Making your decision
You did it! Now you have some decisions to make...
This part could be easy or difficult depending on how your visits went.
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You have to think of rankings, faculty, atmosphere, and your overall happiness. The most important, in our opinion, is your overall happiness.
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Two good tools are a pro-con list and a decision matrix. A pro-con list is self-explanatory, but I'll briefly explain a decision matrix. In a decision matrix you lay out the factors you're considering (location, size, research, cost of living, ranking, etc.) and give them a weight on a chosen scale. Let's assume that you use a scale ranging from 1-5 (5 being most important). If cost of living is the most important criterion to you, you would give it a weight of 5. Contrastingly, if you care little about the location of the school, you would assign location a weight of 1. You would follow the same pattern for each of your considerations. Next, you would award points to each of your considerations for each university. In other words, how did each university stack up in each category? For example, if you're looking at University A's cost of living and it is very high, it would receive a score of 1 (using 1-5 with 5 being the best). In comparison, University B's cost of living is mid-priced, therefore it would get a score of 3. You would do this for each university and category and finish by multiplying the weight by the score of each factor. For instance, if University A scored a 1 in cost of living and cost of living holds a weight of 5, University A would be awarded 5 points for this category. Finally, each university's points should be summed. The school with the largest overall sum is the best for you.
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If you secretly wanted another school to be the winner than the one you got mathematically, go with that one.
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Once again, congratulations!! We hope you enjoyed this guide and found it useful. Don't hesitate to ask us any questions, and good luck! Applying to graduate school is no easy feat, but you have 2 more people cheering you on now! :)
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Kat's Take
I lost so much sleep over this decision. I had confidently narrowed down my choice between two universities, but was heartbreakingly torn when I had to make my final decision. On one hand, I had met a faculty member who truly blew me away and was amazed by how excited we both were to plan the projects we would work on together. On the other hand, I was incredibly impressed by the other university's program itself, especially the students and faculty members who I interacted with.
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Once again, I fell back on my support system. I spoke to many people that I love and look up to about my choice, but my final decision was a result of both talking to my PI and listening to my gut--it's cheesy, I know.
I sent an SOS email to my PI about my predicament and before I even entered her office, she already had a pro-con list outlined for me. We went through all of my options and when I left she suggested that I leave her office pretending like I had made a decision. She said that I didn't have to share my choice with anyone, but that I should live the next 48 hours pretending like I had committed. If I was happy, I had made the right decision. So, I did. And at the end of the 48 hours, I recognized the feeling in my gut that I had felt all along but suppressed--I hate not being able to quantify a gut feeling--Stanford was where I knew I needed to be.
Kiara's Take
I dreaded this part at first, because I didn't think it would be easy to make a decision. After I eliminated my backup after I was accepted, I was torn between my two that remained. I went onto the recruitment visit to one and in the same weekend, the other had a diversity recruitment day. So I got the chance to compare them one right after the other. My decision to go to Brown became pretty clear after that. The fact that they had the diversity recruitment day really swayed my decision. In addition, I wanted to be in a place that was a bit more affordable to live in, and the other school I was choosing between was very similar to Pitt in terms of in the city and such, so I figured Brown would be a nice change. Academically, as I said I got along well with my PI, and Brown's Open Graduate Program (in which you can get a Master's in a different field while pursuing your PhD) was another selling point. I really wanted an interdisciplinary experience. So once I weighed all of that out, I knew Brown was the school for me. If you have more questions about Brown and why I chose it, let me know!
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