Stage 2: Acceptance

Yes, I know that Acceptance is Stage 5 in the evolution of grief, but in the academic context of graduate admissions, it is Stage 2(ish), in the sense of Stage 1 = Application; Stage 2 = Acceptance (or not).

At this time of year in the US academic calendar at many institutions, students have been accepted, rejected, or put on hold by the graduate programs to which they applied. Some departments or programs bring in prospective students for an interview or recruiting visit; in the first case to make final decisions about admissions, and in the other case to try to convince students to accept their offers of admission.

Some departments bring in some of each, and some bring them all in at the same time. That is, a group of prospective grad students are brought to visit as a group: some have been offered admission, some have not (yet). The idea for this post is based on a conversation I had with an undergrad who recently participated in one of these 'hybrid' events.

According to this student, the not-yet-accepted students worked very hard to impress their potential advisors and other faculty and researchers. In the opinion of this student, those who had been accepted did not work so hard (or, at least, some didn't. I have no direct knowledge of the situation, but it was the opinion of this student that those accepted were significantly less concerned with making a good impression than those who had not yet been accepted.)

I suppose if I think back over my years of encounters with prospective students at conferences (before admissions decisions are made) and my subsequent meetings with them after they receive an offer of admission but before they make a decision, I could come up with some examples of students who were energetic pre-admission and lethargic post-admission. Without being any more specific than that, I can say that my experiences seem to back up this undergrad's impressions.

I asked this student: But don't those who have been accepted know that they still need to impress their potential advisors? If they accept the offer at that place, why would they want to start off working with someone who may now have a somewhat negative impression of them? Or perhaps they behaved that way during the visit because they are not serious about accepting the offer from that place, and they are just wasting everyone's time and money? Either way, this does not speak highly of the maturity of those students.

Yes, I know that someone can have an off day, be recovering from the flu, experiencing stress, be exhausted from midterms and travel etc. etc. etc., but exceptions aside, I hope that it is not the case that, once accepted, many students think that it is only their opinion that matters now. It is a two-way street: the students need to check out the departments and potential advisors to make good decisions about what is best for them, and the departments and potential advisors are still checking out the students, even those admitted.

Questions for those who advise grad students and for whom this mode of grad recruiting is relevant:

• Have you ever met a potential student (particularly a potential advisee) before and after their acceptance to your grad program and seen a difference in their energy level or degree of interest in having an interesting conversation about research topics?

• Have you ever met a student who was accepted to your grad program (based on their excellent application) but then, after meeting them, you wished that they had not been accepted? 

• If you answered yes to the previous question, did you later find that your negative first impression was accurate, or did you develop a more positive opinion after more interaction with that student?

Question for current and former graduate students who have been on recruiting visits to programs to which they had been accepted:

• What was your attitude during your visit? Did you try to impress, or was your attitude that it was entirely the responsibility of the program to impress you?

What They Don't Tell You in the Non-Existent Training for this Job

File this under: I had no idea students did this.

In my so-called normal professorial existence, students considering applying to my department for graduate school and possibly wanting to work with me send me an email with various bits of information and assorted questions. I have written about this fascinating topic at length before.

But did you know that some students do this?: They go straight to the person they perceive as the 'top' (for example, a head/chair or other administrative leader of a unit/department/etc.) and explain their interest in graduate studies. They may or may not be interested in that person's particular field of research (most of us are, after all, still professors who teach and advise), but they seem to want to make contact with the "head" -- not the director of the graduate program, not the administrative assistant responsible for the graduate program, not the potential advisor/s (although some may write to these individuals as well) -- to announce their existence, their intentions, and to Ask For Things (advice, confirmation of their self-stated outstanding qualifications for graduate studies, etc.).

This surprised me, although maybe it shouldn't have. Does it surprise you? Is this normal behavior in your program or field?

My usual approach to these things is to be as non-judgmental for as long as possible. Some of the student email I get in my normal professorial existence can be classified as "clueless" (I am somewhat sympathetic to these, as I consider myself to have been among the clueless at the applying-to-grad-school stage of my life). But never in 57 million years would it have occurred to me to write to an administrator (other than the graduate director of a department) to introduce myself and lobby for admission.

Yes, I know it is best not to psychoanalyze a student's motivations in sending one of these emails, but that's what we do in blogs.. sometimes. Also, it doesn't really matter what I think about these students because I don't make the admissions decisions, even if some students seem to think that I do.

Mad Libs Gone Mad

Letters sent to me as a prospective advisor of prospective graduate students who are prospective applicants to the graduate program in my department continue to arrive, with more appearing in my inbox every week. As usual, and as I have described before, these letters are quite mixed in their level of sophistication.

Here is an unscientific conclusion from my reading of these letters:

I have not seen any correlation between size, type, prestige, and/or location of the undergrad school and whether the letter is impressive or naive.

Excellent, focused, professional letters can come from anywhere. Clueless, naive and (inadvertently) obnoxious letters can come from anywhere.

The only somewhat predictable characteristic is that students from certain countries tend to send form letters, probably to many different professors, probably in the hopes that at least some will reply. I have wondered about this strategy and whether it is effective. The large number of possible recipients might increase the yield of replies, but the obvious form-letter nature of the letters (especially the "Dear Sir" ones sent to female faculty) discourages replies.

The strangest e-mail that I have received in recent months from a prospective applicant was sort of like a form letter, but it was also sort of like a Mad Libs template into which the student had inserted relevant information for each recipient, but not in a particularly smooth or knowledgeable way. The letter went something like this:

Dear Professor of Science,

My name is Student, and I will be graduating from University in spring 2012. I am looking into graduate programs for the fall, and am interested in your research program. Will you be taking on any new MS/PhD students next year? [<-- all that is fine so far]

In particular, I am fascinated by your work on "Title of old, obscure paper that is an outlier in my usual research topics" and how you applied [incorrect name for a technique] to [something I never did] in "Title of second paper that doesn't have anything to do with anything else listed so far." I would like to work on topics like this under your direction as advisor at [name of my university].

Attached is my CV.

Sincerely,

Student

OK, so he tried. He looked up some of my papers, picked a couple that may have looked interesting to him, maybe took some notes of some words in the abstracts or titles, and put this information in the letter.

B for Effort.

I think this can be a very good approach if you know what you are doing and if the things you are writing about are at least a little familiar to you, so you are not just stringing together Science Words and paper titles in a possibly-strange way. If this student had showed the email to a professor, chances are the professor would have seen some of the problems right away, without even knowing anything about me or my work.

We have debated cluelessness here in this blog before. When I have described clueless students, particularly undergraduates who are just starting to navigate the complexity of the graduate school universe, many readers can relate to the feeling that there are unwritten rules and things you are supposed to do and not do (but you have to figure these out by trial-and-failure first).

And so it is, and maybe that's how internet resources (including blogs) can help a bit. But beware..

For example, I have written posts in which I supplied templates for various types of academic letters, with blanks for personalized bits of information. These templates are mostly just to give a sense for the types of information, appropriate length, and scope of various types of letters. I hope they are overall helpful, but if you stick random words in the blanks, you end up with something that is likely more incoherent than what you'd come up with by writing the letter entirely on your own.

Do Reply

It turns out that I have one more thing to say (for now) on the topic of e-mails from prospective graduate students to potential grad advisors..

On Friday's post, there were some comments to the effect of "How do you have time to answer all those e-mails?" or "Why do you bother to answer those e-mails, even the form letters?"

How do I have time? Of course I don't have time; most of us don't. In fact, I don't have time to do anything, not even write this, but somehow.. we find time, not to do everything, but to do some things we want to do or think are important.

Which leads to question about why/whether answering these e-mails is important.

I have probably told this anecdote before, but it is important for understanding why I answer these e-mails:

Years ago, I went to an awards ceremony for an early-career scientist who, in subsequent years, has continued to do excellent research, fulfilling the promise of his early years as a researcher. He is originally from another country, one in which many young scientists send many e-mails to many potential advisors in the US. In his acceptance speech, this young scientist said that he sent out many e-mails when he was starting to think about graduate work in the US, but that very few professors wrote back. In fact, he really only got one serious reply from a potential advisor. So he applied to that place, was accepted, got his PhD, and went on to do award-winning research. In his award acceptance speech, he thanked his graduate advisor for taking the time to write back to him and encourage him to apply. This changed his life.

The students who send us these e-mails are our potential graduate students. 

We want excellent graduate students, and my hypothesis is that you can't always tell from these e-mails who is going to be an outstanding graduate student and who is not. You can get an apparently sophisticated e-mail from someone who doesn't have a creative bone in their body and who has no real passion or motivation for research.

But what about a clueless, unfocused e-mail? Does such an e-mail indicate a fatally clueless graduate student? Some would say yes, it does, or at the very least it means that the student is far behind some of their peers and will be slower to get on track in a research environment.

So, my latest question to you grad advisor readers is: Do you think that an apparently clueless e-mail (a) definitely, (b) maybe, or (c) does not indicate/s a terminally clueless student who will not do well in a graduate program?

You Can Lead a Horse to Water

Just the other day, a colleague who teaches at a very small college asked me what I want to see in an e-mail message from a prospective graduate student. This was of course an extremely timely question, given the topic of my post on Friday, and I gave her a brief synopsis of my opinions.

She said that that was pretty much what she had been telling her students, and that some students showed her their e-mail drafts before sending them to potential grad advisors (and she encouraged them to show her their drafts). Other students, however, either did not want her to see their drafts and/or didn't take her up on her offer to discuss the purpose and desirable content of these e-mails.

In the case of students who did not want advice, she feared that their letters would appear clueless or might even be perceived as rude (for example, if they asked something like "What is your research?").

We talked about this for a while -- what it's like for her as an advisor of undergrads in a small place and what it's like for me as a grad advisor reading these e-mails, and then later, applications -- and this was very interesting.

It occurred to me that when I get an unsophisticated and/or annoying e-mail from a prospective student, I assume that the student did not consult an advisor or was somehow poorly advised. I don't think I seriously consider the possibility that the student might have a very thoughtful and engaged advisor whose attempts to give good advice are ignored or rebuffed.

There's no way to know which is the case (although I wish there were because it would tell me a lot about that student), but from now on I will not make this assumption.

Will this have any practical effect? Maybe not.

But I wonder. Grad advisors who get e-mail from prospective students: If you form a (perhaps unfair) initial negative opinion of undergrad advising quality, do you think this carries over into your reading of the letters of reference in the application? That is, do you think you somehow discount (a bit) the opinions of advisors of students who wrote lame e-mails to you (in addition to not having the most positive impression of the students)?

I know it's not so simple -- the applications are comprised of a variety of materials (transcripts, statement of purpose, GRE etc.). And yet, when there are far more highly qualified applicants than there are admission slots, maybe these things make a difference. Do you think they do?

Writing to me (reprise)

In 2007, I wrote about the different types of e-mail messages that I receive from prospective graduate students. I've received a heap of these e-mails in recent weeks, so I was thinking about this general topic and looked back at what I wrote 4 years ago. Below I sort-of reprint that post, but I have edited it, in places extensively, based on my current thoughts about these missives.

**************

In my field, at this time of year, potential grad students send e-mail messages to potential graduate advisors.

Note: In my department, students need to have an identified advisor from the very beginning, although it is certainly possible for a student to switch advisors once admitted to the graduate program; hence, these e-mails.

I answer all such e-mails from prospective graduate students, but the content and length of my response varies with the tone/content of the e-mail from the student.

These e-mails come in several varieties:

Type 1: Form letters: Some students send these e-mails to many professors and don’t bother to tailor each e-mail to each potential advisor. Some are clearly not even appropriate for the particular research field of the recipient. This does not make a good impression.

My response: Cursory, particularly if the e-mail starts "Dear Sir". (The correct form of address is "Professor", which avoids the hazard of not being able to guess gender from a name, particularly one in an unfamiliar culture, although a Dear Sir letter to me is a sure sign that my correspondent did not look at my faculty webpage because, despite being a flaming feminist, I am quite recognizably female from my photographs, I think.) My response typically consists of something like this: "Dear S, If you are interested in applying to the graduate program in X-Science at MyUniversity, you can find information about application procedures at [link]. Sincerely, FSP."

Type 2A: More specialized letter, but unfocused, poorly written, or otherwise demonstrating cluelessness. I got one of these recently and it really made me wonder if this student, who is apparently a native English speaker and who may well be very smart and hard-working, can or will get past this severe disadvantage when applying to graduate programs. Example:

Dear Prof FS,

Hello my name is X. I am interested in graduate school for next year because I really love Science! I am especially interested in [garbled name of my research subfield]. Can you tell me more about it?

My response: No.

My real response: polite but not detailed. I point the student to my webpages, which have information about several ongoing research projects.

Type 2B: More serious than 2A, and not as clueless, but still asking in an unspecific way for me to describe my research. When a student requests more information about my research and that's all they say about it, I don't know what -- if anything -- the student has done on their own to learn about my research. I am not expecting a prospective student to write "I have read your last 18 papers and they are all fabulous", but a less vague question will get a less vague answer.

My response: Similar to above, but a notch more detailed; I provide a link to my research webpages.


Type 3: Excellent letter: focused, well-written, demonstrates that the student has thought about why they might want to apply to my university and possibly work with me.

Example:

Dear FSP,

I am a senior at X University, and am interested in obtaining a PhD/MS in Your Field or A Closely Related Field. I became interested in Your Field (briefly mention class and/or research experience). I saw on your webpages that you [mention something of interest as a possible research opportunity]. (Alternative: I read your recent paper in Journal and was interested in [specify]). 

.... (see below for examples of how to end such a letter)...

My response: I respond to any specific questions, providing details about research opportunities.

So, how do prospective applicants end these letters? This is the awkward part for some.

It is OK to ask a potential advisor if they are taking on new students in the coming academic year. You can end the letter with this; it is easy enough to answer with yes, no, or maybe. Whether someone is even interested in taking on new advisees is critical information for potential applicants. Someone might well be doing the most fascinating research in the world (to you), but if they already have 17 students and are not taking new students, maybe you don't want to apply there (unless there is someone else you want to work with). 

It is OK to end the letter with an expression of interest in the graduate program and something like "I plan to apply for the graduate program, and hope that your department will seriously consider my application." It's a meaningless sentence, but it shows intent and is a possible way to end the letter without making an open-ended request for information. Most professors (in fields in which these letters are common) will know why you are writing -- to get your name out there, to show seriousness of intent -- so you don't have to work too hard to explain why you are writing.

If you are going to be at an upcoming conference, you could end the letter by letting the potential advisor know if/when you are giving a presentation, in case they are interested. Speaking only for myself, I don't like getting requests for extensive meetings/discussions with potential applicants about whom I know nothing other than what is in their e-mail.

I am, however, happy to chat with prospective students at poster sessions or professional/social events or during breaks. Instead of making an appointment (which requires the professor to look through the conference schedule in detail in advance and make a plan), just try to track down people of interest in likely spots at conferences, or, better, have one of your professors introduce you. [But that's just my preference. If you like making appointments with prospective students, leave a comment so that it will be clear there is a difference of opinion on this issue.]

Sincerely,

FSP

Check Us Out

Prologue. This post is motivated by the fact that I am already getting emails from prospective graduate students, so I started thinking about the graduate admissions process and remembered that there was a topic I have been intending to discuss well in advance of graduate application deadlines.

Every year when colleagues and I from other departments/institutions talk with each other about graduate applications, we are often collectively amazed that some PhD applicants mention their interest in being advised by professors who have not had a publication, grant, or a graduate advisee in many many years.

I am not talking about a gap of a year or two. I am not talking about distinguished near-retirement faculty who have a reputation for their scientific awesomeness and who might be quite interesting mentors, even if they are ramping down their research programs. I am talking about associate and full professors who no longer do active research. Of course, there are not many of these, but I think most of us can think of one or two.

Didn't these students do any investigating beyond what is listed on a department directory-type webpage? I could be wrong, but I imagine that these students saw the professor's field of interest listed, saw that it corresponded with their interests, and then went no further.

It is not difficult to figure out whether a faculty member is active in research. I understand that web pages may be out of date and contain selective information, that some undergraduates may not be too aware of different citation databases, such as Web of Science, and that most undergraduates probably don't know that they can search for list of active awards to individuals in the databases of the major funding agencies.

It would be great if more undergrad advisors told students about these resources, but even without knowing about these, you can find out a lot about someone by using Google or its moral equivalents.

I think it is particularly important for prospective PhD students to do a bit of background checking before applying. It is not so critical for MS students, who may do quite well with an advisor who doesn't have a lot of funding or research activity, although it depends a lot on the specific field, the nature of the thesis project, the funding structure of the department, and the student's likely post-graduate career plans.

In the sciences, the 3 things that potential doctoral students may want to know and that can be found with some fairly easy searching are:

- What has the potential advisor published in the last 5 years? Search for both peer-reviewed journal articles and presentations at major conferences. You can try Google Scholar, Web of Science, or some other relevant database. It's important to know how to use such databases, so it's good to start learning now if you don't already have experience with them.

- Has the potential advisor had a grant in the last 3-5 years? For NSF, you can go to their main website, select Search Awards, input the name of the relevant professor in the field labeled "Principal Investigator (PI)", and check the box for "active awards". You can also select expired awards to get information about longer-term funding history. To understand these data and what someone's funding record indicates about their level of research activity, it is important to have some context; some fields don't require a lot of funding, others do. The undergraduate advisors could provide some help here.

- Has the potential advisor advised (and graduated) other doctoral students in the last 5 years? This one is a more ambiguous indicator than the others. Some professors do not advise a lot of students, and the reasons for this are quite varied. The reasons might have nothing to do with whether this person would be a good advisor. It is worth looking into, though, just so you have a more complete picture of what you are getting into. If there have been recent PhD students graduating with this professor as advisor, it can be very useful to know what they are doing now in terms of careers. You may be able to figure this out with some creative searching, or you could ask around.

I think most prospective graduate students do some research into potential advisors and/or programs, and that's a good thing. We all want to increase the chances of a good fit between advisor and advisee, and just as the potential advisor is looking at student records, so too should prospective students be looking at the professor's record.

[note: I apologize in advance for sporadic comment moderation for a day or two during an intense time of travel.]

Let Me Down

At this time of year, some of my colleagues and I like to show each other our favorite "rejection letters" from the recent crop of grad applicants -- that is, the letters that we get from prospective graduate students who decide to accept an offer other than the one from our own department.

I am sure that these letters are difficult for students to write, and it already shows a degree of thoughtfulness to send one. A personalized rejection-of-offer is of course not required; students can just click 'decline' on a webpage and be done with it.

Even so, it's nice that some students send a note of some sort. Some students send a lot of e-mail to potential advisors during the application process, request individual meetings at conferences, come for visits, and basically need a lot of time and care from faculty as they (the students) collect information to make their big decisions. It's polite to thank someone for their time, whether or not you decide to work with them.

The mutual-sharing of entertaining rejection letters is therefore not a mocking of sincere students, but just a weird professorial habit of laughing about some of the stranger aspects of advising (or not advising) graduate students. In particular, some of these letters are interesting for the contortions the students go through in an attempt to let us down easily as they explain that we will, unfortunately, not have the opportunity to work with them -- at least.. not directly. Some students comfort us with the possibility that they will stay in touch, we will see them at meetings, and we will get to see how it all turns out for them in the end.

I have written about this before..

In short, my preference is for a brief and sincere thank you. It's also nice if there's a mention of where the student has decided to go, but there is no need to explain why that was the decision.

In particular, there is no need to reassure a professor that the applicant really does respect them and their work. We do not need to be told that we do interesting research, but.. These 'I actually think you do really good work' e-mails from students annoy at least one of my colleagues, but I think most of us recognize them as classic examples of an academic- letter genre and appreciate the thought, if not the awkward language.

D-Day

April 15* is the traditional deadline for paying the previous year's taxes in the US, and is also the deadline by which applicants to graduate schools typically need to give their response (accept or decline) to offers of admission. There is a Council of Graduate Schools "resolution" proclaiming April 15 to be the decision date, although I don't know how many graduate institutions adhere to this deadline. Let's assume, for the sake of this discussion, that April 15 or thereabouts is a significant date in the graduate admissions process.

[* or, this year, April 18 for taxes]

Here is what I want to know:

How many of you grad applicants (this year or in previous years) accepted or declined your offers..

- well in advance of the deadline
- long after you got the offer but within a few weeks of the deadline; or
- at the very last minute: within days of, or on, the deadline

If you waited until the last minute: Is this because you really had not decided which offer to accept? Or did you know your decision before the deadline, but waited until the last minute for some reason?

And: Did you do all your accepting and declining at the same time, or did you accept an offer and delay the declinations? If you staggered your accepting and declining: why?

I have written before about how it's unfortunate that some applicants delay sending in their rejections, even when they know they are not going to accept particular offers. This delay ties up the process for admitting highly qualified applicants who are on the waiting list. If someone really doesn't know their decision until the last minute, that's fine; but if a decision is made before the deadline, it would be nice to inform the to-be-rejected programs of this.

This year, I almost asked the admissions committee to consider reaching further down the on-hold list and make a few more offers because I started to doubt that an ideal number of first-admits for my group would accept their offers, and there were some great applicants on hold. I am very glad I did not make this request, however, because it turns out that I was just feeling impatient. Eventually, more than enough acceptances came in. I feel bad that some great applicants on the waiting list didn't get offers, but it wouldn't have been doing anyone any favors to accept more students than can reasonably be given a guarantee of financial support.

Explanatory note: In my field of the physical sciences, there are no 'rotations' in which new students cycle through various labs before acquiring an advisor, and, unlike some engineering departments, we do not admit a group of new students and then work out who will advise them. Although students can later switch advisors, at the admissions stage, there has to be at least one professor who expresses interest in being an applicant's advisor in order for that applicant to receive an offer of admission to the graduate program.

Of course there is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety for applicants throughout the admissions process, but advisors also have their own kind of uncertainty. Trying to construct a group that is the optimal size relative to funding levels and research opportunities and that is composed of a good balance of senior, intermediate, and beginning grad students is challenging. Not knowing who will accept and who will decline their offers until it is too late to pursue other options (i.e., make offers to other students) adds an element of uncertainty to the process for graduate programs and advisors.

This probably can't be helped, though. Different programs have different application deadlines and make offers at different times, but it makes sense to have a universal final-decision deadline so that students have time to weigh their all their options, compare offers in terms of financial support and research opportunities, and work out whatever needs to be worked out in their personal lives.

So, unless someone wants to propose a graduate equivalent of the "early decision" option offered by some undergraduate institutions, allowing graduate programs to lock in a core number of new students, we advisors just have to deal with the uncertainty and try to make things work out in terms of numbers of students, grants, and projects.

Demographic Shift?

** warning: This blog post contains anecdotal information involving the statistics-of-small-numbers **

In my field, it is typical for graduate applicants to indicate which subfield they are most interested in pursuing for graduate research. Most applicants also typically indicate which professor(s) they are most interested in having as advisors. Although an admissions committee (in consultation with the department chair) makes the final decisions and offers, individual faculty (or, at least, representative faculty from research groups) also have a say in the admissions process.

Not long ago, I was perusing applications, and there were several surprises in them, all pleasant.

Surprise 1: Although my particular research subfield comprises less than 15% of the faculty in my department, we got about 30% of the graduate applications. This % of applications is higher than in previous years, but there has been an upward trajectory. I was therefore not surprised that the % was high, but I was surprised by how high it was. Possible interpretations other than that these data have no meaning: The subfield is hot, we are hot, or both. I am OK with any of those possibilities.

Surprise 2: Most of the applicants were female. And, when I made a first pass through the applications and considered only those that excelled according to the standard on-paper criteria (GPA, GRE scores, letters etc.), the resulting group of apparently outstanding applicants was 100% female. In my nearly 20 years of experience with graduate applications, this has never happened. [For those who are wondering/cynical: A male colleague who independently looked through the applications came up with the exact same list that I did.]

Surprise 3: Of the first-pass group of outstanding applicants, 50% of the US applicants identify themselves as minorities or biracial. In my nearly 20 years of experience with graduate applications, this has never happened.

Trend or blip? Significant of insignificant? I don't know, but I am intrigued.

Has anyone else in the physical sciences seen an increase -- dramatic or not -- in the number of female/minority applicants (i.e., members of underrepresented groups) to doctoral programs this year?

Getting to Know Me (and You)

Here's my recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education. I must admit I was not too happy about the title, and in particular the subtitle of the CHE piece. There is a throwaway line deep in the essay about Facebook, and I wouldn't have selected that as a topic to highlight in the title. Anyway, I am having a Perfect Storm week of long meetings, proposals, longer meetings, teaching, boring meetings, proposals, and random crises, so here is the CHE essay, which may lead to future discussion of the perennial topic of how graduate students and potential advisers initiate contact in certain academic disciplines.

Every year around this time, I get e-mails from prospective graduate students who want to know if I will be taking on new students in the next academic year. The content of their messages varies a surprising amount, as does, I suspect, the responses we give as professors.

Undergraduates who send those exploratory e-mails have typically been advised to do so. I am in a physical-sciences field in which graduate students often apply to work with, and be advised by, a specific professor or professors. It's the departments—usually a committee in consultation with the chair—that decide whom to admit, but advisers have a major role in those decisions. That's why undergraduate advisers recommend that their students write to prospective graduate advisers.

It is useful to send an exploratory e-mail because some professors may not be interested in advising a new student—depending on how many advisees they already have, and on what grant money is available to pay research assistantships.

Graduate-student support can be supplemented, to some extent, by departmental teaching assistantships and fellowships, but faculty members may be asked to make a financial commitment for at least the first year or two of a student's graduate career, especially for international students who might not arrive with sufficient language skills to be teaching assistants.

Although departments try to admit as many of the "top" applicants as possible, there are typically more qualified applicants than openings. The decision about whether to admit particular students, therefore, involves not only their qualifications but also whether a student would be a good match with a particular adviser. E-mail messages from prospective graduate students are a way for them to determine whether there is even any point in applying to work with a particular professor.

What do students write in those introductory e-mails? What should they write? The former is easy to answer, if we can assume that the messages I receive are representative of the genre. The answer to the second question will vary from professor to professor, but I can explain what I like (and don't like) to see in an e-mail from a prospective graduate student.

Most of the messages include some or all of the following: the name of the student's undergraduate institution, major and minor fields, graduation date, relevant research experience, and field of interest for graduate study. Most e-mails ask some version of this question: Is there any point in applying? And then they make a vague request for "more information."

Some students ask about money (tuition, benefits, salary attached to a research assistantship). Others mention details of their personal circumstances (spouses and significant others).

All of those issues, however, are better left for another time: Money is important, but you as a student can probably find out the numbers some other way (via our Web site or an e-mail to a staff administrator). And personal situations are, well, personal. Your first e-mail to a potential graduate adviser should be professional and short.

Something you probably should mention in the e-mail, but most students don't, is whether you are interested in pursuing a master of science, a master's and then maybe a Ph.D., or definitely a Ph.D. That information is critical to my answer about whether I will be looking for new graduate students in the next academic year. For example, I might be looking for a new Ph.D. student, but not a new M.S. student, or vice versa.

I like a succinct e-mail. Your message is not a pre-application, so I don't want to see your full CV or research statement. I will look at those later, if you actually follow through and apply to the graduate program and you have a good enough application for the admissions committee to pass it along. To cover yourself, just in case the potential adviser you are approaching does want to see such detailed information at this early stage, you could provide a link to a Web site where that information is posted. Professors can follow the link, or not.

Some students ask if they can visit, or mention that they will be at a particular conference and would like to talk with me in person there. I always have mixed feelings about those requests. On the one hand, requesting a visit or a face-to-face conversation demonstrates serious intent. Meeting a potential adviser can help applicants with their decision about whether to apply. The encounters can also be useful for me as the potential adviser because I can form an impression that helps me make an admissions decision later in the process.

On the other hand, it's hard to find time for many of those informal meetings, including at conferences. Fortunately, not every potential applicant wants to arrange a meeting before he or she even applies. I can, however, meet a few.

If a potential applicant and a potential adviser are going to be at the same conference in the near future, it's fine to ask if it would be possible to meet. I do not, however, like e-mails in which students inform me that we are going to meet. I have had students write and tell me that they will meet me directly after my talk at a specific conference (without checking with me as to whether that is a good time). I've had others tell me that Monday would be a good day for us to have lunch together, and I've had students ask me for my cellphone number so they can find me at the conference. One potential applicant—in what I hope is not a trend—sent me a friend request through Facebook. I am actually not that friendly, although I do try to chat with prospective students at conferences.

If you do want to meet a potential adviser in person, my advice would be to keep your request general at first, to see if the professor is interested. Or, if you don't want to request a meeting, just try to track down the professor at a conference, such as at a poster session.

E-mail messages from potential applicants typically end with a request for more information. I can appreciate that it's difficult to know how to finish such a message to an unknown professor, but "more information" is too vague.

My department Web pages describe my continuing research and my published work is accessible, so there's quite a lot of information already available about likely research opportunities. I typically respond with a few sentences about research opportunities, but I don't provide much "more" information.

Of course, the questions that students really want answered aren't appropriate to ask, at least not to me directly: Am I a mean adviser or a nice adviser? Do I expect my students to work nights and weekends? Am I a control freak, or do I have a sink-or-swim advising philosophy? Will I scream at them if they don't run a spell checker before handing me a document, or will I merely sigh?

To find out that kind of information, you will have to write to my current and recent graduate students—something I encourage potential applicants to do.

And what about my response to you? Do I even bother? Yes, I always write back, except for the cases that are obviously mass-mailed form letters that start "Dear Sir" and mention a research field that is completely unrelated to mine.

Barring those, why do I answer every legitimate message? I write back because maybe one day the student will be my student.

What I Don't Know

When I advise undergrads about graduate schools, I take into account the usual things, such as what the student thinks might be his/her specific interests for graduate research (and therefore which schools are good in that field). I also consider my opinions about which places have good advisers in that field, based in part on what I know about the previous experiences of graduate students working with a particular adviser or group of advisers.

And of course it is important whether the student is certain he/she wants to go directly into a PhD program, definitely wants to stop after the MS, or maybe will do an MS first and then see how things go (leaving open the option of a PhD later).

If the student has any personal issues that restrict options to a geographic area or to a set of universities that would also be suitable for the continuing studies or employment of a significant other, I can adjust my recommendations as necessary.

Although I do not claim to be a perfect match-maker between students and grad programs, I have done pretty well over the years in terms of helping students find a program that matches their scholarly interests, personalities, and other personal preferences.

I still have things to learn, though. This year I learned the following:

1. The economic crisis has shifted the ground at some schools so much that places that used to offer decent financial packages for stipends, tuition, and benefits now cannot. I don't know the details of the economic situations at particular institutions (although, for state universities, I can sort of guess based on what state they are in), but I wish I knew more so that I could have adjusted my recommendations accordingly.

Example: A talented undergrad asked for my advice about graduate schools. We talked about options on more than one occasion, and I suggested that he go to a conference in the fall, sit in on a range of talks in the fields in which he had an interest, and meet some people. At the conference, I introduced him to some potential advisers at one particular school that I thought was a really good fit for him. I knew that the professors to whom I introduced him were excellent scientists and also great advisers who cared about their students. The student talked to them at length and got very excited about the research possibilities. That institution was his top choice for a graduate program.

He applied and was accepted, he visited the department, and .. the financial offer was so inadequate that there might as well not even have been one. The student would have had to get a job and take out loans to make it through grad school (just as he had done as an undergrad), and no one should have to do that in the physical sciences.

If I had had any idea how bad the offer would be, I would not have made this "match". And I would have suggested that the student apply to many more places than he did. He had applied to more than one, but by mid-April, his options were few and unappealing. This was shocking because he is an excellent student and should have had his pick of graduate programs.

I felt like I had made a serious error in my advising, with possibly grave consequences. The story has a happy ending, though. I sent out some e-mails and found a colleague who was still looking for a graduate student and was pleased to have a strong recommendation of a possible candidate; the student now has a good financial offer at a really good place with a dynamic research group. It was only by luck, however, that I was able to fix my error and help work out a good solution.

Next year I will try to be better informed about economic issues before making strong recommendations. I feel very sorry for faculty in economically distressed departments that can't put together decent financial offers, but students need to look out for their personal economic situations as well. Those of us advising students on potential graduate programs can't just send them off an economic cliff because we only consider our usual criteria when making recommendations.

2. I have never really considered time-to-degree as a factor in my recommendations of certain graduate programs or advisers. These are difficult data to evaluate for a program or a particular faculty adviser; there are so many factors, including many related to the student. Even so, I learned this year of a particular program/adviser that I previously enthusiastically recommended owing to the interesting research and research environment, but now this place is off my list because the time-to-degree for many students is twice what it should be.

If a student asks my advice about that place I won't say "Don't even consider it", but I will strongly recommend that they talk to other students, look into the time-to-degree issue, and consider very carefully whether they want to invest what might be an unusually long time in their graduate studies. Students should do that anyway, no matter where they apply, but having this information in advance will affect my specific suggestions of graduate schools.

I hope all those involved in the grad admissions process this year -- professors and students -- had as successful a year as possible given the economic situation. I am happy with how things turned out for me and my research program, although I made my usual gamble and accepted more students than I thought would actually accept. They never all accept; except when they do. This year they all did. This has never happened to me before. That's fine, though. They all got good financial offers of guaranteed support, we are going to have fun, and we are going to be writing more proposals than we expected.

Go Ahead - Reject Me

An e-mail question from a reader:

What's the best (most diplomatic?) way to reject an admission offer from a school?

For most places, you don't have to do anything except click on the decline option on a webpage, but if you feel that you should send a personalized e-mail to various people at the rejected institution, including faculty who were your potential advisers, here are my preferences:

I prefer a rapid rejection. As soon as you know you will not be accepting a particular offer, inform that institution so they can make additional offers to applicants on the waiting list. If you delay because you don't know what to say or you feel bad about rejecting an offer (for whatever reason), please get over this and give an opportunity to someone else. There are typically many highly qualified applicants on waiting lists, and the only reason some of them are there is because there are limited admission slots and they weren't as lucky as you to get a first-round offer.

If you interacted with particular people, including some who devoted time to discussing research opportunities with you, write to them and just say that you have decided that Other University is a better fit for your interests, thank them for their time, and that's that. Don't ramble on about how great the people at the declined institution are and how you wish them luck with their future research and hope to see them at meetings in the future. See also this old post for a cautionary tale.

I always find it strange when a student is vague about what university's offer they have accepted. If a student spends a day or two in my department, talking to me and people in my research group, and then they decide to go somewhere else, I am fine with that, but what is the point of being mysterious about where they do decide to attend graduate school? The webpage on which offers are declined or accepted may ask for this information, although of course it is optional to provide it. Similarly, you don't have to tell faculty at the declined institution if you prefer not to, but again, why not?

If you are feeling anxious about sending a rejection letter, perhaps this will help: I have never felt annoyed or angry at a student who was potentially going to work with me but who declined an offer from my university. Every individual makes the best decision they can about what the fit is for their interests and other factors in their lives. Most faculty respect and understand that.

The only exception to the declaration above is that I do get extremely annoyed with the occasional applicant who already knew they were going to accept another offer before they visited and wasted a lot of people's time and my department's money.

In a recent example of this, I found out via someone who is an applicant's friend on Facebook that the applicant had decided to accept an offer from another university before even visiting My University. That applicant was not a potential student of mine, but would normally be on my schedule for an individual meeting. Knowing what I know, why should I take the time to meet with him/her? On the off chance that the FB information was wrong? Just in case this person is so blown away by the visit to My University that he/she will change plans? Because I should take every opportunity to chat with bright young students? My delicate professorial ego is not bruised by a student's decision to go elsewhere, especially if they weren't going to work with me even if they came here, but I can think of better uses of my time than to meet with an applicant who has already accepted another offer.

But I digress. Regarding writing a diplomatic rejection letter: Keep in mind that, for students, the decision about where to attend graduate school is momentous, but for most faculty with established research programs, the loss of an opportunity to work with any particular student is routine (some students accept their offers, some don't, life goes on), so don't sweat the rejection letter. Just be sincere and professional, and then focus on the exciting things to come in the future.

Fatal Flaw

All this talk of grad school admissions, reasons for rejection, and whether it is possible to be rejected in a good way reminds me of an incident from my academic youth, when I applied to grad schools.

When I first started looking at grad school possibilities, there were two main areas of focus that were both very interesting to me, so I looked at schools that had strengths in one or (ideally) both of these subfields. As my senior year in college progressed, I tilted strongly towards one of these based on a very positive experience I had with a research project that fascinated me. In the end, I went to work with a professor who was the world expert in the particular topic of my undergrad research and was therefore quite happy with the way my grad school search turned out. Before I made that fateful veer, however, I was very interested in another university.

I visited that university and met its Famous Professors and was very impressed with the facilities I toured and the graduate students I met. I assumed that my visit was organized because my application was at least within the acceptable range for admission. I had good grades at a good school, high GRE scores, had some research experience, and presumably had positive letters of recommendation.

Near the end of my visit, I met with one of the most Famous Professors there. He had my application on his desk. He did not waste any time and told me directly that my application was outstanding, with the exception of one little thing, and if it were not for that one little thing, I would likely be accepted. However, because of this one little thing, my application had a flaw in it and was therefore going to be rejected.

The flaw? During a year spent studying abroad at an international university, one of the professors never gave me a grade for one course. All attempts to communicate with that professor were unsuccessful, and I therefore had an incomplete on my record. Fortunately, I had enough credits to graduate without that course, and it was clearly an outlier compared to my overall academic record.

I explained the situation to the Famous Professor, but he said that there were many excellent applicants who did not have a flaw in their record, as I did, and who would also be rejected. So I had no chance whatsoever of being accepted.

I sort of understood, even though I thought it was a stupid reason to reject my application. It didn't matter in the long run, as I got into the graduate program that was the best fit for my research interests.

I was sort of thinking of this incident when I wrote at the end of yesterday's post that we hope our rejected applicants will succeed elsewhere and eventually make us regret not accepting them. I was thinking about it because I sometimes encounter the Famous Professor in my professional life and I am quite sure he has no recollection of our very first meeting. I was just some random undergraduate -- one of thousands -- who applied to that graduate program over the years. And I have never mentioned it to him, not even when that same university approached me about possibly luring me away from my current university and offering me a senior faculty position.

Dear Applicant

Dear Applicant,

All indications are that you will do very well in a graduate program in Science. Your academic record shows that you have worked hard for many years, did well in a range of difficult classes, and acquired the research experience that is essential preparation for graduate studies in Science. Your personal statement was well-written and focused, your grades are excellent, your GRE scores are very high, and it is clear that your reference letter writers are impressed with your intellectual abilities, motivation, and maturity. You have clearly met or exceeded all of our criteria for acceptance to the graduate program in Science at Major Research University.

We regret that we cannot offer you admission to the Department of Science this year.

Why can't we accept you, and all other qualified applicants? We can't owing to factors that have nothing to do with the quality of an applicant's academic record. For example, we have to consider how many graduate students are interested in particular fields of Science relative to the number of faculty in those fields, the number of current advisees these faculty have, and their interest in (and funding level for) advising new grad students. As it turns out, you expressed interest in a field that had the highest number of applicants this year.

In addition, our budget is being slashed and we are no longer able to provide a guaranteed financial safety net for as many students as we used to, in the event that an adviser doesn't have sufficient funding to cover a student's graduate program in its entirety. We are therefore admitting fewer students overall than usual.

To some extent, it is random bad luck that you aren't getting an offer of admission and a few others, with similar excellent records, are. That may make you feel better, or worse, but we wanted you to know that the reason you aren't being offered admission has nothing to do with your academic qualifications.

We have no way of knowing if you were serious about wanting to join our Department or whether this letter is a disappointing blow to you, but either way, we hope you are soon able to launch an interesting and successful career in Science at another university. In fact, we hope that you will do so well that you will make us regret not accepting you into our graduate program.

Sincerely,

The Admissions Committee

Grad Interviews

There have been several requests lately for a post on interviewing at or visiting grad schools as a prospective student, along the lines of my recent series of posts on faculty interviews.

These interviews/visits may vary from field to field, so I hope that readers will contribute additional information, specifying if possible their academic discipline.

My philosophy can be summed up quite simply. During my interaction with visiting students, I try to give a clear picture of the research opportunities and dynamics so that, if admitted, they have information to use when making a decision. Those who express an interest in my research field also meet my grad students.

When I meet with grad candidates, I don't grill them with aggressive questions. I want to see some degree of focus, but the student doesn't have to know exactly what they want to do for their thesis research. I want to be able to have a conversation about the research possibilities in my research group/department/university, and it's nice if the student asks a question now and then so the conversation isn't a monologue.

Many (all?) of the visiting students have or will end up with multiple appealing offers, as they should. For these students, the visit is a mutual checking-out of/by applicant and department.

I think that I have quite flexible parameters when it comes to evaluating a visiting grad student -- i.e., in terms of their personality and level of sophistication -- but I do have some limits. For example, I am not perturbed by shyness, although I am not as accepting of someone who considers "What are your interests?" to be an aggressive question. I am not disappointed by an inability to ask brilliant questions, but I do want to see some evidence of an interest in research. I am happy to talk about something other than science and find out about the outside interests of a student, but I think it unwise for a student to skip out on part of the organized group activities to check out the rec center (for example); I recommend finding another time to gaze at the elliptical machines and trail along on the boring lab or campus tour as scheduled.

Just as with interviews for a faculty position, I advise grad applicants to BE REAL. Give clear and sincere answers to any questions you are asked, ask any questions you want to ask, and take a careful look around and see if you are visiting a place you would really want to be.

****

There was also a request for information on timing of interviews, offers etc. This is going to vary a lot with institution/discipline. Anyone care to comment? I can say that it's likely that, at my institution, the process is going to be more protracted than usual as we deal with economic uncertainties.

Analytical Writing

The GRE contains an "Analytical Writing" section that is supposed to be a good indicator of .. something. But what? This is what I would like to know.

Is the score relevant to how well a student might do with some important aspects of graduate school? I took the GRE long before the advent of the Analytical Writing (AW) component, so I don't have any firsthand experience with it. I've read some of the available materials about what it is and how it is graded, and all of my recent graduate students have taken the AW exam, but I don't really know what the score means, if anything.

From what I've seen, the GRE in general does not predict whether a student will do well in research. This is not news to many (most?) people. The Quantitative score does tend to predict how a student will do in quantitative courses, but that may or may not correspond to whether a student can apply quantitative techniques in research. I've advised students with perfect Q scores and apparently no ability to think about science in a quantitative way or apply quantitative skills to research. I've advised students with lower Q scores who were quite talented at quantitative research applications.

Also based on personal experience advising students, I surmise that the Verbal score seems to indicate something about the complexity of an individual's vocabulary, but doesn't predict anything about reading/writing ability. Maybe that's where the AW exam comes in, but I still don't know what the score really means.

An exam involving writing and text analysis should test some skills that we want a grad student to have, but I have increasingly encountered extremely smart and creative students who write well and have no problem with reading comprehension but who have low AW scores, and students with high AW scores who struggle with writing and synthesizing essential points from what they read.

The conclusion that some smart students take tests well and some don't seems inevitable; this is of course one of the oft-proposed interpretations of student performance on standardized exams that are taken with strict time limits.

I don't think the GRE scores are totally meaningless. I would be very reluctant to admit a grad student with low scores on one or more of the GRE exam components unless the low scores were convincingly different from the rest of the academic record.

I have recently been gazing at applications with AW scores ranging from 3 to 6, and in many cases there seems to be no correlation between the AW score and the rest of the application, even for students for whom English is the first language. I am willing to believe that a 6 (out of 6) means the student is a good writer, just as I am willing to believe that a student with across-the-board good GREs is smart, but then there are all the students with good-but-not-great scores. I have seen no evidence that a student with an AW score of 5 (or even lower) is necessarily less-great at the things supposedly tested by this part of the exam.

In any case, we get these scores as part of grad applications, we stare at them, we try to figure out what they might mean, we consider them in the context of the entire application, and then we make our best guess in the admissions process based on the entire file.

You're the Best

Years ago, a friend of mine had a highly unsuccessful interview for a faculty position. According to the legend, the department chair, who had had the same adviser as the candidate, was upset that their mutual adviser had written in the reference letter that the candidate was the best graduate student he had ever advised. This was humiliating for the not-best professor and he did not support hiring the candidate.

Perhaps I am naive, but I don't believe that the wounded ego of one professor would be enough to sink someone's chances at a job if there weren't other reasons for other faculty to not prefer this particular candidate. The reasons might be good ones or bad ones, but I think there must have been other reasons. I also think in this case that it was true that the candidate was indeed the best graduate student of that adviser; the years since the fateful interview have demonstrated this well.

It's likely that the adviser sent the same letter to every institution to which the candidate applied and did not modify it out of consideration for his former student who was on the faculty at one of these places. Should the adviser have worded the letter in a different way for that particular institution? Or was he was correct to state his frank opinion, which was surely accurate and not a case in which every one of his students was the best?

I was recently thinking about this incident for two reasons:

(1) I have been writing reference letters for graduate students, and I always think about who is likely to read my letter -- anyone I know? anyone my students know? Does it matter in terms of what I write in the letter, or at least how I express my opinions?

and

(2) I just read a reference letter for an undergraduate student applying to graduate school at my institution. We went to the same college and had the same professor for a particular class, albeit many (many) years apart. Although the applicant is not the best student this professor ever taught, she is very close to the best, who is clearly indicated as a recent student (i.e., not me).

I laughed when I read the letter that states (indirectly) that I was not the best student of that professor. For one thing, I knew that. I did well in his course, but I did not excel.

Also, I was responsible for a practical joke that my class played on this professor and that he still seems to remember when I encounter him at conferences. When my friends and I graduated, he told us that he would miss us, but not too much.

His letter for the almost-best applicant was obviously a form letter sent to all departments to which the applicant was applying, but even if it had not been, this wouldn't have mattered in this case. The applicant is impressive and my ego has weathered the blow (this time).

FSP231: INTRO TRANSCR RDG I

Like many of you who are university professors in the US, I have recently been poring over grad applications. These applications typically include various forms containing data of varying usefulness, a cover letter or statement of interest/purpose, the infamous Letters of Reference, and transcripts.

Some years I read only a subset of applications to my department, some years I read every application to my department, and some years I also read applications to other departments at my university. I am fortunate that this year is a subset-of-applications year.

Nevertheless, I've managed to gaze at quite a few applications recently, and the fun will surely continue for a while yet.

Transcripts are interesting to read because you can see a student's evolution of interests. Did they take an intro course in Science their very first term and immediately dive into the major? Did they meander around for a year or so, sampling a wide variety of courses before focusing? To me, it doesn't matter if a student has known since they were 3 that they wanted to be a Scientist or whether they discovered this late in their undergraduate studies; it's just interesting to see the academic trail as indicated by course titles over the years.

In yesterday's post, I mentioned something about the unusual courses that a character in a novel was taking at a large midwestern university. In fact, it is not unusual to see a few strangely titled classes scattered about an undergraduate transcript. Presumably some of these courses were taken to fulfill a graduate requirement or to fill out a course load with a 1-2 credit course that fits a busy schedule and would not be too onerous.

I am not surprised or alarmed to see Aerobics or Yoga or Introduction to Badminton or even INTRO BONSAI on a transcript. I think it is a little strange, though, when there is an actual grade for this type of course. Many universities evaluate this type of course as pass/fail or satisfactory/not-satisfactory; I suppose at others the students can choose whether to get a grade or a pass/fail score.

What does it mean if a student gets a C in Kundalini Yoga or Intermediate Ping Pong or Self-Awareness? They are not flexible, have poor hand-eye coordination, and/or are oblivious? More likely, the student put little time or effort into a low-credit course that was just an additional thing they had to do. Even so, I personally would have taken Building Self-Esteem as a pass/fail course so that I didn't have to feel bad about getting a B or a C. It would be devastating to fail a self-esteem course.

I prefer transcripts that have the entire course name typed out or that use only unambiguous abbreviations: ADV INT IND LIT INTRO PRINC LIN ALG DIFF EQ ENV MOD EUR. Some less ambiguous abbreviations can be figured out from context or from the course designation; i.e., whether COMP is Computer or Composition or Composers, or whether DIG is Digital or Digestive.

The strangest abbreviations tend to be for specialized seminars or upper level courses with technical names. For example: CONC FUND MAGN. Surely it is Concentrated Fundamentals of Magnesium. Or Magnolias..? Or something.

And what about this?: RESI PHYS. Residues of Physics? Residences of Physicians? Resilient Physiognomy?

It doesn't really matter. The names of the essential courses (for the grad app) are typically unambiguous, and if there are some unusual specialized courses or seminars that are relevant, the applicant or reference letter writers typically highlight them in their prose. The strange course names provide a bit of entertainment to a transcript-reader, as I hope the course itself did to the student when they took it.

You Choose

This is another example in the continuing saga of Choosing Excellent Grad Students. Of course, prospective grad students go through a similar guessing game when trying to choose an excellent adviser. On both sides of the experience there are people who are wondering:

Is there a foolproof way to tell in advance who will be a good [student/adviser]?

The answer, at least for me, has always been no, but choose we must, using the few clues with which we are provided. For some advisers and students, these clues start with an e-mail.

This leads to the perpetual questions: How much should potential advisers read into these e-mails, some/many of which display a level of cluelessness that is both understandable and alarming? How much should applicants read into the response/lack of response of a potential adviser?

EXAMPLE: Let's assume that e-mail content may be a significant indicator of the work habits of a student. Which of these students would you accept if you had to choose only one of them?

Student 1's e-mail to a potential adviser contains the following:

If you have papers that you could send to me, I would like to read them to get a sense for what you have been working on.

Student 2's e-mail to a potential adviser contains the following:

I recently read your papers on X and Y and think that I would be very interested in pursuing research related to these topics because [succinct explanation].

If I were in a nice, generous mood, as happens from time to time, I would assume that Student 1 is trying to show me that he/she is interested in my work and is trying to display initiative by expressing a willingness to read my papers. I would factor in the possibility of inadequate advising or inexperience in online search techniques and journal article acquisition. I might also assume that Student 1 doesn't have online access to the relevant journals (perhaps he/she has already graduated) and didn't think that was relevant information to provide. Some of these correspondents use their gmail or whatever addresses even if they are students, so the lack of an edu email address is not particularly meaningful. I may know that their gmail name is angelkissyboo or lemurhead, but I may not know their current academic/employment status (but that's another topic).

Yes, I know that some readers identify with the clueless and are cynical and suspicious of the clued-in. What if Student 2 is merely an obsequious politically-astute operator who is trying to impress me by writing what he/she knows I want to hear and Student 1 is a sincere-but-naive person who, with the right nurturing, will blossom into a creative and productive graduate student?

That may well be, but Student 2 took the initiative to read some journal articles and Student 1 is asking me to do things for him/her. If you had to choose only one of these two students (a not entirely realistic scenario) and had no information other than these email messages and what is typically in an application file (a somewhat realistic scenario), would you choose Student 1 or Student 2?

If both have excellent academic records, they will both have opportunities for graduate research, so I am not talking about giving one a chance and destroying the other's hopes and dreams. I am, however, using this real-life example to highlight the fact that we as advisers have to make choices based on limited and/or flawed information. So what do we do?

If I really had no other information on which to base my decision, even knowing (from experience) that either of these students could be an excellent or dismal student for all I know and can predict, I would choose Student 2.