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Top 3 Tips To Land the Graduate School of Your Dreams 🎓

Many aerospace engineering schools get inundated with applications every year. To get in, you’ll need a standout application.

Applying for graduate schools can be a daunting prospect for any engineer. Our undergraduate years are filled with difficult and time-consuming classes, research or club participation, and extracurricular activities. While each of these things can be a great use of time, we can (and should) ask ourselves, “What is the best use of my time to help me get where I want to go?”

For me, I chose early on in my undergraduate degree to focus my efforts on graduate school, specifically a PhD in aerospace engineering. I chose this path because I am interested in the research and development phase of engineering, and many of the people I looked up to in the industry with the roles I aspired to achieve were PhDs. This decision helped guide my time and efforts toward things that would make a difference in my application process and set me up for success in a research role.

For those of you who may be in the same boat as I was, I want to share what I was taught by my mentors and what I learned through my own experience of preparing, applying for, and accepting a PhD role in aerospace. Here are my top 3 tips to land the graduate school of your dreams, with tips 1 and 2 being the most obvious and important and tip 3 being the most commonly overlooked step by graduate students:

1. Choose the correct research advisor as early as possible 🧑‍🏫 

The first thing you will be evaluated on in all your applications and interviews is your research ability and experience. So, join a research group as early as you can!!! I cannot stress this enough. Those who make the biggest impact in research during their undergraduate are usually those who started the earliest. No, the first semester of your freshman year is not too early to contact professors to see if you can join their lab. If you feel like you’ll be lost and have nothing to contribute, that’s normal and how research always starts.

That being said, it’s just as important to choose the right professor. When looking for which professors to reach out to, look for professors who don’t just conduct research that interests you, but who also regularly publish papers/presentations with student authors. Go to their faculty page and try to find their publications list. Read through the titles and/or abstracts and see if it sounds like something you’d want to be a part of.

Even more importantly, check the author list on each paper. If all of the professor’s papers list them as the first author with relatively few student contributions, that’s a red flag. On the other hand, if they have papers listed that have students (especially undergraduates) as authors (or at least coauthors), that’s a sign that you will be able to publish papers that build up your resume/CV and give you valuable experience.

Once you’ve chosen a professor, send them an email or meet them in person to ask if you can be a part of their research group, or ask an assigned mentor or more familiar professor to help introduce you.

2. Establish meaningful connections and friendships 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 

When graduate schools decide to admit you to their program, they are taking a huge risk on you. They are committing to educate you, provide you with mentors, and often to fund your research for 5+ years. Many PhD students cost their university well over $100k per year. So, what gives them the confidence to admit a twenty-something engineer with relatively little information about their skills and character? How do they trust the contents of each resume that comes in their inbox?

In large part, it is letters of recommendation. I was lucky enough to establish a good relationship with my undergraduate research professor, and through him, I started on a project with several NASA Langley engineers who became strong letters of recommendation for me. Because I started early on and sought to work reliably and collaboratively, their letters of recommendation were powerful. I wasn’t just “some undergraduate who I met once” to them. I had worked with them for three years, published papers with them, and even spent a summer at Langley being directly advised by my NASA mentors. I’d even spent time with them outside of work grabbing ice cream at conferences, touring NASA facilities, and even trying out a flight simulator together.

These experiences gave their letters of recommendation some real power because they could state that they had worked with me for a long time and seen my character on display in many different scenarios. These are the kinds of letters that help graduate admissions committees have the confidence to take a leap of faith on you and trust you in their program.

3. Craft your authentic story ✍️ 

This step of your graduate journey is crucial for admissions committees and easy for us to overlook. Your future graduate school doesn’t just need to know what you’ve done, they need to know why you’ve done it and where you’re going with it. They want to admit students who are full of passion and purpose about their work because graduate programs can be exhausting and demoralizing at times, and many of the payoffs don’t come until well after you’ve finished. If they worry that you are unsure about what you want or where you are going, they are unlikely to admit you.

Additionally, they want to see that their specific school and research are a good fit for your journey. Thus, you need to determine a) which area of research you want to be in and b) which specific professor at each school will make a good match for you. Then, dig deep and connect the dots so that each piece of your aerospace journey supports why you’re at where you are now and where you want to go.

Consider how each research project, internship, and experience you’ve had has shaped your career’s direction. You need to know where you’re going with your graduate degree so that you can convince the admissions committee that their school is a logical choice for your next step.

Conclusion

In summary, make sure to choose the right advisor early on. Put effort into that relationship and any other meaningful connections you can make in aerospace. Be conscious about how every experience you’ve had has shaped your aerospace journey and helped you choose your specific interests.

We here at The Overview have navigated this journey before and are here to be your “older sibling” in your journey. We know it can be a daunting, confusing, and even unfair process to apply to graduate school. But with the right knowledge and tools at your disposal, we know you can make it into a graduate program and launch your career as an aerospace engineer.

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