As you hopefully have the privilege to weigh competing offers in the Spring, you’ll hear arguments on both sides regarding visit days—those who think they are the most important decision factor, and those who think they don’t matter at all and in fact should not factor into our decision-making process in the first place.
Personally, I found them incredibly helpful, and while I agree that some components of these visit days should be actively discounted by the applicant when it comes to making decisions—i.e. don’t let one school’s particularly nice wine-and-dine experience outweigh more important factors like strength of potential faculty advisors, fields offered, etc.—I ultimately found an incredibly helpful level of candor from faculty, current students at each school, and prospective students who might form the cohort.
While there’s a lot of potential biases and even tricks of decision architecture that likely go into the process from both the applicants’ and the schools’ side of things (after all, on this side of the admissions game, schools are competing for the applicants they have admitted and not the other way around, and ultimately everyone is undergoing a matching process), I found the visit days really fun and helpful. I was advised most of all to enjoy the victory lap they represent, and to enjoy for once the feeling of actually being courted by the schools you spent so much time applying to.
However, to make the most of the time you’ll have at each school and make the most informed decision, I suggest you come prepared with a list of questions to ask, and as such, I have compiled below a running list of questions I kept the few weeks before visit days. Most of these questions were devised purely out of my own concerns as I began considering where to go, as well as from other online sources.
My last piece of advice though is that ultimately, the conversations you have with faculty, staff members, students, and other fellow admits that flow organically are likely to be the most informative. Definitely do not allow the need to ask all or even many of these questions get in the way of you developing a feel for each school and how you might get along in particular with the admits who may make up the rest of your cohort. After all, these are the people you’ll be spending long hours with doing problem sets, studying, socializing, and maybe even doing research and writing papers together.
For me then, getting a sense for who else was there on the admit side (and being able to see some of them at multiple schools, and in turn learn what they were thinking about as they were weighing their own choices) was probably the most critical piece of information coming out of visit days.
But to the extent the following set of questions may also be helpful, this is the non-comprehensive list of questions I came to each visit day with:
GENERAL
- What would you consider the best and worst aspects of the Department?
- What are important details about the program (i.e. requirements, examinations, papers) I should know? Are any in particular different from other schools’ typical requirements?
- (For those coming from the workforce) How have those with prior experience found going back to school after some time off for work?
- What are attrition rates like? Why do people drop out?
- What fields are particularly popular and strong in the department?
- Are any faculty members in my intended fields of study planning to leave soon? Are there any offers out for professors in those fields?
- What is the math camp like?
- How does the Department overall function? Is there a lot of politics involved in the department culture?
- How helpful is the administration staff? How nice are the facilities?
- Do you get a Master’s after some years, or if you have to drop out after a set number of years?
- (For current grad students in particular) Could you remind me what field you’re going into? Who’s advising you? Any thoughts on who might be the best advisors in that field?
- What do people typically do over the summers?
COURSEWORK
- How do you perceive the difficulty of the courses? Of the math involved?
- Are students competitive with each other? Do grades matter? Are students ever required to repeat core classes?
- I notice there are often seemingly-high grade requirements for classes. Does everybody generally do that well?
- Where do first year students study? Do they have offices?
- What are the first year classes like? Are they well taught? Do they turn out to be useful?
- Do you have opportunities to present your research? How often? Who gives you feedback?
- Do faculty members co-author with students? Which faculty members?
- Do students talk to each other about or collaborate on research?
- What are the opportunities for first-year research? When do people typically start getting involved in research?
- What is access to data sources like?
- What resources are available for learning statistical coding like STATA, MATLAB, R, or other programs?
TEACHING
- What are teaching responsibilities like? What is the workload from teaching, hours and commitment-wise?
- How is interaction with faculty early on?
- (For faculty in particular) What research are you currently working on?
- Regarding the ratio of junior vs. senior faculty, how much attention does the more distinguished faculty give you? On the other hand, how involved can you get with more junior faculty’s research?
- How attentive are faculty advisors? How easy or hard is it for you to get face time with your advisor? Which professors are more and less available and helpful as advisors? How many hours do you meet with your advisor per week?
- How well are first and second year students integrated into the department? How/by whom are they advised before they have committees?
- Will a potential advisor be open to working with me? Will our working styles be complementary? How many students is s/he currently supervising, and what have their placements been like?
- (For those interested in more “interdisciplinary” or “inter-field” work) How would advising and research work carry on in a desired field of study that draws heavily from two separate fields and advisors?
- How do you spend your time? Do you tend to have time off often? How many nights a week do you study?
- How is community and mental health among the grad student population?
- What is the housing situation like?
- How do enjoy the town or city? What is transportation and ease of access to campus, airports, etc. like?
- What is the funding situation like for upper year graduate students? Do students need to do extra work beyond a standard TA or RA job to earn money?
- Is it difficult to get funding for research needs, like data, software, travel?
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