My first step was to hit Google. I spent a lot of time looking up each program that interested me. My top concerns for entering a doctoral program with the hopes of securing an academic position in the future were ranking and prestige of the program, funding, and high quality faculty. In particular I wanted to find a list of faculty where more than one overlapped with my areas of interest. I was concerned about the horror stories I had heard where people were admitted to work with Famed Brilliant Dude, Ph.D. and he turned out to be a complete wreck. Working with several faculty while in graduate school is a reality for most of us and I wanted a broad network of support. Looking back, I am really happy that I took this kind of approach.
This combination of factors brought the list down to about 14. My next move, probably the one that I can only really share because this an anonymous blog, was to cross a few off the list due to being in an undesirable location. Intellectually, some of these places were reasonable fits, but I simply had no desire to move to a location I knew that I would hate for 6-8 years. This brought my list down to about 10 schools within two related disciplines. It is hard to ignore if the perfect school for you intellectually is in an undesirable location, but it is something to consider - after all, the reality of moving to this place to start your new life in graduate school will set in at some point. Don't you want to be excited about that move rather than ambivalent or apprehensive?
The next step was the most important. I looked at the faculty listings again and I e-mailed two or three faculty at each institution. The subsequent responses brought my list down to a manageable number - 7 schools. I will expand on this particular process in my next post.
