GS recruiters cast wide net

The Graduate School expends considerable effort recruiting new students from institutions across the world except, students said, from Princeton itself.

“My advisers … strongly discouraged [me from] applying to Princeton [for graduate school]. They even said, ‘We will throw your application away if you apply here,’ ” said Zach Berta ’07, who is now pursuing an advanced degree in astrophysics at Harvard University.

The unofficial policy is intended to foster Princeton undergraduates’ further academic growth, David Redman, an associate dean of the Graduate School, said in an e-mail.

“The idea here is that our own undergraduates already have had a chance to work closely with our faculty on research, through the [junior paper] and senior thesis, and so the departments generally believe that it is to the student’s advantage to experience a different academic and research environment for their doctoral work,” Redman said. If Princeton undergraduates apply and are admitted, he added, they are discouraged from attending.

Berta said experiencing other academic environments is particularly important for his field. “Astronomy in particular is a small field, so [the department] likes you to meet other professors and try new things,” he explained.

Even if given the opportunity, however, many Princeton graduates would not choose to apply to the Graduate School.

Ashley Wolf ’08, a graduate student in the biology department at Harvard, explained, “Princeton’s small, and you kind of feel like you know a lot of people before you graduate.” Wolf is also a former sports editor for The Daily Princetonian.

Though she enjoyed her undergraduate years at Princeton, Julia Liu ’08 “didn’t really want to stay for another five years,” she said. Liu is currently pursuing a graduate degree in biophysics at Harvard.

Though Princeton undergraduates are discouraged from applying to the Graduate School, individual departments and the school in general make efforts to attract prospective students, Dean of the Graduate School William Russel said in an e-mail.

Representatives from the Graduate School, accompanied by staff from the Lewis-Sigler Institute, the Wilson School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, “travel across the country and around the world to universities, colleges, and graduate fairs to contact and recruit students,” Russel said.

He added, “individual departments generally act more informally, through contact with alumni and colleagues at other universities.”

“About a half-dozen departments conduct pre-admission weekends or interviewing sessions,” Redman said. “Most departments, however, offer one or more visitation opportunities after the students have been formally admitted.” Depending on specific department’s financial resources, international students may be flown to campus to experience student life firsthand, he added.

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One such weekend visit played a key role in convincing Benjamin Tiede, a graduate student in the molecular biology department, to come to Princeton. “It was over that weekend that I got a sense of the close interaction students have with the faculty and the faculty’s emphasis on teaching both on the undergraduate and graduate level,” Tiede said. “That led me to believe that this was where I wanted to be.”

Praveena Joseph-de Saram, also a graduate student in the molecular biology department, noted that as an applicant from the United Kingdom, she did not have the opportunity to visit campus. She was, however, able to meet a faculty member “who happened to be visiting Oxford soon after I received an offer,” she said in an e-mail.

Both Tiede and Joseph-de Saram now serve on the Graduate Student Committee, which is responsible for overseeing recruiting weekends. The weekends usually occur twice a year in February and are attended by 25 prospective students each, Joseph-de Saram said.

“I think that we’re doing a good job trying to showcase some of the strengths of Princeton,” Tiede said, pointing to the molecular biology department’s small size as a major attraction to the program.

Still, not all departments hold recruiting weekends. “The English department sort of has a ‘you come when you can’ attitude,” English graduate student Yaron Aronowicz said. He noted that the lack of a more formal setting allowed prospective students to get to know members of the department without the “bizarre dynamic” that often accompanies such weekends.

“At the time [I applied], Princeton didn’t pay for your travel, [whereas] the other schools I got into paid for me to go,” Aronowicz noted. “But it wasn’t a big deal, because I lived in New York.”

Despite the recruitment process, Aronowicz said the strength of Princeton’s faculty ultimately drove his decision. “The department was very strong in its field and has a number of professors that are really great … which is different from most departments [at other schools], which have maybe one or two professors in my field that are really good.”

Jenna Phillips, a graduate student in the history department, said she applied to Princeton intending to work specifically with professor William Jordan GS ’73. “Meeting my adviser was a selling point,” she said.

The faculty was also a key consideration for Joseph-de Saram, who completed her undergraduate degree in physics and was looking to work with professors “who would understand the challenges faced by people who change disciplines,” she said. “Even though this [consideration] turned out to be less important in the end, during the decision-making process it played a significant part,” she explained.

Both current Princeton graduate students and Princeton alumni now studying at other universities said that the recruitment process itself is far less important than the established record of the program.

“There were definitely schools that recruited harder, and that kind of turned me off,” Wolf said. “For me, it wasn’t really the recruitment efforts. It’s more what you see when you go” to visit the school’s campus, she said, emphasizing that friendly faculty members and happy students were tbe main criteria for her choice.

Phillips, too, said that meeting fellow prospective students during a recruiting weekend played an important role in her decision to come to Princeton. “I thought it seemed like a really good group of people … and just the whole place seemed overall extremely friendly,” she added.

Both Russel and Redman noted that steps taken by the Graduate School to attract prospective students have consistently drawn a strong student body. “The sum of these efforts, together with the overall quality of the faculty and the distinction of Princeton University, produces a large, diverse and, in many ways, intellectually rich applicant pool,” Russel said.

“The way that [graduate schools] actually do the recruitment is less important than the professors they have here, the money they give you and the job placement record,” Aronowicz explained. “It’s those things that really make the decision.”