Having gone to law school before I started my PhD at Yale, I understand that applying to an elite graduate program is very different from applying to a professional school or to an undergraduate institution. Much of the advice that applies to those applications either is not applicable to elite PhD programs or only gets you halfway there. Indeed, much of the advice people dispense can be counterproductive because, if you’re not really careful, it sets a tone that your reader won’t appreciate.

This begins by having a basic understanding of the difference between the admissions process at a professional school versus the admissions process within a top doctoral program. Whereas undergraduate institutions, law schools and business schools have dedicated staff whose fulltime and only job is to be admissions committee members, for elite graduate programs those roles are filled by professors who rotate through as part of their university service. Sometimes, they are supplemented by graduate students who also read, comment upon, and vote on these applications. As such, it’s important to remember that if you apply to, say, a PhD program in Sociology, your application is being read by Sociology professors and Sociology graduate students. That’s your audience. A scholar and expert in the field, not a professional AdCom.

While I was a graduate student, I participated in these committees, and found them deeply informative in terms of understanding why I had gotten in and also getting a sense of what these readers look for. Bluntly speaking, having a lot of experience with law school or business school personal statements is of very limited utility in terms of helping someone craft a personal statement for a PhD program. There’s an approach to questions of authority and scholarship that is acutely different among professors who are trying to decide which students they want to train as opposed to a biz school adcom who isn’t necessarily (probably isn’t) an expert at the things being taught in their institution. In other words, if you write like you should for a business school application, you’re not writing for the right audience.

At Gurufi, we work with people looking to apply to PhD and Masters programs at highly competitive universities, and all of our consultants have either PhDs or Masters from elite universities (4 Yale, 2 Harvard, 1 Columbia, if you’re counting), so we understand the process, have been in those small admissions committee meetings, and can advise you on how to get through your admissions journey successfully!
Check this space in coming weeks as we offer some hints and guidelines for applying to elite doctoral and Masters programs! Also, we'll be check this forum frequently, so if you have questions, leave them here and we'll reply!