graduate school

a school in a university offering study leading to degrees beyond the bachelor's degree

A graduate school or "grad school" (American English), or, in British English a postgraduate school, is a school that awards advanced degrees, with the general requirement that students must have earned an undergraduate (bachelors degreebachelors) degree. Many universityuniversities award graduate degrees; a graduate school is not necessarily a separate institution. Graduate schools are also a part of quaternary education, together with postdoctorate research, and a graduate school experience often involves a significant component of original research, including the writing and defense of a thesis or dissertation.Students who attend graduate schools are called "graduate students" or "grad students" in the US and Canada, and "postgraduate students" or "post-grads" in Britain and other Commonwealth countries.Degrees awarded by graduate schools include master's degrees, doctorate degrees (Ph.D.s), and other postgraduate qualifications such as a graduate certificates, as well as some professional degrees. The term "graduate school" does not usually refer to medical school (students are called "medical-" or "med-students") and only occasionally refers to law school or business school. Although graduate school programs are distinct experiences from undergraduate degree programs, graduate instruction (in Australia, the United States, and other countries) is often offered by the same faculty and departments as teach undergraduate courses. Unlike in undergraduate programs, though, it is rarer for graduate students to take coursework outside their specific field of study. Some institutions, however, do designate separate graduate faculty and divisions.

Canada -

Admission - Admission to a masters program generally requires a bachelor's degree in a related field, with sufficiently high grades (usually ranging from B+ / 80% average and up, though this requirement may be significantly higher in some faculties), recommendations from professors, and, for some fields, demonstrated ability in at least one foreign language. Some schools require samples of the student's writing as well as a research proposal. At English-speaking universities, applicants from countries where English is not the primary language are required to submit scores from the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Admission to a doctoral program typically requires a masters degree in a related field, sufficiently high grades, recommendations, samples of writing, and a research proposal. Requirements are often set higher than those for a masters program. In exceptional cases, a student holding an honours BA with sufficiently high grades and proven writing and research abilities may be admitted direclty to a Ph.D. program without the requirement to first complete a masters.Graduate students must usually declare their research goal or submit a research proposal upon entering grad school; in the case of master's degrees, there will be some flexibility (that is, one is not held to one's research proposal, although major changes, for example from premodern to modern history, are discouraged). In the case of Ph.D.s, the research direction is usually known as it will typically follow the direction of the master's research.Master's degrees can typically be completed in one year but normally take at least two; they may not exceed five years. Doctoral degrees require a minimum of two years but frequently take much longer, not usually exceeding six years.

Funding - Graduate students may take out student loans, but instead they often work as teaching assistantteaching or research assistantresearch assistants. Students normally agree, as a condition of acceptance to a programme, not to devote more than twelve hours per week to work or outside interests.Funding is available to first-year masters students whose transcripts reflect exceptionally high grades; this funding is normally given in the second year. Funding for Ph.D. students comes from a variety of sources, and many universities waive tuition fees for doctoral candidates. Funding is available in the form of bursarybursaries and other awards, both private and public.

Requirements for completion - Both master's and doctoral programs may be done by coursework or research or a combination of the two, depending on the subject and faculty. Most faculties require both, with the emphasis on research, and with coursework being directly related to the field of research.Masters candidates undertaking research are typically required to complete a thesis comprising some original research and ranging from seventy to two-hundred pages. Some fields may require candidates to study at least one foreign language if they have not already earned sufficient foreign-language credits. Some faculties require candidates to thesis defencedefend their thesis, but many do not. Ph.D. candidates undertaking research must typically complete a thesis, or dissertation, consisting of original research representing a significant contribution to their field, and ranging from two-hundred to five-hundred pages. Most Ph.D. candidates will be required to sit comprehensive examinationcomprehensive !examinations—examination s? testing general knowledge in their field of specialization—in their second or third year as a prerequisite to continuing their studies, and must defend their thesis as a final requirement. Some faculties require candidates to earn sufficient credits in a third or fourth foreign language; for example, most candidates in modern Japanese topics must demonstrate ability in English, Japanese languageJapanese, and Standard MandarinMandarin, while candidates in pre-modern Japanese topics must demonstrate ability in English, Japanese, Classical Chinese, and Classical Japanese. At English-speaking Canadian universities, both masters and Ph.D. theses may be presented in English or in the language of the subject (German languageGerman for German literature, for example), but if this is the case an extensive abstract must be also presented in English. In exceptional circumstances, a thesis may be presented in French.French-speaking universities have varying sets of rules; some will accept students with little knowledge of French if they can communicate with their supervisors (usually in English).

United Kingdom -

Admission - Admission to do a research degree in the UK typically requires the sponsorship of a professor. It is useful to have a master's degree, but certainly not essential. A good bachelor's degree, however, is required. Usually research students are admitted to do an Master of PhilosophyM.Phil and can later convert to a Ph.D if they progress well.Admission to do a taught master's degree (based on coursework) depends upon having an undergraduate degree, generally in a related subject.

Funding - It is very difficult to obtain funding for postgraduate study in the UK. There are a few scholarships for master's courses, but these are rare and dependent on the course and class of undergraduate degree obtained. Most master's students are self-funded.Funding is available for some Ph.D. courses. There is more funding available to those in the sciences than in other disciplines. For overseas students, most major funding applications are due as early as twelve months or more before the intended graduate course will begin. This funding is also often highly competitive. The most widely available, and thus important, award for overseas students is the Overseas Research Student Award, which pays the difference in university fees between an overseas student and a British or EU resident. However, a student can only apply for the ORS for one university, often before he or she knows whether they have been accepted.

United States -

Admission - Admission to graduate school usually requires a bachelor's degree. High grades in one's field of study are important, grades outside the field less so. Good GRE scores and, especially, good letters of recommendation from undergraduate instructors are essential. Within the sciences and some social sciences, previous research experience may be important; within most humanities disciplines, an example of academic writing normally suffices. Many universities require a personal statement, which may include indications of the intended area(s) of research; how detailed this statement is or whether it is possible to change one's focus of research depends strongly on the discipline and department being applied to. In some disciplines or universities, graduate applicants may find it best to have at least one recommendation from research work outside of the college where they earned their Bachelor's degree; however, as with previous research experience, this may not be very important in most humanities disciplines.The most selective schools set minimum grade point averageGPAs and test scores below which they will not accept any applicants; this reduces the time spent reviewing applications. Some also require professors to act as sponsors. Finally, applicants from non-English speaking countries must take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).At most institutions, decisions regarding admission are not made by the institution itself but the department for which the applicant will be studying.

Requirements for completion - Graduate students often declare their intended degree (Master's or Doctorate) in their applications. In some cases, master's programs allow successful students to continue toward the doctorate degree. Additionally, students who complete their coursework but not dissertation ("ABD," for "all but dissertation") often receive master's degrees and an additional master's called a Master of Philosophy, or MPhil. The Master's component of a doctorate program often requires one or two years, and some students, because doctoral programs are better-funded, apply for doctoral programs while only intending to attain a Master's degree. This is generally not accepted and, if a student's advisor learns of the student's plans, can result in early termination.Many graduate programs require students to pass one or several examinations in order to demonstrate their competence as scholars. Comprehensive examinations ("Comps") are often required in the first year of doctoral study, and are designed to test a student's background undergraduate-level knowledge. Students failing after two attempts are usually expelled from the program, often being awarded a master's degree instead of a Ph.D. Some students who fail to perform well are declared "terminal Masters" students and not allowed to progress on to the Ph.D. after finishing & defending their master's thesis. Comprehensive examinations of this type are more common in the sciences and some social sciences, and relatively unknown in most humanities disciplines.Most graduate students perform teaching duties. Early in the program, they often serve as graders and tutors; as they advance, they can be promoted to Lecturer status, receiving more responsibility and a larger stipend.Doctoral students generally spend roughly their first two years taking course work, and by their second year if not before, begin research. Many master's and all specialist students will perform research culminating in a paper, presentation, and defense of their research. This is called the master's thesis (or, for Educational Specialist students, the specialist paper). Many US master's degree programs, however, do not require a master's thesis, focusing instead primarily on course work.In the second and third years of study, doctoral programs often require students to pass more examinations. Programs often require a Qualifying Examination ("Quals") or General Examination ("Generals"), testing students' grasp of a broad sample of their discipline, and/or one or several Special Field Examinations ("Specials"), testing students in their narrower selected areas of specialty within the discipline. If these examinations are held orally, they may be known colloquially as "orals". For some social science and many humanities disciplines, where graduate students may or may not have studied the discipline at the undergraduate level, these exams will be the first set, and be based either on graduate coursework or specific preparatory reading (sometimes up to a year's work in reading). In all cases, comprehensive exams are normally both stressful and time consuming, and must be passed to be allowed to proceed on to the thesis. Passing such examinations allows the student to stay, begin doctoral research, and rise to the status of a doctoral candidate, while failing usually results in the student leaving the program or re-taking the test after some time has passed (usually a semester or a year). Some schools have an intermediate category, passing at the Master's level, which allows the student to leave with a Master's without having completed a Master's thesis.For the next several years the doctoral candidate primarily performs his or her research. Usually this lasts three to eight years, though a rare few finish more quickly and some take substantially longer. In total, the typical doctoral degree takes between 4 and 10 years from entering the program to completion, though this time varies depending upon the department, thesis topic, and many other factors. For example, astronomy degrees take five to six years on average, but observational astronomy degrees take six to seven due to limiting factors of weather, while theoretical astronomy degrees take five. Though there is substantial variation among universities, departments, and individuals, humanities and social science doctorates on average take somewhat longer to complete than natural science doctorates. These differences are due to the differing nature of research between the humanities and some social sciences and the natural sciences (solitary as opposed to lab or group based), and to the differing expectations of the discipline in coursework, languages and length of thesis. However, time required to complete a doctorate also varies according to the candidate's abilities and choice of research. Some students may also choose to remain in a program if they fail to win an academic position, particularly in disciplines with a tight job market; by remaining a student, they can retain access to libraries and university facilities, while also retaining an academic affiliation, which can be essential for conferences and job-searches. Traditionally, doctoral programs were only intended to last three to four years and, in some disciplines (primarily the natural sciences), with the economic support of a second-income, a helpful advisor, and a light teaching load, it is possible for the degree to be completed in that amount of time. However, increasingly many disciplines, including most humanities, set their requirements for coursework, languages and the expected extent of thesis research by the assumption that students will take five years minimum or six to seven years on average; competition for jobs within these fields also raises expectations on the length and quality of theses considerably. In some disciplines doctoral programs can average seven to ten years, with those taking less seen as not doing as full a job as they should have. Archaeology, which requires long periods of research, tends towards this. The increase in length of degree is a matter of great concern for both students and universities, though there is much disagreement on potential solutions to this problem.Foreign graduate students outnumber American-born students in some US departments, primarily in the natural sciences.

Funding - Graduate students who are not independently wealth wealthy live meagerly compared to their peer group, but how meagerly depends greatly on the nature of funding at their university. At some elite universities with large endowments, there may be a minimum stipend established for all Ph.D. students within their first five years, as well as a tuition waiver. This stipend may consist of a scholarship for one to two years, and then guaranteed TA or RA positions. At many elite universities, these stipends have been increasing, in response both to student pressure and especially to competition among the elite universities for graduate students. Because of this competition, increases tend to be concentrated on the beginning years of the program, not on the relatively poorly funded finishing students. At most universities, however, the level of available funding is much less and required work greater. Students who are able to attain an RA (research assistant) or TA (teaching assistant) position, at least, may acquire tuition-forgiveness and a stipend that pays for most expenses. Stipends do not usually correlate with local cost of living, so students in expensive locales such as Boston and Berkeley, CaliforniaBerkeley, even funded, almost invariably lose economic ground. RA positions are more coveted than TA positions because, while teaching is generally considered a distraction from one's work, RAs typically are paid to work on the dissertation they are required to complete anyway. RA positions are more typical of science disciplines; they are relatively uncommon in humanities disciplines, and where they exist, rarely allow the student to work on their own research.A rare few students can attain outside fellowships such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Physical Sciences Consortium (NPSC). The sciences are funded well enough that most students can attain either outside or institutional funding, but in the humanities, not all do. Some humanities students are forced to borrow money during their coursework, then take full-time jobs while completing their dissertations. Again, funding differs greatly by the wealth of the university; some universities give five years of full funding to all Ph.D. students, though often with a teaching requirement attached; other universities do not. However, because of the teaching requirements, which can be in the research years of the Ph.D., even the most funded of universities often do not have funding for humanities or social science students who need to do research elsewhere, whether in the United States or overseas. Foreign grads are typically funded the same way as domestic (US) grads, although some funding sources (such as many NSF fellowships) may only be awarded to domestic students. International students often have worse financial difficulties than domestic students. Reasons include high costs to visit their families back home, support of a family not allowed to work due to immigration laws, tuition that is ridiculous by world standards, and large fees: visa (document)visa fees by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, surveillance fees (such as Student and Exchange Visitor Information Systems, or SEVIScnn.com) by Congress and Homeland Security.In rare cases, graduate students can lose funding and be ''de facto'' terminated from the program. Depending on the structure of the department, this can sometimes even happen at the whim of an advisor. This can be devastating, and there have been instances of suicide or murder of professors or advisors by graduate students who have lost funding and are unable to complete their degrees.With the recognition of both the lack of funding and the uncertainty of the job market, many academics advise their undergraduate students not to pursue graduate education if they do not have adequate funding. However, even students with generous funding at the beginning of their degree may find themselves struggling to find funding to conduct research away from the university or to finish writing.

Unionization - There is debate within academia as to whether or not graduate students should be considered ''students'' or ''employees''; many graduate students see themselves as akin to junior faculty, but with significantly lower pay. Many graduate students feel that teaching takes time that would better be spent on research, and many point out that there is a vicious circle in the academic labor economy. Institutions that rely on cheap graduate student labor have no need to create expensive professorships, so graduate students who have taught extensively in graduate school can find it immensely difficult to get a teaching job when they have obtained their degree. Many institutions depend heavily on graduate student teaching: yaleunions.org - a 2003 report by the Yale graduate student union, for instance, claims that "70% of undergraduate teaching contact hours at Yale are performed by transient teachers: graduate teachers, adjunct instructors, and other teachers not on the tenure track." The United Auto Workers#Academic UnionUnited Auto Workers (under the slogan "Uniting Academic Workers") is one of the unions that represents graduate employees. Universities' administrations often oppose these unions, arguing that student should be exempt from labor laws intended for "workers", while the union organizers and most graduate students feel all workers have an inalienable right to unionize. In some cases unionization movements have met with enough student opposition to fail. At the schools where graduate students are unionized, which positions are unionized vary. Sometimes only one set of employees will unionize (e.g. teaching assistants, residential directors); at other times, most or all will. Typically, fellowship recipients, usually not employed by their university, do not participate.When negotiations fail, graduate student unions sometimes go on strike actionstrike. While graduate student unions can use the same types of strikes that other unions do, they sometimes elect to perform a ''grade strike''. In a grade strike, graduate students refuse to grade exams and papers and, if the strike lasts until the end of the academic term, also refuse to turn in final grades. It is rare that lecturing or critical resident-director duties are neglected; in some cases the union declares these duties voluntary, and almost all students perform them, believing that it would be unfair to neglect the undergraduates because of a disagreement with the institution, not the student body. Another form of strike is the "work-to-rule" strike, in which graduate student instructors work exactly as many hours as they are paid for and no more. Typically, one 3-credit course is considered to take 10 hours per week of work, although many instructors spend more time than this on class meetings, class preparation, office hours, corresponding with students, and especially grading student work.

Life after graduate school - Traditionally, successful doctorate candidates in the English-speaking world would proceed to tenure-track faculty positions upon graduation, perhaps after completing a postdoctoral researcher post-doctoral position. Some of the requirements or recommendations for doctoral programs still reflect this tradition (for example, it is recommended that Ph.D. students gain at least some teaching experience—for example, by working as teaching assistants—during their studies).In recent years, however, merely possessing an advanced degree is no guarantee of getting an academic job. Universities are more reluctant to hire full-time faculty, relying increasingly on part-time teachers who earn less money, have no tenure or job security, and are not eligible for benefits. The term "Publish or perish" refers to the increasing need for faculty to engage in research and publish regularly in order to be considered for tenure-track positions, promotions, salary increases, and so on.As a result of these issues, many Ph.D.s enter industry—in some fields, more than 50 percent do. Others seek work in academically-related fields, such as Librarianship.

References -

William G. Bowen & Neil L. Rudenstine, ''In Pursuit of the PhD'' (Princeton UP, 1992; ISBN 0-691-04294-2). A comprehensive report on graduate education in the US from the 1960s to the 1990s, based on surveys of tens of thousands of graduate students.

See also -

Comprehensive examination

EURODOC (European Council of Doctoral Candidates and junior researchers)

Thesis

Thesis defence

External links -

AcademicLadder.com - Academic Ladder is an informational site for graduate students and professors climbing the academic ladder.

phdcomics.com - Piled Higher and Deeper is a webcomic about the life of grads at Stanford University

phinished.org - Phinished.org a discussion & support group for those who cannot seem to finish their theses or dissertations...

phdcentral.com - PhD Central - Open Source Network to Suggest or Find a Thesis Topic

everythingbio.com - Biology Graduate Schools : Search for biology graduate schools, and find out information about different programs before you apply.

nextwave.sciencemag.org - Science NextWave : Contains many articles about graduate school life, and how to deal with many of the frustrations one faces. Also covers scientific training, career development, and the science job market.

edusvcs.com - FullyEmployedMBA : Provides comprehensive content and articles on getting your masters degree in business; comprehensive list of high quality, not for profit universities offering evening programs to get your MBA; detailed financial aid info, work-life balance and everything you need to know when thinking of getting your masters degree.

philosophicalgourmet.com - The Philosophical Gourmet Report : Information about graduate programs in !philosophy.Category:Educationa l? stagesCategory:School !typesja:大学༉ 8;生sv:Doktorandth:บภ±à¸“ฑิตวิทยาภ¥à¸±à¸¢zh:研究 983;

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Gradschools.com
Comprehensive online directory of graduate and post-graduate school programs, arranged by curriculum, including contact information, program descriptions and links to leading programs world wide.
http://www.gradschools.com/

SchoolGuides
College resource with multiple search features and shopping links.
http://www.schoolguides.com

Stanford School of Business
Offers a leading graduate program in business in the heart of Silicon Valley.
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu

U.S. News & World Report
A weekly national newsmagazine devoted largely to reporting and analyzing national and international affairs, politics, business, health, science, technology, and social trends.
http://www.usnews.com/

Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Gives information about the school, its research programs and publications, special projects and prizes.
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/