Graduate Admission Essays: Write Your Way Into the Graduate School of Your Choice by Donald Asher, offers 50 sample essays, showcasing the best and worst of graduate school essays, to provide you with practical suggestions for getting into the program you want to attend. The book also includes sample letters of recommendation, scholarship essays, and more.

Graduate Survival Guide by Michael Bergman, provides practical advice from a “real world” perspective on how to transition to and survive graduate school.

When you purchase items from Amazon.com through this link, you help give back to KDP. Amazon donates up to 8 percent of sales revenue for the KDP Foundation, which funds scholarships and grants.

Peer Mentoring
Once you have chosen a graduate program, reaching out to a graduate student who is a year or two ahead of you in the program can reap large benefits. Members of KDP’s Graduate Student National Committee note that a peer’s perspective and insights about qualifying exam presentations, dissertation proposals, and other requirements went a long way to support, encourage, and guide them through their own process, whether it was for a master’s or doctoral degree. Graduate “in the trenches” mentoring helps prepare you for the types of questions you may be asked when defending your dissertation, provide tips for moving through the process and avoiding procrastination, and other ‘insider’ information that can reduce the anxiety of stressful situations.

Older students also have a handle on the graduate assistant positions that are opening up, because they know who is graduating, getting married, and starting a new job. These inside-track colleagues also know about graduate-assistant funding and openings– often before the faculty.