Going to grad school several years after getting a bachelor's degree, during which time I graduated with an unremarkable GPA?

1 Answer

Answer :

To be honest, your stats aren’t strong enough to get you into a decent Ph.D. program in the social sciences. Grad school admissions are extremely competitive, and someone with less than a 3.0 GPA, who doesn’t even have a background in the field, is not going to be considered a strong candidate. Your best bet for even getting your application to be looked at by admissions committees is to kill your GREs. Like, 1450 or above. In an otherwise weak application, a good score could indicate that you’re capable of something great, and the committee may start to look at your application in a different light. Even so, you’re not going to get into grad school simply because you have a good GRE score. You really need some kind of research experience and better defined research goals. Not only do you need to pick one specific field (political science OR sociology OR psychology), but you need to pick the subfield within that field and then the specific topic in which you are interested. At least, ideally. An application is automatically stronger when the applicant has clearly defined research goals and shows a sincere passion for a specific topic. Anyway, like I said, you are going to need to gain some experience in some way before you apply to Ph.D. programs. This could be by working as a research assistant or by completing a masters program. While a masters degree is not necessary for acceptance to Ph.D. programs, it can be helpful for those without research experience. Masters programs are not as competitive as Ph.D. programs (though still competitive), so as long as you spin your personal statement correctly, you’d likely have a bit more of a chance. Then you’d have to spend two years getting your masters and thereby accumulating research experience, which would make you a much stronger candidate for Ph.D. programs. The only problem here is that Masters programs cost money and typically do not provide a stipend, so you’d have to go into debt for tuition and living expenses, unless you have a gigantic savings account. Going right into a Ph.D program is advantageous because tuition is waived and a living stipend is provided. Regarding letters of rec, you can simply get them from wherever you choose to gain experience (job as a research assistant / masters program). Also, it doesn’t matter that you didn’t get letters of rec from your professors while you were in college… They wouldn’t have written them without a specific goal in mind. It is always ok to write to old professors and ask them for letters, when you have something to which you’re applying. Hopefully this helps and good luck. Feel free to write back with more questions.

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