Thinking of grad school at Colorado?

Great! We're delighted you are interested in our program. First off, you might have some questions about the Boulder area and being a grad student at Colorado. A CU page has info on what's around the Boulder area. And if you've come looking here, there is a decent chance you are interested in working in geophysics; if so, you should look into the Geophysics program--you can't be directly admitted to the program, but you might well get your degree there. And the Geophysics program also points out the range of expertise in geophysics across campus. Information on applying to the Geological Sciences graduate program is online. (The link is on the right side of the main Geological Sciences page).

Some common questions:

Are you looking for new students?

I always am looking at new applicants, though my ability to support new students varies from year to year and often is uncertain owing to outstanding grant applications. For starting in fall 2013, things look bleak for supporting new students. The exception might be getting a fellowship; if you want to explore this higher-risk approach to coming to CU, then be in touch with me early. The big problem here is the timeline: fellowship results are announced typically in March or even early April, near the April 15 deadline to accept financial aid offers. If I am aware of your interest and that you have applied for fellowships, then stay in touch and we can probably deal with things as they happen (of course, I would suggest applying to some other programs that might have more money at this time as a fallback--although 2 of our graduate students got NSF fellowships for starting in 2012, it is a very competitive program).

Are there are projects available?

For an M.S., it sort of depends. Unlike some other researchers, I don't have a pile of canned, ready-to-go projects that can easily be turned into a masters. Since much of my program is field-centered, there needs to be some funding source available for those kind of projects. We have a large collection of seismological data that can be studied, so there is nearly always something to be done there, but if there is not separate funding, a student working on that would probably have to be a teaching assistant for at least some part of their time here.

In contrast, for a Ph.D. there is enough time to get funding, and I am always open to ideas on projects that are a good combination of my research interests and your interests. So the existence of a project isn't an important precondition; it is quite possible that we will build something to suit. You can go directly for a Ph.D. without a master's; whether you should try this or not depends on you and your background.

What support is provided?

Depends. Ideally we get research grants and you get paid as a research assistant. Of course, getting a fellowship is better still (see below). But often in the first year or so a teaching assistantship is a likely means of support.

What are you looking for?

Nobody is perfect so don't fret if you may not fit everything, but demonstrating responsibility, having a quantitative background, and being a self starter all count. It is nice to see a year or more of physics, calculus as well as some geology, but these vary from school to school. Having done research as an undergraduate is a definite plus.

What can I do to improve my chances?

For starters, apply for any scholarships you can. All too often students worry about which program before thinking about the money, but the deadlines for fellowships are frequently earlier. There are some listed on the departmental page and the deadlines on some are quite early (October and November of the year before you would start graduate school). Four external fellowships that are pretty prominent in Earth Science are National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships (deadline mid November) , National Physical Science Consortium Graduate Fellowships (deadline Nov. 30), Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship (deadline near end of October) and National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (deadline Dec. 16, 2011 for 2012 fellowships). Think about what you want to do and what your goals are: these may all change, but if you never think about them, you'll probably not get very far. Communicate these to us in your application if not sooner. Identifying a faculty member you want to work with and getting in touch with him or her is a good idea. If you are in Boulder, drop by and say hi. Here at CU, admission is largely decided by a faculty member's interest.

What courses do you teach at CU?

The CU catalog is always trailing the courses being offered a bit, and in any event it doesn't tell you when the courses are offered. We are now trying a system in Geological Sciences of having faculty list the courses they expect to teach in the graduate program down the road; you can see what is currently listed at this webpage.

What is going on with my application?

This can get involved. The short answer is that our process gets drawn out for a large number of reasons, and most frequently you should know if we will or will not admit you sometime in February. Financial support might take longer to ascertain; keep in touch (particularly once you know you are admitted) and we'll try and let you know what is likely to happen. It can be a frustrating wait for all involved but usually turns out OK.

I'm from outside the U.S. Can I apply?

Yes. Our system in the past forced students or grants supporting them to pay high tuitions; that policy has been changed and foreign students no longer cost so much if supported as a teaching assistant or research assistant. However, the international student office tends to be slow in processing materials and so you would be wise to get your application in early and to be sure to let faculty you think you would work with aware of your application. Please note that applications do need to be made to the university; sending me your application materials is not helpful (I cannot apply on your behalf).

What's your department's ranking?

Perhaps you have seen rankings from US News and World Report, or the National Research Council (NRC) rankings. I think these ratings are of very limited use for prospective graduate students. The capability of one part of a departmental program might be quite different from another part. If you are thinking of continuing in academia, it will be the thesis work you do and, to a lesser degree, your advisor that will tend to affect how easily you can land a postgraduate position; a strong thesis from a solid advisor in a weak program will usually have better appeal than a weak thesis from a weak advisor in a strong program. Industry criteria vary widely. Some people thrive in the pressure-cooker environment that Caltech, for instance, cultivates but others might succeed in a lower-stress situation. Some need a program to have a lot of students doing similar work, others are delighted to work alone with a faculty member. Some want a lot of options, others know exactly what they want to pursue. (The web-based tool at phds.org uses NRC survey information in a clever way to let you look at some of these aspects of a broader program). The graduate education process is very different from getting a B.A. or B.S. and is highly individual; it varies certainly from group to group and often from student to student. In the end, the ranking that matters most is your own. But in case you are interested, here are some words about these rankings:

US News and World Report relies on questionaires sent to department chairs asking them to rank other programs (in their words, "these rankings are based solely on the ratings of academic experts"); these are often highly backward looking and border on beauty contests, as most "academic experts" hardly spend much time learning about the capabilities of other schools' academic programs unless they happen to be on a school's visiting committee; for instance, in a recent ranking in earth science, MIT was tied for first largely because of its high profile for some 20 years, but frankly, over the previous few years that program was in turmoil, with a number of high profiles departures, and might not really merit that ranking (this might be why MIT was between 10th and 35th in the NRC S-rankings, overlapping with CU). The rate of change between these surveys might actually be a more useful barometer than the ranking itself, but such information is hard to get and tends to reflect changes years in the past. We here are listed as 23rd in the last survey, having moved up from the previous survey some number of steps, take it for what you will.

The NRC rankings are probably the most comprehensive and most likely to be quoted on a departmental webpage. NRC's survey is for the period 2002-2006 and cover a broad set of elements reported from surveys of schools with a complex set of analyses only poorly conveyed as rankings. Indeed, it was so messy that NRC decided not to make a single rank but made two separate overall rankings! In addition, summary rankings often provide a lot of confusion. The last version (2010) lists a number of "rankings" and usually schools will choose the highest number from all the possibilities. Furthermore, NRC ran their numbers through 500 recalculations and reported the center 90% of the range of rankings, so a school might have ranged between 5th and 30th. You will of course hear that they were 5th in the country, but if you get the ranked spreadsheet, you might find there were 10 other schools in front of them, several with rankings of 1! A more accurate statement is that the school is between 5th and 30th--good luck ever seeing that. The best way to use this, I suppose, is to say that if school A's lowest ranking is higher than school B's highest ranking, school A's program is arguably better, but if the rankings overlap, you might think they are essentially peer institutions. CU Boulder? Well, Geological Sciences comes in on the S-ranking (which is based on surveys of what faculty in earth science think is important in graduate programs and then applying an equation using those results to the quantitative data from the schools) between 13th (what is reported in a CU press release) and 40th of 140 programs, but then some of the programs ahead of us really aren't geological sciences (one hydrology, an earth engineering program, etc.) and a few schools were broken into multiple programs (Caltech, for instance, is listed 5 times), so maybe we're a little higher against schools with similar programs. In the R-ranking, which is based on a regression algorithm of NRCs, we are lower: between 40th and 66th. I'm not quite sure I agree with this approach, to be honest: this was derived from asking experts to rank programs and then deriving a regression on the variables NRC measured to match those rankings--I kind of think this was a way of quantitatively reproducing the beauty scores from US News and World Report, so I don't know that I think so much of this idea [to wit, if everybody agrees some program is great, but in fact that program is in the process of decay, the regression will reward measures of distant past success more than current success; in the reverse case, an unrecognized up-and-coming program may not get high expert rankings and so characteristics of current success might get downweighted; an example here might be University of Georgia, which had a major collapse, and has an R-ranking of 13-35--arguably above CU's--but an S-ranking of 99-124--well below CU's!]. NRC also lists a student support and outcomes ranking, which arguably might be a better ranking for looking for graduate schools (has to do with support, time to degree, postgrad employment, etc.); there we are between 9th and 52nd (interestingly, a lot of the high ranking schools on R- and S-rankings do poorly here--UC Berkeley, for instance, is in a tie for 1st in both R- and S-rankings at the high end of the range of each, but is listed as between 27th and 86th in the Student Support and Outcome ranking). All this boils down to the problem that there are a lot of measures of what a graduate program is supposed to do; if you really want to use this information, you might want to understand it. (NRC has posted some guides farther down the study webpage to help potential students use the survey results, and these results are incorporated into a clever web-based tool at phds.org).

 

Please send mail to cjones@cires.colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.

C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder

Last modified at May 23, 2012 10:38 AM