Graduate School

The first thing to know is that graduate school in the sciences is generally free. The second thing to know is that graduate school is significantly harder than undergraduate, mainly because it requires independent research, which has no preset goal or path forward. The answers are not in the back of the book!

While many grad school application deadlines are in March, some are months earlier. It pays to start investigating your future research interests and potential graduate schools no later than the summer between your junior and senior years.

Getting Into Graduate School

You generally need a solid academic record, good GRE scores, and 3 letters of recommendation to get into grad school. Pitt, for example, requires a GPA of at least 3.0; other programs may be higher or lower. Find more information on getting into graduate school.

Picking a Graduate School

Choosing a graduate school is not easy. The most important thing is figuring out which area or areas you find most interesting. 

Picking a Gradual School by Geography

The easiest way to get an overview of all of the graduate schools in geology in a particular area is by checking out an old-fashioned BOOK: The Directory of Geoscience Departments, published by the American Geosciences Institute (AGI). You can instantly get lists of all geoscience departments in each state, plus lists of all the faculty in each department and what their specialities are. This one book makes it amazingly easy to see which department are big, which small, and which have faculty doing roughly what you are interested in. We should have a copy of this book in the department office (SRCC 200). In addition, here is list of all geoscience departments in the United States and Canada.

Funding Your Graduate School Education

Please visit here for more information on how to fund your graduate school education.