I’ve emailed everyone on my list of potential graduate advisors.  Most of them aren’t taking graduate students next fall, so I’m casting my net a bit further.  One of the things that makes the search much more difficult is that many of the universities have really awful websites – at least from the perspective of prospective graduate students.

Here are a few rules I wished graduate programs and universities followed on their websites:

• If you have a list of faculty associated with a certain program or department, include links to faculty information on that list.  Otherwise I have to use your (usually god-awful) search function to find out more about that professor.
• On your professor websites, include more than contact information.  I want to know what their research interests are and what they’ve published recently.
• Make your deadlines really clear. If your program has a deadline that’s different from the department or university deadlines, that should be clear, too.  Normal font buried in paragraph 5 is not really clear.
• If you have a website for your lab, update it at least once a year. You say you aren’t taking graduate students, but I’m guessing from the most recent date on your publication list and the blinking text that you haven’t updated this site in awhile.

Anyone else who’s gone through this process have anything to add to the list (apart from xkcd’s obvious, but generally ignored, wishlist)?

Also, sending emails to advisors requires cute, confidence inspiring dresses, like so: