Maybe it's been in your plans since you were in diapers, or maybe you've never thought about going to graduate school until recently.   But how do you decide the when, where, and how of your graduate education?  Embark.com interviews Chad Galts, Communications Director for the Brown University Graduate School, to get straightforward advice on the decision to go to graduate school, the difference between masters and PhD, when to start a program, school rankings, and funding options.

My first question for you is: how do you know if you need to go to graduate school?

How do you know if you need to? Because you want to.

And how do you know if you are ready to go to graduate school then?

In a way, it's sort of the same answer to the same question.  Graduate school is not like college, where everybody goes through the same thing at the same time, and it's not an extension of college in the same way that college is an extension of high school.   Graduate school is much more self-selecting.  It's really about the person who's applying at that moment.  So if you're really, really interested in cellular mechanics, then you should do something about it, and you should try to learn more about it.  Or if you're really interested in being an investment banker, maybe you want to get an MBA ? or maybe you should work for a while.  I think the questions are not all answered in the same way like they typically are for college students.

What would you say are some red flags that would indicate that you're not ready to go to graduate school?

If you're doing it because somebody else thinks it's a good idea ? I would say that's generally just a bad idea when it comes to your own education.  Graduate school is either expensive if you're paying for it yourself (actually it can be more expensive because you don't qualify for the same aid as a grad student that you do as an undergrad), or it's expensive in terms of time.  It takes, on average, seven years to finish a PhD in the social sciences.  Not everyone has that kind of time to spare.  It's a serious decision and you need to take it seriously, because it's really about you as a student and what happens after you're a student.

For those who might be just exploring the idea of graduate school, can you talk about some different ways that graduate school can fit into a career path?

You know you're ready to go to graduate school when it's what you want to do. If you're interested in a problem in engineering, or a problem in physics, or a certain book or writer, or a particular period in history, and you really want to immerse yourself in an answer ? start filling out applications.  It's possible that nobody else has ever been interested in quite that same problem before, and graduate school is an environment where this kind of knowledge is created.  To have something this specific in mind up front would be great, but I'd say most students don't start off this way.  They have a broader interest that becomes more specific when they get here.

For Masters students, it's sometimes research related, but it's often more related to career or training objectives.  They need a certain credential or a specific kind of training, and so they look for a school that offers what they're looking for.  Because they're looking for something very specific, it narrows the number of institutions they can apply to.  They're often much more active consumers of their educations than doctoral students.  They [doctoral students] are active, too, but it's a different kind of thing.

What do you mean by these different kinds of activeness?

For Masters students, it's more specifically about training and it's more applied, so the programs are shorter and more focused.   If you're getting an MFA in acting, you're there to learn how to act, to get yourself oriented to the profession you're about the join, and connected to people who are going into the profession with you.

If you're a PhD student working on 18th century British drama, you're going to acquire many skills that are not directly related to your field ? like how to do research, how to write a conference paper, how to teach and grade student work ? but in the end, the quality of your research is what matters most and gets you a degree.  Not necessarily how you do it, but what comes out at the end.  It's a different focus.  One is longer term, one is shorter, and like I said, one's much more tied to professional placement and advancement, and the other one is the choice of a profession.  I think those are really different things.

So would it be fair to say in a Masters program, there's more of a one-to-one ratio between what you learn and what you end up doing than with a doctoral program?

By and large, yeah. I think that's really true.

How would you say the experience of a graduate degree changed over the past two decades?

I think there are a lot more Masters students and a lot more Masters programs.  And the advent of online schools and the fact that some of them are now accredited means that there are a lot of opportunities for people to get degree certified in less traditional environments.   Things haven't changed much at more traditional schools.  Things have changed around them, but they haven't really changed... Although some, Brown included, have changed as well.  We have a lot of new Masters programs that weren't here two decades ago.

Doctoral students and PhD programs have changed very little.  The idea that this is an apprenticeship process, that these students are becoming the faculty and high-level researchers of the future is what doctoral education is about, and that's what it needs to stay about.  Now, obviously, higher education has changed a lot in the last twenty years.  Some grant funding opportunities have vanished while, it seems, many fewer new ones have appeared.  So while graduate education [itself] hasn't changed, higher education has changed, and those two things map onto each other.

More recently, there also seems to be more of an interest in graduate students from national organizations.  Brown just got a grant and joined the [Council of Graduate Schools'] National PhD Completion Project, which is funded by Pfizer and the Ford Foundation.   We're looking more carefully at our own students as part of a national project of people looking more carefully at their students.  I think these things are relatively new.

Let's talk a little bit more about the differences between Masters and PhD programs, or professional versus academic Masters degrees.

You know, I think those boundaries are really kind of foggy.  I was talking to someone yesterday from our Classics department about their master's program.  Now, I confess it, I did not think of Brown's Classics department as a destination for people seeking professional, Masters-level training.  But they told me they have seen a number of secondary-school teachers come through their Masters program to increase their certification level, and, obviously, improve their earning ability.  So a Masters in Classics can be a professional degree.  Who knew? It's less obvious than an MBA, but it serves a similar purpose.

I would also say that applying for a Masters program should not just be about improving your earning ability.  There are people for whom a bachelor's simply isn't enough of a learning experience at a personal level.  They want to know more about history, or more about architecture, or religious studies, or engineering, or whatever it might be.  They have a real personal interest in that stuff, and so they should do something about it, not just because it's going to help them earn more money, which it will, but because it's something they want.

So how do you know whether a Masters or PhD is right for you?

Do you have five to seven years?  If the answer is yes, and you're willing to live pretty low-rent for that long, you're ready to think about a PhD program.  Seriously, doctoral students need to be very self-directed.  You need to know what you want, and it might not be that you need to know exactly which protein or writer or mathematical problem you're going to study before you apply, but you need to know that you're interested in something.  PhD students take courses for two or three years and then do research and write a dissertation.  You're largely on your own with your research, even while you're teaching or helping faculty with their research, so you've got to be prepared for that kind of environment.

Masters programs are typically more focused and traditional.  You're in class more, usually with the same group of people who are all moving through the program together.  You still need to be interested and engaged because the demands on your time and attention are going to be intense ? remember, this isn't a journey of hand-holding and self-discovery, it's professional training.  There are big differences between those experiences, but they also have a lot in common.

How true is the idea that doctoral programs are almost exclusively an apprenticeship for becoming university faculty?  Is there any leeway within that characterization?

Oh, yeah, of course.  Doctoral students, in order to succeed, need to develop a good, strong mentoring and advising relationship with a faculty member, or a few of them.  So if you don't like universities, and you don't like researchers, and you don't like professors, it's really hard to imagine that a doctoral program is the right place for you.  And I mean that both humorously and seriously.  I'm not saying that the only people who belong in universities are people who like them.  Obviously not, but this is an environment in which you have to not only survive, but thrive and produce really good work, so you need to like the environment at some level in order to be successful in it.

There are plenty of people, particularly in the sciences, who work in the for-profit sector after graduate school.  And it seems every year at Brown there are new faculty members who have "come back" from those places.  There's some degree of movement back and forth, particularly in the sciences.  People come to universities because they want to teach, interact with students, spend more time on their research, and publish their results.  And then people leave universities because they want to make money.   It's a traditional tension.

Cycle in, cycle out.

Yeah.  And it works, I think, on both sides.

On a practical note, what factors should one consider in their decision about when and where to go to graduate school?  What shouldn't you leave out of the decision process?

Well, first I'll tell you what to leave in:  Is there someone doing the kind of work you want to do at the institution you're thinking of applying to?  For example, not all English departments are the same.  They all have different faculty in them, so if you're really interested in the Harlem Renaissance, and you're applying to a school that doesn't have anyone doing work in that area, that might be a wasted application fee.  But you have to be careful about this, too.  As I said earlier, it's likely you won't be this focused up front.  You may just be interested in African-American history.  Fine.  What matters either way is to find someone at that school doing something you're interested in and excited about, particularly for a research degree.

Second, a school's connections to outside resources and institutions can be pretty important.  Brown has research partnerships and exchanges with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole.  Our students can do research there or work with researchers from those places here.  We also have joint degree programs between with the Rhode Island School of Design, Paris VI University in France, and with a local Tony-Award winning theater company.

As an applicant you need to be a real consumer of what schools are investing in the area you're interested in, so you can get caught up in it.  Is the school showing any energy or enthusiasm for your subject? Have they accomplished anything in that area?  These are really important questions for applicants.  A school that is projecting the message:  "We've always been here and we'll always be here," may not be your best bet.

What are some of your thoughts on the issue of graduate program rankings?

In general, I'd say they're useless.  It all depends on who's ranking who, right?  We answer some of the surveys that lead to the rankings that are out there, but not all.  We try to concentrate on the ones we feel are going to paint an accurate picture.  Unfortunately, the metrics used to measure and rank colleges have very little bearing on the metrics for graduate schools, but these distinctions are often not well understood by whoever is asking the questions.  They ask questions that are an awful lot like [what you would ask about] colleges.

However, the National Research Council just completed a national survey of doctoral programs this year.  There were 230 participating schools.  It was a huge data-collection exercise.  The results... who knows?  If Brown does well, I'll call them incredibly accurate (laughs).  I think a lot of time and thought and effort went into the NRC survey.  There's value there.  Whether or how it will translate into rankings is still unclear.

The general problem with rankings and graduate schools is that they assume the institution is the most important thing [rather than the program].  Is there any meaning in saying MIT has a "better" graduate school than Stanford?  No.  What's worse, this issue doesn't even resolve itself within a discipline.  Take anthropology.  How do you rank different universities' anthropology programs next to each other when they aren't equal ? and they aren't trying to be.  Brown has some of the leading scholars in the world doing work on cultural demography and transnational issues.  Other places may be better with ethnography and physical anthropology.  How do you manage this when you're ranking something called anthropology?

Then it's a more personal decision; rankings aren't useful?

They're not useful.

So if I'm consulting the rankings, what do you recommend that I do with that information?

What's the person's name and where do they teach?  Once you find out they teach at SUNY Stony Brook, for example, keep asking questions:  How long has this person been there, and who else have they [the department] hired recently?  How much does this school spend on its students?  Am I going to get healthcare when I go there?  Those are the things that will get you an answer.  All surveys are going to do is sort of present a bunch of meaningless data to you.  They don't work.

Let's talk for a minute about funding.  What kind of funding opportunities are available for graduate students?

Brown guarantees five years of support for all incoming doctoral students.  That means a base stipend, health insurance, and all your fees.  All you have to do is your research, some teaching, work in somebody's lab as a research assistant, or other things as assigned by your department.  Basically, you're either doing research or teaching, or you're on a fellowship and you're finishing your experiments and writing up the results.

For Masters students, it's more variable.  Typically, Masters students don't receive financial support.  At Brown, a proportion of them do; some don't.  It's more varied.  [There are some] scholarships, but it doesn't cover the full cost, and people borrow money.

Addressing Masters and doctoral students separately, what role should funding play in choosing a graduate program?

If you're a highly-qualified student and you're being accepted at multiple institutions, the decision should really be about who's doing the coolest stuff.  Whose lab or research group can you join, or can this amazing academic superstar be your mentor?  Those are the things that mean the most.  Whether or not you get $19,000 a year or $21,000 a year, you know what?  You're basically living below the poverty level for the duration of your [graduate school] career.  Whether or not you want another couple of thousand bucks, compared to ending up in a program where you're engaged and productive...[funding] is not the only factor.  It should be a factor, but you should be looking at more than how much money somebody's giving you.

Most Masters students don't get any financial support.  It's not where universities concentrate their resources.  So if you can make a case that there are equal opportunities and one's cheaper than another, then yeah, because you're only there for a year or two, and you're going to end up essentially with the same credential and the same level of training, yeah.  I can see money being much more of a factor.

I would think that the location and timing of graduate school has to do with your individual life trajectory, too.

Sure.  Brown's grad students are half and half male/female, and I think we're a little younger than the national averages at 28.

Is that the average of all in the program, or average entering age?

The average age of all the students.  Also, about a third of our students come from countries outside of the U.S.  I think it's not unique.  We might be a little younger and a little more international than other schools, but people generally go to grad school in their late 20's after they've worked for a little while.  And some people go straight from college.  That happens, too.  That's what I did.

You?

Yeah. And it was fine.

What would you say are some of the most surprising things that you have learned about graduate school in your capacity as Director of Communications at Brown?

That's a good question...

It would also be okay not to be surprised.

Oh, no.  I'm endlessly surprised, I think.  Students' enthusiasm for their work is really infectious and cool.   It's the part that I really enjoy dealing with.  There's a series of profiles that run on the Brown Grad school's website, and these profiles are specifically about the students and the research that they're doing, or the work that they're doing in the classroom.   They're really interesting things to talk to the students about.  It's great.  It's the reason the place exists.

If you could say one thing to someone considering a graduate education, what would that be?

Do your homework.

How would you recommend someone go about doing their homework?  What are some good resources for that kind of information?

They should talk to people they know in the field.  If you're an undergraduate, you should talk to whoever your faculty are now and ask them ? Who writes stuff you read?  Who do you think is interesting?  Who do you think is doing interesting work?   If you're talking to somebody you trust, and that person is giving you advice about something they're interested in, it'll be meaningful to you.

And obviously websites.  If you go to a graduate school's website and there's no information there and it's poorly organized, that goes back to this question of "Is the university investing in this or not?"  And if you can't find out who's the chair of the department and how to call them on the phone, that would be a problem.  That tells you something about how seriously that place is taking itself.  So the website's not everything, it's one piece of information, but like I said, you've got to put the whole picture together.  For doctoral students, it's a lot of time, and for Masters students, usually it's a lot of money.  Don't do it unless it's what you want.