Recruitment

This past weekend was the first of two big recruitment weekends that the Chemistry department has in the Spring.  Recruitment weekends are one of the handful of nice things about graduate school in the sciences.  While if you are applying to graduate school in something... not science you may apply to schools and then have to fly yourself out there to see what the school is like, in Chemistry (and I am assuming other sciences do this as well) if you get in they will fly you out for a recruitment weekend.

With recruitment weekends they really try to give you a feel for what life there is like in a period of a couple of days.  They also really try hard to get you to want to come here for grad school.  My university has one excellent selling point about it: in February (when the first recruitment weekend happens) you can wear a t-shirt and flip flops if you so choose.  Many prospectives are coming from the midwest or pretty much anywhere else, where the cold, miserable weather is not close to stopping.  Flying in here and seeing the sun shining is a major plus.  We usually send the prospective students out for a hike to really show them how excellent our weather and location really is.

While recruits get to go on adventures around town and have parties thrown for them, its also a really mentally draining experience.  Your first full day in town you go on tours around the facilities and then you go to a poster session where you talk with graduate students and PIs about their research.  From this poster session you are expected to pick out 6-ish faculty that you want to interview with.  You get to start your 2nd full day  with those interviews.  It is a pretty fast paced visit, you do a lot of stuff, and by the end of it all you just hope that you can finish your homework that may or may not be due the Monday after your crazy graduate school visit adventure.  Oh yeah, and you also hope that you make the right decision on what you do for the next chunk of your life.

It's really fun to be a part of recruitment weekends now as a graduate student, and it is hard to think that I was one of those wide-eyed, fresh faced students wandering around asking, "What is a good question to ask in my interviews?"  It is important to give them a good but real impression of the place that they will potentially be spending the next 5 or more years working on their PhDs, and it is also important to get an idea of who will be showing up the next August in the new group of first years.  I just wonder what sort of impression I made as a recruit, and what sort of impression I make now on the other end of that interaction.