Adviser: This is EducationUSA Iran. Hello and welcome! Welcome to our podcast.
Professor DePaola from the physics department of Kansas State University will explain to us the procedure in selecting students and how the admission committee reaches their decision. I hope this information will help you with your application and to learn more how they admit an international applicant at their university.
Prof. DePaola: The committee typically consists of five persons. We have different sub-disciplines in physics and we try to get people from the different sub-disciplines on the committee where it’s possible. Also, one person on the committee is a sitting graduate student and the student has an equal voice in our decision-making process.
The data that we collect, the application, involves several forms, one being a physics form. All of these of course are on the website and the graduate school directs student to the physics website. But we have a form just for the physics department itself and that directs the student on what she or he needs to provide us with. One thing we require is a letter of interest. Why the student is interested in physics, why Kansas State University. The reason we do this is we were getting difficulties with international students using us sort of as a stepping stone. They would use us to get their I-20 and then on the day they arrived they start applying to other schools. We found that if we had a slight barrier of them having to write us a little essay—why are they interested in physics; why are they interested in KState—then they had to do enough research that either they decided that they really were interested in KState, or that this is too much effort and they didn’t apply. So, it’s helped us a lot. And, we do read these things and they often are very interesting!
We have them indicate which sub-discipline in our department they are interested in. Once again, this sort of forces the student to think. They could randomly circle something on the form, but typically it seems that the students actually do read our webpages, see what research we are doing and I think this helps us with retention and it does help us further as I will describe later and it does affect, a little bit, our decision making.
In particular, we would like to have some sort of a balance. We don’t want all of our incoming students interested in a single sub-discipline because when we try to move them to research assistantships we don’t have enough funding in just one sub-discipline to support all of our incoming students. We like it to be a little bit diverse. This doesn’t translate to a strategy on the part of students because the student has no idea what all other students are interested in and all of our programs, all of our sub-disciplines, are very viable. Of course we have contact information. We have gender, which is not an important item in our decision making process. If two students within error bars of just making the grade, then we favor the woman because the woman in physics is a definite minority and we want as much diversity as possible. But gender does not trump qualification.
We also just for our own purposes ask how the students have heard about our program: web-based, from a friend…. It turns out that often our international students found out about our program from other international students who’ve been in our program.
We strongly urge students to supply us with a physics GRE score. We don’t require it, but it really does help us a lot. Different members of the committee—we all have our own different criteria on the committee—I find the physics GRE really useful but we have to be careful that we normalize it differently for different countries. A domestic student, who we find would perform just as well in a classroom and in a laboratory as a student would say from China, would always have a much lower physics GRE score than that student from China. We kind of normalize this and we do take our physics GRE with a grain of salt but it really is a useful data point to have.
We do not care at all about the general GRE. General GRE has analytic and it has verbal skills. Well, for international students we have TOEFL and the entire physics GRE is one giant analytic program. Of course we need the TOEFL for international students. Oh, we also have letters of recommendation. To me that’s almost the least important. We read them, we consider them, but unless we know the person writing the letter it’s meaningless to us almost. I mean, the letter may emphasize certain qualities the students has that are kind of unique or we may learn that the student was instrumental in a particular piece of research but that tends to be exceptional. Normally, we hear the same old, and a good letter is more an indication of the letter writer it seems than the person the letter is written about. So, we require the letters, once again as just a little bit of a hoop the student has to go through to screen maybe a little more the serious students from less serious students in terms of their interest in our program but most of us on the committee don’t tend to weight the letters very highly in our decision process.
Really important data points though are the transcripts. The GPA itself is not critical because that varies country to country. But, what I like to look at is how students do on the more theoretical or more abstract courses compared to the maybe lower level or less abstract courses. I’ve found that the students that do better in the abstract courses tend to survive our programs better. I think it’s more of an indication of the overall strength of the students. Different members of the committee differ in how they weight these things but for me that’s a really important data point. Not the GPA overall, although if you know an institution and have a feeling for what a GPA means they can be useful but really in which courses they do well in, in physics and in math, and which ones they don’t, turns out to be pretty important to me.
All of these data that come in are scanned by one of our secretaries and they are put into a file, one file for each student. These are the documents that we on the committee read and evaluate. Just kind of key snippets of information are also put into a spreadsheet just for quick reference. We don’t make our judgments based on what is on our spreadsheet because those are just numbers typically but they remind us of different things and then we can look at our notes. Everyone on the committee then grades the student applicant. We give them a score for example between 1 and 5, 1 being the best and 5 for being the worst. And then, this is nice, it’s on a spreadsheet and we can get an average of the standard deviation. The standard deviation is actually quite useful because it helps us see at a glance if there is huge disagreement among members of the committee. Then the committee meets and now this is the tricky business. It turns out that even though many of us on the committee have many very different criteria that we use personally, such as how we rank the importance of the different piece of data I just discussed, it turns out that we are remarkably close in our recommendations of which students to accept and which not, or how to rank these students. Our standard deviations are typically very small.
One thing we don’t take into consideration when we’re grading the student too much is what discipline the student is interested in. That comes into play when we meet as a committee and we are forming our list of first-round offers. Because we don’t want, as I said before, all of our students entering one discipline because there won’t be enough grant money to support those students after their first year. And, this is not good for us, not good for the student because the student won’t be able to do research in the area that they came to KState to do. That’s not good for the student. So at this point it is possible that a higher ranked student could get pushed lower on the list because we had too many students with better qualifications in that sub-discipline. This isn’t a huge effect but it is something that we do consider to try to get some balance.
We don’t have quota systems for different countries but it is true that we try to avoid having too many students from the same country. We like diversity; we don’t want 90% of our international students to be from China, for example. We have a diverse group and all the different students from the different countries are all talking to each other and they are talking physics and they are talking culture and it is really a good thing. In the past, we have had situations where we had overwhelmingly one country of origin. You had those students and the other students and that wasn’t so good either for their physics discussions or their personal discussions. So we do take that into the account. Once again this is secondary to the overall qualifications, but it is a fact that we take into the account.
Adviser: To be continued….
This is a production of EducationUSAIran.com.
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