Resident Graduate Admissions FAQs

I have a question that wasn’t covered in the seminar. Where can I go?

Check out https://www.geog.psu.edu/graduate or reach out to our graduate student administrator, MacKenzie at grad@geog.psu.edu

Is there any advantage to submitting the application prior to December 1?

No. We evaluate all applications after the deadline. If you think your letter writers might need a lot of time to submit your letters of support, submitting earlier might help give them more time

I am interested in the 5 year MS + PhD program, but when I click apply I only see the option to choose between the MS and PhD. What should I do?

We’re sorry about this confusion. Choose the PhD for the initial option. Then later on you will get to the geog specific page where there is an option to choose the 5 year program.

Are there application fee waivers? How does it work?

We’re sorry you have to pay a fee at all. Unfortunately Penn State sets the fees and we can’t afford to waive everyone’s. We have a limited number of fee waivers. Each geography faculty member is only allowed to request ONE fee waiver on behalf of a single student each year. So you can ask any faculty you have had a conversation with if they can put in a request for you. Unfortunately you can not request a fee waiver yourself.

Is the GRE is required for international applicants for masters and PhD?

No, this requirement has been removed by the graduate school for any student. You do not need the GRE to apply whether you are international or resident. You can see the full list of international requirements here: https://gradschool.psu.edu/admissions/prepare-to-apply and here https://gradschool.psu.edu/graduate-edu

What is your typical cohort size & tenure?

Historically this has ranged anywhere from 6 - 12 students. The time to get your degree (tenure) varies — but it is typically 2-2.5 years for masters students and 4-6 years for PhD students. As a guide, all PhD only students are funded for 4 years

I’m excited about all the human geographers I could work with. But if I come from a social science background, will I be able to keep up with the technical data analysis and the software that would be required during the research?

It depends on your individual profile, but we do have a lot of scholars and students that are very much on the qualitative side. So you will still have to do some technical data analysis as part of your classes and studies. But know that we often accept qualitative geographers/sociologists who are newer to technical research or have no programming background.

Does every professor take on students every year?

No. As a department we pool our money to centrally fund all students (see funding below) and we normally only afford to fund 6-12 students per year. We have many more faculty than that, so pre-tenure professors (assistant profs) or those with less recent students are often prioritized. Equally there are many years when a professor doesn’t wish to take on a new student. To see who is actively recruiting this year and their topics of interest, see here https://www.geog.psu.edu/graduate/recruitment

How do I find out which of your professors have an interest in topic X

Finding out which supervisors are a good fit is part of the process we ask you to complete. WIth that in mind, here are two ways to search for information on your question. Let’s say you were looking for professors with an interest in coastal research.

1. Go to google and search coastal site:www.psu.edu/https://www.geog.psu.edu/ This will find any result from our website with your keyword(s) of choice. That can then help you narrow down who is working on different topics.

2. Here is the list of professors who are interested in recruiting this year and the topics they care about. You could see if coastlines are mentioned by anyone https://www.geog.psu.edu/graduate/recruitment

Should I email potential professors?

It does help to contact faculty and potential advisors before applying. Even if you have one person you really want to work with, I would still suggest contacting other people who have interests that may be at least tangential, if not aligned with yours. . You may need to send another email, that's okay - and you can still apply and be successful without reaching out (see next question) But do try to get in touch with faculty, or at least reach out to them.

What should that email look like?

Short and tailored.

We don't have time to read 5 paragraphs, in one email, so, we really advise you to send short, succinct emails. It’s your first time you can show us what it would be like to work with you.

On what topic?

We want to know that you are interested, that you already know a little about our research and WHY doing similar research at Penn State is interesting to you, and, that's really all we need to know from the email. Using one of our interest bullets is a great place to start https://www.geog.psu.edu/graduate/recruitment

You could also consider attaching your resume, but know this isn’t your application and you don’t need to prove your worth.

Don’t use AI to do anything other than check your spelling and grammar.

We can tell because AI doesn’t know you and it won’t sound like you (we all know what ChatGPT-speak sounds like!). It means your email becomes indistinguishable from generic statements of interest that are now being sent to thousands of professors by bots.

For example, one professor recently said “We have so many highly tailored emails that its not as urgent for us to reply to emails that are generic and that maybe cite papers we didn't actually write, which I have gotten a few of this year..."

I e-mailed one or more of your professor(s) and didn’t receive a response, or they sent an “out of office”. Without confirmation from a potential advisor, is it worth applying?

Yes! Absolutely. Many of our faculty might receive hundreds of emails from potential students a year, so we know that they might not have the bandwidth to reply to everyone. As your application is reviewed, faculty often go back to those initial emails, so they are still valuable even then. So please don’t take a lack of reply personally, but also it does give you some sense of their advising style.

IMPORTANT,

In the application process you will be asked to select three faculty members you wish to work with. So if one of your chosen professors doesn’t reply to you, you are still welcome to apply and still select their name as one of your three. 

For all applicants, but especially in this case, please make a strong case in your statement why you would fit well with their research, AND how your work fits with your other selected faculty members. (Most successful students will have a topic that matches the interests ofmore than one faculty member.)

I emailed a Professor and got a reply that they are not in a position where I can commit to taking on new students at this time. Should I mention this Professor as a potential advisor?

If they’re not accepting students this year, then they won’t be your main advisor. They might be able to later support you by sitting on your monitoring committee, but I wouldn't angle your whole application around them. INSTEAD, In your application materials you are allowed to select three faculty of interest to work with. Select your sabbatical person as one of those. Then I would make sure that your application was tailored mostly to a different professor who is accepting students, but talk about how your interests align with the person on sabbatical. This helps us see how you fit into the department as a whole. Most successful applicants have a topic that interests several faculty members.

Once accepted for admission, does one automatically qualify for funding from the department? Is every student fully funded? To confirm, we fully fund every student we admit, including international students for the following time periods.

For the masters If accepted you will be fully funded for 2 years.

For the PhD If accepted you will be fully funded for 4 years.

For the MS+PHD program, we fund for 5 years,

We also try hard to financially support students who still haven’t submitted their thesis by the end of their funding period, but this is not guaranteed. So yes! One reason why we can’t accept large numbers of students is that we commit to funding those who are admitted. In return, our students are expected to work as research assistants or teaching assistants if they don’t have a scholarship of their own. The only downside to this is that this makes our program very competitive and we have many more people applying than we can accept.

Do you accept students that can fully fund themselves? For example students supported by their employer or national government has a scholarship and is willing guarantee funding.

This counts as a special case so please reach out to the professor(s) you were hoping to work with or grad@geog.psu.edu . We happily accept students who self-fund. BUT with the caveat that those applicants still need to meet the same standard of entry requirements & timelines we ask of any other student, and that their chosen faculty member has the bandwidth to fully support them.

How does funding work?

We offer most of our students financial support via teaching and research assistantships. They typically include a stipend, tuition remission, and a subsidy for medical insurance. In exchange you would work for 20hrs a week working as a teaching assistant (or later on as a lecturer or record), or as a general assistant. Sometimes your advisor may have research, funding and can give you a research assistantship, and so then you would do 20 hours a week of research for your advisor. 

We also enter every applicant into a pool to receive full university funding from scholarships (highly competitive).

If you are accepted we encourage you to find additional funding of your own

https://www.ems.psu.edu/graduate/admissions-and-aid/assistantships-awar…

Let's Talk

If you have questions about applying to our graduate programs, please contact us at grad@geog.psu.edu or give us a call at 814-865-3434.