a thaumaturgical compendium

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Our seven-year-old guest was literally on the edge of his seat, watching The Princess Bride for the first time, and seeing Inigo Montoya fulfill his lifelong pursuit to avenge the death of his father at the hyperdactyl hand of Count Rugen.

“This is an excellent scene,” our young guest said precociously.

When we considered movies we had on hand that were PG-rated–his requirement–we came up with two, this one and Flushed Away. Afterward, he said both were good, but he much preferred Princess Bride; why? “Obviously, more chaos.” Was a bit puzzled by this, but his mom let us know that “obviously” and “chaos” were two of his favorite words lately.

Watching Princess Bride with a kid makes you recognize that it has some messages that were common in films of the period that were intended for younger audiences, but not so common today. While the arch villain is left by the hero to live with his own infamy, Montoya seems in many ways to be more heroic in his quest and in its completion. The theme–call it Count of Monte Cristo light–seems largely absent from youth literature today, and perhaps even to my own surprise, I find that unfortunate.

There is something in Montoya’s righteous indignation, his passion for justice, his sense of honor, that is comforting and wholesome. The idea that vengeance is always wrong, an idea that runs through much of modern Christianity, seems misplaced to me, just as misplaced as assuming that revenge is always just. French moralist Joseph Joubert wrote, “Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.” (He also wrote “Children have more need of models than of critics.”) The standard escape these days–played so often as to be a cliché–is that the hero captures the villain and allows him to live, only dispatching him when the villain makes a last effort to kill the hero when his back is turned. This is present somewhat in Princess Bride I suppose; If Montoya was not seemingly mortally wounded early in the scene, I’m not sure it would play as just.

I realize that there is something in my core personality that sympathizes with Montoya, and I suspect this was installed in me at about my guest’s age. Seven is traditionally referred to as the “age of reason” among Catholics, when people start becoming responsible for the morality of their actions. Seven is also a pivotal age for many developmental psychologists; Piaget marks this as the onset of “concrete operational thinking” and the close of egocentric thought.

It seems somehow retrograde and old-testament, these ideas of vengeance and honor. But I’ve always liked those imperfect characters who nonetheless were honorable in their own way. I’ll take Montoya over Wesley, Solo over Skywalker, Batman over Superman. I am pleased, therefore, that a pervading sense of the avenger is present in the first book I am reading to my unborn son, Cory Doctorow’s new Little Brother. We are going through it slowly, a few chapters a week, and of course I like the way it introduces a hackerish ethics to issues of surveillance, but I also like its revival of the vow of retribution. No spoilers please–I hope Doctorow does not cave to more recent sensibilities, and dampen the release (or noble tragedy) of retribution.

This is awesome: redeeming not only (as Boing Gadgets notes) Feist from repetitive iPod commercials, but Sesame Street from small red monsters that start with the letter E.

I haven’t blogged about the ongoing saga of the Quinnipiac Chronicle, our student paper, which is facing administrative censorship. An editorial printed in the paper lays out the problems: efforts to constrain the way the paper represents the university and its policies. The president doesn’t like how his position has been portrayed in the paper, and the editor has been told it is not appropriate for him to criticize Quinnipiac policy, even when such policy hinders the way in which the newspaper operates. There are other issues, and like any sort of conflict, it’s a lot more gray than black-and-white. What is clear is that the university administration has taken a position that is regressive, and that hurts our reputation as a School of Communication, and, of course, our reputation as a university.

Tin Foil Hat

I have a pet theory. The president of the university, John Lahey, is nothing if not public relations-savvy. What is the guaranteed way of getting publicity for your campus newspaper? Threaten to shut it down, let things stew for a while, then make a firm statement that clearly endorses the autonomy of the newspaper. Think of this as a kind of “Pentagon Papers” for our own little newspaper. In a year the Chronicle may be seen as a beacon of student activist journalism, simultaneously propelling our journalism program to national prominence and dispelling the idea that the Quinnipiac campus is particularly apathetic.

It’s almost a given. If you want publicity, threaten the editor of the university paper when he criticizes an administrative policy. Even better, make sure that the president is directly involved. This is like sending an email to journalists saying “free hooks.” And at least a few of those journalists have bitten. An article appeared last Sunday in the New York Times detailing the conflict, and another article appeared earlier this week in Inside Higher Ed.

On the Other Hand?

On first blush, it looks like there is little to prop up the administration’s position. They offer two issues. The first is that they claim that things have been misquoted or taken out of context in Chronicle articles. This is almost certainly the case: after all, newspapers always fail at incorporating what everyone would like to see in the paper. Newspapers cannot please all of the people all of the time.

However, I am particularly cognizant of this criticism because of an exchange that occurred on this blog. I noted a quote in the Chronicle that seemed odd, and the person quoted argued that she never said what the paper said she said, or that if she did it was taken out of context. She complained to the paper, and the automatic response in these cases–the ethical response–is at the very least to make clear to the readership that the quoted individual disputed the article’s quotation. When I read a response on this blog that suggested that the paper was unwilling to do this, it raised serious flags for me: journalistic ethics require that reporters and editors are sensitive and responsive to their audiences and their sources. I think this is something that the paper should take seriously, and review their procedures for handling complaints about quotes and either publishing retractions or letters from sources contesting the quotation.

The second issue, which comes in a letter from the administration to faculty that I will not quote, suggests that there is an issue of legal liability: if the newspaper publishes content that is libelous, or that reveals protected information about the student (presumably issues protected by FERPA), the university could be held liable. I won’t hold them to this argument, since it seems not only misguided, but potentially damaging. If they are suggesting that by publishing the paper they are editorially responsible for it, I think they are setting them up for a fall down the road. It is almost inevitable that a media outlet will at least be *threatened* with lawsuit at some point. Even this lowly blog has received such threats from more than one corner. Does the administration really want it on record that they think they have an oversight role in determining content in the paper? If they assert such a role now, it will lead to a lot of back-peddling if and when the paper is sued and the administration tries to wash its hands of culpability.

In the end, what needs to happen is a clear statement from the administration that they have no interest or desire in acting as a censor for the newspaper. That is a vital first step. The second issue–whether university officials are allowed to speak to student journalists directly–is important to the quality of the education QU students receive, but if the administration chooses not to speak to the press, internal or external, there isn’t much that can be done about it. In some ways, the worst possible public relations is limiting your relations with the public. As the university seeks to become better known nationally and internationally, it needs to abandon parochial views and embrace a role that is very much in the public eye.

All of this comes back to an instigating issue. A number of racial epithets were scrawled on the doors of black students’ dorm rooms and elsewhere on campus. In some sick way, this makes Quinnipiac quite a bit like some other major campuses, where racial insensitivity is rising. Unfortunately, it represented yet another black eye for Quinnipiac, in part because of a (correct) impression that it is not particularly diverse. Quinnipiac ranks among the “top” ten whitest law schools in the US, and despite some interesting efforts, many of the students are strikingly unaware of the world outside of this little slice of the eastern seaboard, or outside of their own neighborhoods. It is important that the president not sweep racism under the carpet; like many social ills, it racism breeds best when kept under wraps, quiet, and unchecked. Many students on campus reacted against the racial incidents that occurred, and it is important to reflect the tolerance of our community proudly. We need to demonstrate our beliefs publicly, and conversations with our president should be equally open and public.

What Doesn’t Kill Us

As I said, I am hopeful that good can come out of this incident. As one commentator has noted, this act has energized otherwise placid students at Quinnipiac. She notes this rather ominous YouTube posting, suggesting that there is an undercurrent of activism on campus:

If there is such an undercurrent, it is well hidden. Many of the differences between this campus newspaper and that at the The Daily at the University of Washington are night and day, in part because the latter has successfully navigated efforts at censorship. It’s about page proudly trumpets its independence:

The Daily is the independent student newspaper for the University of Washington. The Daily is produced exclusively by students, with the exception of four non-student UW staff members who provide fiscal and administrative assistance. Any UW student may work for The Daily and will be paid for their work.

All content and advertising is approved by student staff members with no interference by UW staff or administration for an uncensored press. No non-student staff members review editorial content before publication.

A nine-member Board of Student Publications oversees the newspaper, reviews finances, resolves disputes and selects the editor and advertising manager. The board is comprised of representatives from UW administration, the Faculty Senate, the Department of Communication, ASUW, GPSS, a professional publication and The Daily newsroom.

The Daily began as the Pacific Wave in 1891. It became The Daily in 1909 when the paper began publishing five days a week. The Monday edition of the paper was dropped in 1933 during The Great Depression. The Monday publication resumed in 1985 and has run on schedule ever since.

The uncensored approach to student journalism has been controversial at times, but the First Amendment and Supreme Court decisions guarantee this right for students at the University of Washington.

Former UW Communications professor, Don Pember, stated “While freedom of expression has been considered a basic right for the press in this country for nearly 200 years, this right was not articulated for college and high school newspapers until quite recently. Until the 1960s, college and high school journalists enjoyed about as much freedom of expression as the newspaper’s advisor, the high school principal or the college dean was willing to allow.”

In the 1967 Supreme Court decision Dickey vs. Alabama, it was ruled “censorship of school papers is allowed only when the exercise of freedom of speech interferes materially and substantially with the requirement of appropriate discipline and order in the school.”

It remains as the law today.

UW faculty, staff and students can be proud that this university was a pioneer in clarifying the freedom of student press and that University presidents have defended that Constitutional freedom ever since.

The Daily won the Apple Award at the 2006 College Media Adviser Spring Convention in New York City for the best overall four-year college tabloid-sized newspaper in the nation.

Obviously, The Daily has about a century of a head start on the Quinnipiac Chronicle, but I hope that the current efforts to curtail its freedom act as a kind of annealing process, giving student media on campus a more common set of values and objectives.

OK, this is just too cool. Sharkrunners is a game set up by the Discovery Channel for people to learn more about sharks. Human players take on the role of captains of virtual research ships, tooling around coastal waters looking to collect data on sharks. The sharks are controlled by–sharks! Yeah, the wii controller is so yesterday, so species-centric. Sharks have been tagged with GPS devices and control their position in the game by, you know, swimming around the ocean. The game is played in persistent real-time, with updates sent to you via email or SMS. (via infoaesth)

Alan Watts, who finished grad school, has the right idea here.

[I just found this in cleaning out my system. People were reading my unfinished posts--can't find anything on the ! bug in wordpress. So I cleaned them out. I wrote this on November 15, 2004, but obviously I didn't finish :). Rather than trash it, I publish. ]

More of the Same

As with every new system or innovation encountered on “the internets,” a common claim about blogging is “it’s all been done before.” I kept a blog before they were called blogs: a frequently updated website, an email newsletter, a periodically downloadable file on “the Source,” an early ISP. And before that there was Plato. Isn’t blogging just BBS software / forums in new bottles? How is the blogosphere substantially different from Usenet? These questions are both inevitable and valid. Too often we thrill to the idea of the latest incarnation of the “virtual community,” and are quite willfully able to forget the hyperbole surrounding earlier technologies. And it is difficult not to recognize the kind of buzz around blogging as similar to these earlier collaborative technologies.

I think blogging has a simple answer to this: none of these other technologies captured the public imagination in the same way that blogging has, nor the same number of users. Sure, there are more who use email, brows the web, or communicate via IM, but these are not really the same special type of large-scale discussion technologies that blogs embody. I think that when future historians look back at the earliest years of this century, two of the things that will show up in the history books will be the mass adoption of blogs and wikipedia. I don’t think that these are the most important innovations of the last few years, but I do think that they will have some of the most important social impact. So part of the answer to that question is simply one of size. Usenet, even at its peak, did not (I believe) have a million people writing, and ten times that reading. We don’t have to fall back on hyperbole: if the story of blogging ended today and no one ever blogged again — and I although I don’t think we’ve seen the peak of public blogging, I would not be shocked if this were the case — we would still have to acknowledge this as one of the most widespread examples of user-produced media, and something worth understanding.

But really what people are suggesting when they say this is that the principles that we have already discovered in earlier examples of computer mediated communication are just being repeated in another form in blogs. One answer to that is “yes, but to a greater degree.” That is, there are more people doing it, as argued above. Or, the impediments to presenting to the web have been reduced further, so that creating and maintaining a web page is even easier than it has been in the past, and has been reduced to some critical level at which there are compounding returns. But this “more” change is not something that should be dismissed out of hand. On the other hand, there are some elements of the blogosphere that I think are, if not unique, especially important. Some of these are reflected in the neologisms and specialized services that have arisen to support blogging.

New words for new ways

One of the ways to identify what makes weblogs special is by noting some of the specialized jargon that has grown up around blogging. Unfortunately the proliferation of these terms have made entry into blogging more daunting in some ways. But they also indicate new ideas or techniques that need to be named because they don’t fit well into previous paradigms. Among these:

Trackbacks, pingbacks, reciprolinks, blogrolls.

RSS, aggregators.

del.icio.us, technorati, blogdex, furl.

The blogging factors

What, then, are the salient differences, the principle components of blogging, that we should be concerned with?

Ridiculously easy publishing.

Forging public voices.

Conviviality, conversation, deliberation?

Planned serendipity. While improving the ability to search is an important need on the web, improving our ability to stumble usefully is also important.

The return of a workable push media: now with more mods.

Convergence of exchanged data, personal server. Todo: Onfolio

Ubiquitous media.

Future

No one is good at predicting the future of communication technology; there are just too many variables. That said, a prediction of the future state of technology is really just another way of saying that you have a good feel for what is important in today’s technology. Neal Stephenson claimed that books like Snow Crash were intentionally placed in the now. The degree to which they seem to be prophetic is directly related to how well they discern the contours of the present. So the future of blogging is “more of the same” where “the same” refers to those elements of blogging that are important or unusual. If the list above is correct, we can expect innovations to continue to develop along the lines they already have.

The barriers to entry, and complexity of the process of blogging will be reduced. I suspect we will see WYSIWYG blogging software within the next year, at the outside. When you want to add or edit a message, you click on it and start typing. The RSS of anything that might ever change is already providing a way of quickly making semantic connections that allow for other kinds of rapid updates, and I suspect that this will continue. We are all blogging with kludges for blog software at the moment, and many of the ways that this needs to improve are already clear.

There will continue to be a place for small and large public voices, but I suspect we will see some serious changes in the way some organizations do business, such that they can make use of the transparency that blogging provides. This will have a real effect on how we think about privacy and how we think about who we are. The transparent and networked nature of our public identities is, I believe, reversing some of the the century-long opinions about the nature of personal identity/psyche and the networked (or urban) society. It was assumed that we would increasingly become divided into multiple selves in service to a number of non-overlapping groups. Unlike in the traditional village, the people we work and play with often do not know each other, and they each know a different form of “you.” This leads to something that appears to be akin to multiple personalities, and the purposive construction of new identities for different kinds of interactions. But the transparency that blogging seems to encourage may mean a reversal, or at the very least a complication, of this process. The identity that appears in my blog is one that looks the same to my wife, my students, my doctor, my boss, my mother, and my colleagues around the world. Maintaining any multiple identities I might have becomes far more difficult with my social circles become enmeshed together.

We can at least hope that those newly public voices will also lead to new kinds of discussion, deliberation, and conviviality. I must admit that I am particularly suspicious of this. I suspect that very little gets done in blogs, and that there is not a good framework for distributed conversations. This may change, but at present, the kinds of conversations that occur on blogs feel somehow asymmetric. I have talked about this before, on this blog and in conversations: many bloggers are the inverse of lurkers: they are “mumblers.” Lurkers read without revealing themselves to the authors. Mumblers write without knowing if there is an audience. Mumbling is good for public discourse, I think, but it may not be as good for discussion and deliberation.

While they may not host collaborations, they might enable them. The discussions that do occur on blogs tend to be a little like the pheromone trails that ants leave. Those trails may not, in themselves, represent any form of useful structure. However, they form the support infrastructure that allows for large-scale collaboration. By providing some form of transparent “contrail” on the web of your work, your interests, your ideas, your social networks, you allow for the intersection of such paths. As a bunch of ants wandering around exploring the intellectual space of our world, the likelihood that our trajectories will ever lead to a useful collision is relatively small. But this increases many-fold when we leave behind bread crumbs for others to stubble upon.

I think people are coming to understand this process of encountering trails. You see this a bit in investigations of knowledge management in the real world. More and more, people are abandoning the idea that you can download expertise into a system. If you could do that (and you can’t), you wouldn’t really need the people in an organization. Instead, you need to build tools that enhance the process of leaving a trail, so that when people don’t know what they are looking for, they know who does.

So, it’s that time of the year again, and so the inevitable question comes from a few graduate students: Where’s a good place to get a communication Ph.D.?

Well, first of all, that’s probably the wrong question. The right question is: “Should I pursue a Ph.D.?” and the answer I will always give is “no.”

Should I go for a Ph.D.?

No. There are lots of good reasons not to pursue the doctoral degree:

1. People really won’t respect you more. Some folks actually do pursue a Ph.D. with the thought that they can then be called “Dr. X” (OK, maybe not Dr. X. Heck, it would be worth it if you could be called “Dr. X.” I mean they want “Dr.” in front of their own name.) I’ve talked to these people, and don’t understand it. There’s no special power a Ph.D. grants–it doesn’t certify you for much of anything, with the below exception. In other words, if you are doing the Ph.D. because you want the prestige, it’s really not worth the effort. Besides, this is America! No titles, remember? If you want the Dr., just use it; or, as a co-worker did, Senator.

2. You won’t make more money. At least not with a communication degree–it may be different with an engineering degree, for example. Someone is now sure to come up with a statistic that says that you make an extra million dollars in your lifetime with a Ph.D., but (a) it’s false causation and (b) you’ll spend that on therapists and paying off debts.

3. You’re really good at coursework, and so you think it’s the natural next step. Generally, it’s not. Particularly if you are in a program that is designed as a “terminal degree,” like the Informatics program at UB, or our MS program at Quinnipiac, you probably are not very well prepared to pursue the Ph.D. People have successfully moved on, but it isn’t a smooth transition. If you gain admittance, you’ll probably be scrambling to catch up with students who have been on the research path during their masters programs. Moreover, although there is generally coursework at the doctoral level in US institutions, it isn’t the major part of the work of the degree. The Ph.D. is always a research degree–you are expected to come in and be an apprentice researcher fairly quickly, on top of your required coursework.

4. You want to be a college instructor, and you think this is where you learn to do it. I was actually lucky in that my program did talk a little bit about teaching, but that is certainly not the focus of a Ph.D. program anywhere; except, of course, in education programs. If you aren’t ready to teach after finishing your masters degree, that isn’t going to change by the end of the Ph.D. You should already be a master of your field when you have the masters degree in hand, the doctorate means that you have made a significant contribution to that field. Many doctoral programs graduate excellent researchers who would be horrible if unleashed on an undergraduate class.

Now, it’s true: it is increasingly the case that colleges and universities will only consider Ph.D.s for their teaching positions. But the problem is two-fold. First, if you are really primarily interested in teaching, you are going to be very frustrated spending 18 hours a day doing research for several years. As a result, you probably won’t be very good at it. Second, as noted below, you probably won’t be able to get a teaching job after all that anyway.

Dirty Ph.D. Program Secrets!

Still not convinced? OK, the two dirty secrets of doctoral education:

1. Many people don’t finish. It’s bad enough that you are going to be alienating your family, and going into debt (and this is assuming that you aren’t paying tuition, but just for living, etc.), you may end up not finishing. The lucky people drop out in the first year. Many get through the coursework, only to be unable to complete general exams. A much larger number get through any required coursework and exams, but find themselves unable to complete the dissertation. If you don’t think you can write a 300 page book now, don’t expect that is going to magically change by the end of your program. There is a reason my university sent out “Ph.C.” (candidate) diplomas. A lot of people end up stuck indefinitely on the dissertation, and in at least some cases, this isn’t even their fault. Sometimes departmental politics or shifts in the field make completing a dissertation in your area impossible.

2. Of those who get the degree, only a small fraction actually get a job teaching in a college or university. An even smaller number end up teaching at an institution as good as the one they attended. Now, you may not want to do this, and you have another target, which is fine. If you do want to teach, you should definitely have a strong “plan B.” Oh, and when I say teach, I mean anywhere. I have colleagues who are brighter and more accomplished than I am who are either unemployed or who are teaching under conditions they hate. A large number of doctorate-holding individuals are stuck in the perpetual hell of adjunct work, hoping one day to “make their break.” Just read through the archives of Invisible Adjunct to get a feel.

You have self-confidence, or you wouldn’t be even considering this. But be realistic about that self-confidence–it takes a lot to make even a minor splash. I know that the JD and MBA people will eat me alive for saying this, but there is usually some clear path out of the top programs for law, business, and medicine. Unless you are at the bottom of your class, you’re likely to get some job in your profession. The truth that schools won’t tell you is that even among the most elite programs, a tenure-track position is far from guaranteed. The majority of graduates go into something else. You would be surprised how many movers and baristas hold doctorates from top universities.

Not Dead Yet!

So, still here? Is there a good reason to pursue a doctorate? Yes, I think–and this is just my own opinion–that there are two good reasons. First, you love to do research. You aren’t just a curious person–everyone says they are a curious person–you live on curiosity and Top Ramen. You do not care particularly about being rich, but you want to be challenged every day. You are passionate about learning and helping others to learn. You will need that passion to sustain yourself through the idiocy, politics, and bureaucracy of the typical doctoral program. Doctoral programs virtually guarantee stress beyond what you have experienced before, which accounts for the strange bestiary that is the typical university faculty.

Second, you like spending most of your life around people who are smarter and more driven than you are. If you are used to being the smartest person in the room, get over it. (Contrariwise, if you think everyone who pursues a Ph.D. is brilliant, be prepared to be disabused of that notion. Many of the brightest people said “screw this” several paragraphs ago and are signing up for the GMAT/LSAT/MCAT as you are reading.) That was really important for me, because I am naturally both lazy and competitive. If there aren’t people around me doing really interesting stuff, I am less likely to be doing so. There was something really exciting to me about being in a room with people who were likely to change the world, and hoping that I could too.

Finding a program

So, now that you are sold on the idea of a doctorate, where’s the best place to go for one in communication? There isn’t a single answer to that question. As you will find, if you haven’t already in your coursework, there isn’t really a field of communication. Really, it’s more of a family of topical areas and approaches that gets bundled together under that name. As one of the younger fields of study, what you find in one communication department is unlikely to be identical to what you will find in another. There are certain affinities among some programs, but there isn’t any clear leader.

The best way to find a program you would like to study in is to identify the dozen or so living researchers you would most like to be a slave assistant for. Whose thinking really excites you? Now, it may be that their work on paper is a really poor representation of what they are like in person, but this will at least get you going down the right path. Honestly, if you can’t think of anyone you would get excited about working with, you have a lot more homework to do before you consider going on to a doctoral program.

You probably shouldn’t choose a program based on just that one person. Once you find where these folks are working, you should take a look at the rest of the faculty, and see whether there are other people you would like to work with there. This is pretty important, since you are likely to be taking classes with them, and one of them may end up being your advisor, depending on how the department assigns students to committees. Finally, if you can figure out who the students are, see if you like the kinds of research they are doing. Email some of them and ask about the department: current students are often the best resource for deciding whether this is the kind of place you want to go.

Set up a time to talk with the chair of the department and the faculty members you are most interested in. Yes, even (especially!) if the campus is in another part of the world. There is a good chance you will be relocating for graduate school, so you better find out if you like the city and the campus as well as the people. Equally importantly, although I don’t know of doctoral programs that explicitly interview candidates, by becoming a real person to the faculty, you are more likely to be in mind when they consider admissions and tuition awards.

I will reiterate: don’t go unless it is paid for. There are a handful of programs that do not award assistantships to new students, but most use the assistantships mainly, or even exclusively, as a recruitment tool. Don’t expect, in those cases, that you are going to show up, pay tuition for a year, and wow them into supporting you. Too many students do, and then find themselves in impossible financial binds and heartbreak.

But, you ask, isn’t there a ranking of Ph.D. doctoral programs? I would like to say “no,” but there is such a ranking. The National Communication Association does a reputational ranking of doctoral programs in a number of subfields. There are a couple of caveats to bear in mind. First, “reputation” doesn’t necessarily mean quality. If Princeton decided to offer a Communication Ph.D., it would quickly rise to the top of these lists, largely because of the name. That’s not to say that a Princeton Department of Communication would suck, just that the reputational measures might outstrip the reality of the program itself. The other piece of this is that the NCA does not represent all of communication. In fact, a lot of scholars in the field may choose the ICA as their primary affiliation, or IAMCR, for example. So the ICA people might have a slightly different take on the best schools.

Making the application

Once you have picked out five or seven schools that you think are worth applying to, spend some time working on the applications. It’s really hard to gauge what admissions committees will do with your application. A letter of recommendation from a colleague that is well known in the field might go a long way. Stellar GREs might attract attention. While good grades are expected, they are more likely to look at the courses you took to decide whether you have the appropriate preparation for a doctorate. But most important, for many schools, is a statement of purpose that shows that you have a clear expectation for your future as a researcher, and that you know about what their program can offer you. It is pretty common that students receive admission and an assistantship from one of their most desired schools only to be rejected by one of their less interesting picks. Admission to doctoral programs tends to be very idiosyncratic.

I would strongly recommend against limiting yourself geographically. I have to admit that the city of Seattle was a major part of the reason I ended up at the University of Washington, and that worked out well for me. Had I stayed in San Diego, I would have done fine with UCSD. Both programs are of very high quality, and also happen to be in great cities. But if you are limiting yourself to a local university, and that university is not among the top in the US, consider seriously whether it is worth your time and effort to commit to a Ph.D. there. Without naming names, there are Ph.D. programs that really are sub-par. There is an unfortunate amount of snobbery and nose-turning as it is, often at cross purposes. Put someone from Columbia, Wisconsin, and Austin in the same room, and there is a chance all three will consider themselves to be at the top of the food chain. If you are completing a Ph.D. at Pudunk U., you may be limiting your possibilities. Since only fools do the Ph.D. more than once, do you really want to put that effort into a university that has an undistinguished program?

Please don’t take this the wrong way. I loved graduate school. I’ve talked to many successful researchers who hated it, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I would have loved it even if it turned out that I didn’t get the chance to work in academia, and I’m really happy that I do. But doctoral programs often share their Kool-Aid widely, and are lost in a haze of self-appreciation. Don’t be afraid to ask the tough questions: What percentage of people finish? What percentage of those get tenure track jobs? What do the others end up doing? Are the students happy? Are the faculty happy? Is it a supportive environment? This will be your entire life for a good number of years, you should go in with your eyes wide open.

Update: Also, don’t even think about a Ph.D. in physics :).