Navigating the Path to Graduate School

This week we welcome Dr. Shannon Dobranski, Director of Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising at Georgia Tech, to the blog. Welcome, Shannon!

Listen to “Episode 20: Navigating the Path to Grad School – Dr. Shannon Dobranski” on Spreaker.

“I want to go to medical school. Have I taken all the steps I need to?”

“What should I be doing right now to get into a competitive graduate program?”

“Will I fall behind if I study abroad?”

The most common questions I hear from college students is some version of “Am I on track?” One of my tasks as a Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advisor is to reassure the students and alumni who seek my guidance that there really is no track.

Because the path to college is often forged collectively with friends and classmates pursuing similar outcomes at the same time, students assume the next step in their journey is also predictable. They might feel uneasy when they see a roommate or friend from home seemingly making faster progress or taking an unanticipated route to graduate or professional school.

But the truth is the journey to professions that require post-graduate education is not a march; it’s a voyage that requires time spent in exploration and self-discovery.

For some, that journey begins in high school and in the selection of an undergraduate university. High school seniors who anticipate graduate or professional school to pursue a career in healthcare, industry, or scholarship can ask questions of their professional mentors and, more importantly, of themselves to determine their possible way forward.

Health Professional School

BiologyYou may be attracted to a career in medicine or another health field for many reasons. Perhaps you had a good experience (or a bad one!) with a physician when you were young, or maybe you observed a loved one who struggled with illness or injury. Medicine may be a family calling or a way to give back to your community. Perhaps you’ve dreamed of becoming a physician for so long that you’ve forgotten exactly what attracted you to the field. Now is a good time to get in touch with that motive and to practice putting those impulses to words.

Start a journal in which you capture your health-related activities, such as shadowing, volunteerism, research, or other extra-curricular service or leadership. In addition to keeping a record of these engagements, you should periodically reflect on how they are shaping you into a prospective health professional. Think about the following questions:

  • Why do I want to be a healthcare professional?
  • What steps have I taken already to prepare myself for that purpose?
  • What challenges have I encountered?
  • How have my ideas about my career changed?

Of course, not everything you do will be related directly to health, but that doesn’t mean that the things you are currently doing won’t inform the sort of healthcare professional you will become. Writing down your observations about your current activities and capturing your changing perspectives will show that you have chosen your career intentionally.

You also owe it to yourself to explore the career you have in mind by consulting experts. Talking to current health professionals or to pre-health advisors is a great way to learn more about a field and to test whether it might be a good fit. If you have family members or family friends in health careers, you can start with them and ask if they would introduce you to their colleagues for other perspectives.

If you don’t have the advantage of personal acquaintances in the profession, there are websites that can tell you about the career and how to prepare for it, such as the National Association of Advisors for the Health Professions and ExploreHealthCareers.org. Your college or university will likely have advising resources to help you as well, either in dedicated pre-health advisors or in more general career advising or academic advising offices. I also highly encourage you to ask about pre-health advising resources during your college information sessions and tours.

Graduate School

If you are considering a career in teaching or research, or if you want to Engineeringfast-track your career in some specific professions, you might discover that specialized post-graduate training is in your future. College professors, research scientists, and highly specialized personnel in government and industry all benefit from advanced coursework, usually culminating in a master’s degree or a PhD.

To determine if graduate school is right for you, I again recommend practicing reflection. Get started with these important questions:

  • What subjects am I genuinely curious about?
  • Do I have unanswered questions when I’ve completed a course?
  • Do I enjoy seeking new or additional information to solve problems?
  • Am I able to clearly explain my discoveries to other people?

While your reflection responses will reveal your own inclinations, you should also check with people in your anticipated career to see how much university training is expected for starting positions and advancement. For many fields, graduate school is not necessary, and you could advance more quickly by starting work rather than pursuing a master’s degree. Professors, current professionals, or pre-graduate or career advisors are good resources for this information.

As you consider your college options, ask what opportunities they have for faculty mentoring. A strong undergraduate research program will allow you to explore your commitment to research and provide experiences that will make you a strong applicant when you eventually apply to graduate school.

Next Steps

Whether you are considering a career in health or one that requires graduate school, you will benefit from a regular practice of self-reflection and from the habit of consulting a network of informed mentors or advisors. Here are some other actions you can take, now and as you enter college, to prepare for your career:

Participate in student organizations, research, or service projects. You may have an opportunity to do this in high school, but it is particularly important once you start college. These organizations and opportunities will advance you on your journey toward a specific career. Others won’t directly relate to your chosen field but will develop competencies or perspectives that will be valuable to you now and in the future. Be sure to reflect on these experiences in your journal!

Be curious. The most satisfying careers allow you to engage in a field that energizes you, so be open-minded early in your college career in case you discover that a different major or a minor would be rewarding. (Be sure to ask the colleges you are applying to about their major changing policies.) Be proactive during your college search and in your first year on campus and talk to an exploratory advisor to discover opportunities that fit your interests, and speak with career advisors about how your field of study might translate to a career.

Read actively. Explore your interests by staying current in your field. In some disciplines, the most recent developments will be captured in news publications and other popular discourse. In many fields, you will want to begin exploring scholarly journals and conference proceedings to discover the latest innovations. As a high school student, notice where some of these professionals attended college. This may help you broaden your list of schools to consider. And please don’t be discouraged if these materials are challenging at first; you will soon speak the language of your field.

Cultivate faculty relationships and maintain existing relationships. Professors may seem intimidating in the classroom, but they enjoy talking about their field of study and their research. Visit them during office hours, and try to set a goal for meeting other members of your campus support team. Check in with academic and career advisors each semester if possible.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog. Taking the time to do so is a great indication that you are well on your way to an exciting college and professional future.

Dr. Shannon Dobranski has been an educator at Georgia Tech since 1996. She is currently the Director of Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising, overseeing a team committed to students and alumni seeking careers in education or health, or pursuing graduate admission or prestigious fellowships. She believes that advising is relationship and that effective advising is critical for student success in higher education. 

Breathing Room

This week we welcome Regional Director of Admission (West Coast) Ashley Brookshire to the blog. Welcome, Ashley!

Have you ever watched a presenter on a raised surface, or a singer on a stage? Think about the space they leave between themselves and the end of the stage. Now, imagine that person chooses to pace on the very edge of the stage, rather than a safe distance back. I don’t know about you, but I would be much more concerned about that person walking themselves right off the edge of the stage than focused on their presentation. Because the speaker has positioned themselves in a place without margin, stress has now entered the situation for both them and the audience.

Margin is an essential part of our lives. Without margin we run right up to the edge. Once on the edge, our focus turns to simply staying upright, rather than paying attention to the quality and intentionality with which we operate. Breathing room is absolutely necessary in the college admission process! But if you don’t plan for it, you likely won’t have any.

For those of you who are high school seniors, the college application process has already begun. Here are a couple of tips to help you  set limits and expectations for the ride ahead—tips that will allow you to preserve margin around your college search process and decision.

Dead Line

Did you know that the origin of the word deadline comes from the American Civil War? It referred to a line within prison walls beyond which inmates were shot. What a terrifying origin for a word that is now a part of our everyday language! As you can imagine, during the era when this term was making its debut prisoners probably left plenty of margin between themselves and the deadline.

Warning: Deadline are closer than they appearFast forward about 150 years… these days we’re not very good at leaving margin between ourselves and deadlines. As the west coast representative for an east coast school, I’m often asked if our application deadline refers to 11:59pm ET or PT. If the answer to that question makes a difference in your plan to complete your application, then you are cutting things too close!

Last year at Georgia Tech more than 60 percent of our early action first-year applications were received within three days of our application deadline (that’s over 11,000 applications!). As more applications come in, the number of phone calls, emails, and walk-in visitors who have important, time sensitive questions increases. Needless to say, despite additional staffing, our response time during these few days of the year is slower than nearly any other time in our office.

If you’re treating the deadline as THE DAY on which you plan to apply then you find yourself with a last-minute question, you’re welcoming unnecessary stress into your life as you anxiously await a response. The solution is simple: build in breathing room! When you see a deadline, give yourself a goal of applying one week in advance. Then if something unexpected happens, such as illness, inclement weather, or the internet breaks (true story—it’s happened in the past!), you still have margin between yourself and the actual deadline.

Quiet Hours

Back when my husband and I were engaged, we realized very early on we could not talk about wedding planning every waking moment. There was plenty to discuss, and each day we could spend hours talking about song lists, seating charts, and minute details. But the obsession of planning was exhausting. If we wanted to actually enjoy our engagement, and plan for a future far beyond our wedding day, we had to set limits on when we discussed wedding plans.Margin is your life

I strongly encourage you and your family to do the same for your college search process. If you set no limits to college talks, then you all will inevitably burn out. A time of discovery and maturity will be marred with talking about details that are subject to constant change. You’ll find yourselves rehashing the same conversation over and over and over again, but with different levels of emotion and stress.  There are important things for you and your family to discuss, and you certainly need to have dialogue around the college process. Just don’t make it part of every conversation you have during your senior year.

Find the best time for you all to sit down each week and talk (sound familiar? It should!). Maybe you agree not to talk about college on the weekends… or before school… or maybe you only talk about it on a designated day. Do whatever makes the most sense for you, but make sure you’re setting a framework around when these important, but exhausting, conversations take place. Leave margin in your day and your conversations so college talk doesn’t permeate all aspects of your life.

Just Breathe….

Breathing room is valuable in many aspects of life, but in the frenzy and significance of the college process, we often lose sight of it. Keeping margin in the picture can substantially reduce the amount of stress you carry during this season as you keep your head above the chaos. Take a deep breath, make a plan, and use this unique time to determine what things matter most to you.

Ashley Brookshire is an Atlanta native and Georgia Tech alumna who has worked in college admission for nearly a decade. Ashley serves as Georgia Tech’s Regional Director of Admission for the West Coast, making her home in Southern California. She’s been a California resident for more than 5 years and is a member of the Regional Admission Counselors of California.

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Admissions Festivus

I recently had the opportunity to co-write this article with my friend and colleague, Brennan Barnard, Director of College Counseling at The Derryfield School, an independent day school in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Here are the first few paragraphs to give you a sense of the premise:

College counselors who work in secondary schools, and college admission officers who represent universities, are by and large affable people. We are in this field not because we revel in being “gatekeepers,” but because we love students and deeply value education and the opportunities it brings. Conversations at professional conferences are typically wide-ranging, entertaining and passionate; from football to politics; from travels to cooking; from The Simpsons to Stranger Things.

Festivus

However, there are times when we disagree or simply dislike the way the other operates. And since our nation has too many poor public examples of finding understanding and middle-ground, we owe it to our students to model honesty and open communication. Unfortunately, as in all industries, there are some deeply entrenched patterns and phrases that can be divisive. Perhaps the biggest culprit in our profession is the notion that we are working on opposing “sides of the desk.” “Sides” fortifies our two roles and connotes division and intractable positions. The mere suggestion of a “desk” is also problematic in its formality- an austere, unbridgeable chasm.

So, in the spirit of the Holiday Season and the New Year, we’ve decided not only to resolve to stay open but also to turn a phrase and sit “side by side.” And what better way to do that then to borrow from a deeply loved tradition: Festivus. If you’re not familiar with this Seinfeld-created holiday, it’s essentially an airing of grievances.

Read the full article to see our gripes and rebuttals to each other’s objections…