student I had an M.Sc., and in another three years, a Ph.D.
To get into graduate school, I had to do several things to make up for my mediocre grades. (It had nothing to do with studying harder and getting better grades)! Not surprisingly, some of these things are described in this book. After two years of postdoctoral research, I was offered my current academic position at a major Canadian university. The point is that even though I was a mediocre student as an undergraduate, this did not stop me from accomplishing all of my career goals. But, it scares me to think of where I'd be right now if I hadn't applied for and been accepted into graduate school!
