Dear Graduate School Applicant,

Hello! My name is Dara, and I will be serving as your student host during your upcoming interview at Everyman University’s biology graduate program. My goal is to make your visit as painless as possible, so please let me know if you have any questions.

We will be having dinner the evening before your interviews begin with a number of other current students and applicants, so you can get to know more of your potential classmates and colleagues. The current grad students will use this as an excuse to buy a lot of alcohol and take cabs everywhere for a few hours. If things go well, we will get some of those cabs which just hand you a blank receipt that you can fill out to say whatever you want right before you go to submit them for reimbursement.

In terms of breath and depth of the research being performed, you could not have picked a better graduate program to apply to. Our university boasts over 100 faculty members in biology, 70% of whom you will never even see, no less work for or collaborate with, and will start to believe don’t really exist after your third or fourth year in residence. Is it some sort of ploy to increase the program’s worldwide ranking or something? It’s probably something about grant money, right? You will never know.

Finding a lab to join is an important step, so we want to give you the opportunity to talk to as many faculty members as possible during your visit. It’s an important step for the faculty member, I mean. Do you know how expensive you’re going to be? Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars over your graduate career. Seriously. And no, I don’t know where all that money goes, either. So they really want to know that you’re going to be worth having around. What about the graduate student? Well, I’ll be perfectly honest: the lab you choose matters far less than you think. Grad students are largely interchangeable, and if you’re going to do well, you’re going to do well anywhere you go. And no matter how much you enjoy the subject matter of this lab more than that lab, you will get sick of it after a few years of doing the same thing every day. It’s natural. So find a PI you get along with and can trust, keep your head down, and hope your experiments work. That’s about the best you can do in a field where success is determined by a combination of the amount of work performed, talent, and pure luck.

This was a very competitive year for admission to our program, and we received hundreds of applications from students who thought they wanted to go to medical school but changed their mind, students who wanted to go to medical school but couldn’t get in, and potheads. So we very much look forward to meeting you. You are bright, hard-working, and probably fundable based on the 2009-10 guidelines set forth by the NSF and NIH. So please come here, please please please, your credentials would look awesome on next year’s training grant application.

Sincerely,