Graduate school spreadsheets lend themselves to helping write the graduate admissions essay.

December 14, 2021.

Starting a graduate school search is hard, the important thing is to just start.

Choosing the right graduate school is tough. Hopefully, this post serves as a guide to help others start the process. This first thing to choose is what graduate program you want to do. This is the time to make some changes. I will be graduating with a bachelors in biochemistry and molecular biology, but I would like to continue doing research with human tissue cultures. So, I will look for school with a Biomedical Engineering (BME) program.

Make sure you know what kind of research you want to specialize in, and make sure your graduate school choice does that research.

To find schools with BME programs, I Google searched “graduate schools by state.” I found a list by Petersons.com, which is a recommended by Donald Asher in his book Graduate Admissions Essays. Choosing states that I would not mind moving to is the next step. This way, I can choose 5 states, or an area of the country, and find 5 schools in that area to put into my spreadsheet of graduate schools to choose from.

There is no set way to start a graduate schools spreadsheet, but starting with something important to you might help.

Please keep in mind that location is NOT the most important feature of a graduate school search, it is where I started. Since I am a science major, and my graduate program is also a science program, the most important facet of searching for a graduate program is that the kind of research I want to do is already being done at the institution I am looking at.

The best way to see immediately what kind of research happens in your chosen program at graduate schools is to navigate to the program webpage off graduate admission homepages. Then look at the faculty page. Often, there will be the faculty’s interests listed near their profile picture, and links to their page which will have CV’s and lists of publications.

Location, Location, Location is secondary to Research, Research, Research.

As I started by state, I looked at Colorado first. The University of Boulder Colorado sounds great, but their BME is just getting off the ground as its own program. University of Boulder, Colorado has very strong chemistry programs, so biomedical drug synthesis may be a good second option to go there. Not so much tissue engineering like what I want to do.

My next state was Oregon. Oregon State has a good looking BME program, however, its emphasis is more on the lab engineering side than tissue culturing.

If tissue culturing is what I want to do, then I can Google search for a school that does tissue engineering the best. What came of such a search was University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

University of Michigan has a big regenerative medicine research area. With how many body systems are mentioned, this tells me that research is being conducted with human cells for each mentioned body system.

Your graduate school search may not be as easy as mine is, searching takes a fair bit of time. The hardest part is just starting the search and taking information. Some categories to put on your spreadsheet of graduate schools are whether a program is considered “fully funded” for you to attend and finish a PhD degree. No school is worth looking at seriously if a STEM program isn’t. I made sure all programs I looked at are 100% funded.

Exploring the labs the faculty are in will help with the personal essay on the graduate program application.

Now I have 3 schools to add to my spreadsheet of Graduate School options. I also have the websites to find my potential faculty advisor by looking at which labs are doing research that interests me. This will make writing my personal essay easier since I now have sources of what labs I can contribute to. I am one step closer to applying to my choice of graduate programs. If you remember to add on the faculty page to your graduate school spreadsheet, then you'll be one step ahead of choosing your preferred programs.