I generally prefer to have interest provocating titles to my articles in order to encourage people to read through them. But let me warn you at the outset that if you are looking for a procedural way of putting together a good application packet, this article is NOT going to help you at all. The hard fact is that an application is only as good as the person who is evaluating the application thinks it is good. The only chance of a grad school aspirant is to prepare an application that is more likely to be evaluated by more people as good, which, in itself is a pretty daunting task.

The following discussion holds more or less both for students who are applying to Masters and/or Phd program in an engineering discipline. Some of the discussion might be centered to Computer Science in specific, due to my bias towards the area. For non-engineering disciplines, a lot of the things said in here still hold, though many might be radically different and about which I have no idea :).

Generally, in an engineering discipline, graduate school is about two things:
1. Taking more control over your education, and
2. Doing atleast SOME research during your stay at grad school.

The first point means that once you are in grad school you are expected to be incharge of your education.The professors, faculty are just there to guide you through the few years you would spend at grad school, but you have to be the decision-maker here. The second point just reiterates the close knit relationship of graduate school with research communities in general.

These couple of facts make a very strong point on how should an application for admission to grad school look like. When a person sitting on an admission committee reads a SOP or goes through a candidate’s academic/sports/extra-curricular records, the first thing that he is trying to decide is whether this guy called Pinochhio from Timbaktu would be able to fulfill criteria 1 and 2. It is a difficult decision for him as well, he does not want to lose a good candidate, neither can he afford to admit an idiot. All he has to guide him are a few sheets of papers.

Coming over to the applicant’s side, now we can talk about what should the application packet look like. The usual pleasantries, a good GRE and a good TOEFL definitely helps, but these things have nothing to do with criteria 1 and 2. Things that actually have to do with these criteria are your academics and the way you treated/planned college.

What course did you take, how did you do on that course, why did you do a certain project, why did you go to Jhumri Talayya Institute of Technology for an internship, why did you join the industry for two years and so on. These are the questions that an applicant should be asking himself. Try to dig out the projects you did, think why did you like them and if the project can support your claim that you can actually do research. Include this information in your SOP. (I will try to talk more on importance of SOPs in another article.) Try to take recommendations from people that can support this claim of yours.

Definition: A good application is one that can answer both questions 1 and 2 in a YES.

Suchit