Monday, December 12, 2005
Applying Myself
Applying to grad school can bite me. Getting into grad school is great, and attending grad school even better. But the application process -- it can bite me. So yes, dear reader, that's why I've been absent -- what little free time I have has been devoured by application season. For those readers in positions of influence, I submit the following ways grad school applications could be improved:
1. Don't require the GRE. I'm glad there's no music GRE, but does the benefit of the regular GRE measure up to the costs to the applicants of studying for and then taking it? If you want a sense of my verbal ability or my ability to analyze and write about a position, ask me to submit an academic paper. Any why knowing that (a+b)(a+b)=a^2ab+b^2 should be a factor for a composition program is beyond me. If you care that I'm well rounded, ask me to tell you about my well-rounded-ness. If you care about math because it relates to music theory, ask me to do some music theory. And if you don't look at the GRE scores but the university requires you to ask for them, explain up front that I should take the test cold because the university wants it but that you don't use it as a factor in making admission decisions. Or if the GRE is in fact useful and considered by the committee, can somebody can tell me what I'm missing? And also what kinds of scores are considered good for music programs?
2. At least one school's application asked me about the academic acchievements of my parents. I can see how that might be relevant in applications to undergraduate programs, but not to graduate programs.
3. At least one school asks for a listing of math courses I've taken. I assume that the university put together an application suitable for all departments, and some programs find that information useful. How about special instructions for the graduate composition program letting me know what fields I can safely leave blank so that I don't have to decide between digging up information that I haven't kept track of and risking looking like I'm lazy. And doesn't all that information show up on my transcripts, anyway?
4. Most of the on-line applications don't leave enough space to enter information like job history and other open-ended short-answer questions and I end up making hideous abbreviations. Can somebody ask the folks at Embark.com to leave a little more room?
5. Speaking of Embark.com, can somebody ask them to have more fields available in your standard profile that automagically get inserted into every application? Most schools ask a lot of the same questions, and if you're filling out 10 or so applications the redundancy is a pain.
6. Most schools ask for approximately the same sort of portfolio -- generally three pieces with scores and recordings. But at least one school wanted three 10-minute-long excerpts from pieces with correspondingly excerpted scores. I appreciate that they are trying to make sure that they don't get 3 90-minutes works to wade through in their entirety, but not everybody writes music where 10 minute excerpts makes sense. I sure hope you don't mind that I just sent a few full-length shorter-than-10-minute pieces.
7. It would be great if the deadlines were the same. Many fields coordinate this nationally, but I'm looking at December 1, December 15, and a some early January deadlines as well. So either you make sure to be all done by the first deadline, and don't get the advantage of the later deadlines, or you do a rush job on the first one an only have the polished version.
8. Finally, most departmental pages I've visited could do a better job of presenting all the department-specific information you need to know for the application.
Okay, enough complaining for now. Anybody else out there share these complaints, or have anything to add? I have to go fill out some forms.
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:10 PM
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