Visit Days Advice from UW Grads to Prospective Students
This advice is crowd-sourced over the years by Allen School students. While it was written to help guide you during our own visit days, it’s generally good advice to keep in mind for your other visits as well. Enjoy!
General advice
- Consider whether or not your personality/working style might mesh well with your potential advisor, your research group, and the department in general. Ask lots of questions!
- Ask yourself, “Does the research here excite me?”
- Check out professors/projects whose areas you may only be tangentially interested in.
- Go with your instincts – really try to see how you feel here, how you like the atmosphere, the people. Because you’ll be working here for a long time!
- Read pp. 42–47, “Step 3: Interviewing Professors and Their Graduate Students” in Getting What You Came For by Robert L. Peters, or all of Chapters 5 and 6 if you have the time.
- Meet other prospective students. They might be the people you end up working with throughout your lifetime (not to mention working with on theory homework!).
- Feel free to take a break! Your schedule is going to be pretty hectic. We’re trying to give you all the info you need to make this big decision. However, if you’re meeting with a grad student and don’t feel you can take in any more information, ask them out to a walk and RELAX. They’re likely to thank you!
- Visit Days can be really intense. You may feel a lot of pressure, but remember, you are accepted into the program! This is your chance to really explore the department. Have fun!
Conversation topics for professors you meet
- Ask about the professor’s current research passions.
- Ask about what the professor would like to explore but hasn’t gotten a chance to yet.
- Ask the professor about their expectations in working with a grad student.
- Tell the professor about your research interests.
- Tell the professor about projects you’ve worked on that you are passionate about.
- Ask about collaborations with other departments/specialties/institutions (e.g. Microsoft Research, Pixar).
- Find out what your prospective advisor’s newly graduated students are doing. Do any of their career paths seem similar to your plans?
- Get advice on what background they consider useful (classes, relevant lines of research, etc).
- Ask the professor about how they decide to take on new students.
- Ask the professor about how their research group works. How many students and professors typically work on any given project? Does it vary? How do they determine which projects a student works on?
Conversation topics for grads you meet
- Who do they work with? Faculty? Other students? External collaborators?
- Who have they worked with in the past?
- What projects do they work on?
- Asking a professor’s grad students whether or not they consider the professor to be a “hands on” or “hands off” professor might be a good introduction to a conversation about the professor’s advising style.
- Ask about life outside of the department.
- Talk to first year grads! They are the closest to the experience of visit days and starting at UW.
- Ask the grad about how their advisor(s) take on new students.
- Ask the grad about how their research group works.
- Ask the grad what they like best/worst about the school, the location, their advisor, etc.
- Ask about their process of finding a research area and an advisor, or switching areas if they did so.