On the other side: What I learned about applications by being on the admissions committee

As part of my graduate program, students are asked to serve on admissions committees in their second year. Upon emerging from our admissions meeting, one of my fellow first-time application reviewers told me that she was shocked:

“Did you know that professors had to fill out so much about you when recommending you for graduate programs?”

One of my profs had made me fill out my own recommendation in college, so I knew what was involved, but unless you too have very trusting profs (with better things to do!), there really is no way to realize that in addition to writing a letter, profs are given lengthy lists of questions and are made to rate each student along a large number of dimensions.

Instead, I was more shocked by what the faculty considered important when it came to deciding who to invite for an interview. Factors I thought were important were totally disregarded, and things that I glazed over were the deciding factor that in some cases caused applicants to be thrown out (and probably resulted in myself being thrown out during my first attempt).
These are some of the things I learned by being on the other side of the admissions process:
- What you say about yourself -
The resume and statement of purpose were by and large the most important parts of the application. Here, we looked for signs that applicants would be able to hit the ground running and contribute to the department.
It’s no secret that relevant experience in your field helps a huge deal.
Another factor that successful applicants tended to have was a clear idea of what they wanted to do. The best applications laid out specific plans about who they wanted to work with in the department, and why they wanted to do so. Usually they would list multiple alternative plans – this is a smart move, in case the professor mentioned did not actually need a graduate student. That said…
- Faculty consults -
Consulting with individual faculty via email beforehand was an amazingly smart move. If you could get a faculty endorsement before the applications even arrived in the mail, it practically guaranteed you a spot at the interviews.

- What are recommenders asked about you? -
Obviously everyone knows that recommenders write a letter for you. But when a recommender receives a request for a letter, he is also commonly asked to address several specific things. Here’s a request I received when asked to write a letter for one of the undergraduates in a class I taught.
- Your role (employer, professor, etc.) in interactions with the applicant.
- How long you have known the applicant.
- Place the applicant into a general peer group and rate the applicant against that group. For example, is the applicant in the top 1-2%, 5%, 10%, 25%, etc.? Please justify the ranking.
- The applicant’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential as a (role).
- Why the applicant would be a strong candidate for the (program) in particular.
- How strongly would you recommend this candidate? 1) strongly recommend 2) recommend 3) recommend with reservations 4) not recommend?
The majority of letters we received were full of praise for the applicants. With strong recommendations, consistent ratings in the top 1-2%, etc.
We found that if profs had anything bad to say at all, they would be very sneaky about it, and then sugar-coat their criticisms to no end.
e.g. “X had some trouble at first, but after a few iterations finally…”
or
“Y struggled a bit at …. However, as a person, she is great to be around.”
Even if there was no outright criticism, applicants were sometimes rejected if they came across as mediocre.
In a stack of shining applications, we questioned why students were rated in the “top 10%” instead of the “top 5%” or “top 1-2%”. Yeah, it was that bad. Impress your recommenders, people!
- How much does GRE / GPA matter? -
Given how much sweat and blood (and money) we pour into achieving a high GPA/ GRE score, I thought this would weigh heavily in an applicant’s chances. But here’s what one faculty member said regarding an applicant with a high GPA/GRE, but who lacked relevant experience:
“If I wanted someone to take the GREs for me, this is who I’d hire, but…”
Here was an applicant with nearly 4.0, GRE percentiles in the high 90s, but she was wait-listed despite her book smarts, because she had nothing else on her CV that showed research aptitude.
That said, people with otherwise great CVs, but with suspiciously low GREs (especially in the sections relevant to your field, in this case people with low quantitative GRE scores were frowned upon because the research in my department is somewhat math-heavy) and GPAs (there was one person who was getting C’s or B’s in everything) were passed over. In these cases, unless the applicant had something on their CV that would explain away their poor grades (heavy involvement in extracirrculars, disability, language difficulties…), a low GPA / GRE was regarded as worthy of suspicion.
- What about extracirriculars? -
There were some amazing applicants who had founded charities and made a huge difference to their communities. There were some who had spent months abroad helping underprivileged children, or who were excellent atheletes and such. Unfortunately these factors were given a nod of approval, but subsequently ignored if the candidate did not also show similar aptitude for research.
TL;DR
After reading through this round of stellar applications, I found myself asking “how the heck did I get accepted?!” I actually asked my prof this. He answered that it sounded like I had a plan and some experience under my belt, so I looked like I would be able to start contributing immediately. Comparing this to my previous failed application, I realized the biggest thing that changed from that attempt to this one was that I gained a year of experience in a lab which used similar techniques to the people I wanted to work with, had become more well-versed in the literature, and had developed specific hypotheses I wanted to test.
So bottom line, it was the applicant who looked most like he knew what he wanted to do, whose interests were in line with those of several faculty members who needed students, and looked like he could do it, who were invited to be interviewed.
A lot of info in this exceedingly long post might have been obvious, but I guess many get too caught up in grades and stuff to realize that this boils down to a job application. Good luck!