Guide to Graduate Admission
This guide should help you as you think about applying for admission to the Graduate School of Princeton University. We are pleased that you are considering Princeton, and I offer you encouragement along with a few words of advice as you make a very significant career decision.Princeton’s Graduate School presents singular opportunities in a community that offers students extraordinary academic and intellectual resources. Before applying for admission, however, you should determine that the graduate program you are considering at Princeton actually meets your interests and needs. Be certain that any program to which you apply has scholars working actively in areas that concern you. The general reputation of this—or any other—university does not provide such a guarantee. Knowledge has expanded so rapidly, and disciplines have become so specialized, that no first-rate department pretends to cover any field fully. Make every effort to determine which institutions and programs are most relevant to your objectives.
Consult with your undergraduate professors; departmental advisers and faculty members here at Princeton may also help you. Visit us on the web where you will be able to access our Graduate School Catalog as well as the home pages of all our academic programs and many of our individual faculty members and current graduate students. Review the various national evaluations of graduate programs. It is in your interest, as well as ours, that the most highly qualified and motivated candidates be matched with the best programs in the country. We do believe, of course, that a significant number of these programs are to be found at Princeton.
Princeton offers a limited number of professional master’s programs in architecture, engineering, public affairs, and finance. These programs supplement an undergraduate education or experience in the early phase of a career with rigorous preparation that provides the intellectual foundations and practical skills for your chosen profession.
Research doctoral degrees are more than a continuation of college-level studies. A student develops the capacity for independent research by working closely with a scholar, or a small group of scholars, whose work can serve as a model. In part then, graduate education is a rite of passage through which you may become a colleague to your professors. Achieving this requires more than completing courses, accumulating credits, and passing prescribed examinations. Such a position is earned by commitment to the difficult, but fulfilling, craft of independent research through which you demonstrate the ability to make an original contribution to knowledge.
Meeting this challenge requires personal sacrifice—of time, of leisure, of immediate rewards. But the achievement is well worth the cost in terms of intellectual satisfaction and the opportunity to push back the frontiers of knowledge and help create a better world.
Before resolving to set out on the path to a graduate degree, do reflect on the commitment that will be required. If you think you have this commitment—sufficient to sustain you through several years of intense and concentrated work and study—we welcome your application to Princeton. I wish you well with your decision.
William B. Russel
Dean of the Graduate School