The Unofficial Story: Applying to ESPM's Society & Environment Division
As Told By Graduate Students on the Society & Environment Admissions Subcommittee
So you're interested in applying to ESPM/S&E? By this point, we assume that you have read the general information about the ESPM department and its Graduate Programs. You've read the answers to Frequently Asked Questions about applications. You should also have looked at the faculty members' web pages, read some of their recent publications, and found out what their students are doing. And you'll soon be submitting an application that will be reviewed by the three faculty members and two advanced graduate students on the Society & Environment admissions subcommittee. As graduate students who have read many applications, we've come up with some tips that you may find useful. The goal of "The Unofficial Story" is not to repeat what is available from official sources, but to help you devise a successful strategy for your application and avoid some of the common pitfalls faced by applicants.
Applying to ESPM/S&E
Society & Environment is one of the three divisions of Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM). In keeping with the interdisciplinary objectives of ESPM, graduate students in all divisions of ESPM take the same core classes and usually include faculty members from different divisions on their committees. In fact, you do not really apply to one of the divisions. Applicants to all divisions of ESPM should list "ESPM" as their department on the UC Berkeley application.
Nevertheless, it matters a lot which division you are affiliated with because divisional policies regarding work space, fellowships, and the like vary slightly. You will be assigned to a division based upon the faculty member who agrees to be your advisor. You start the process on your application by indicating which ESPM faculty members are most relevant to your interests. Section 2 below gives some hints for picking suitable faculty.
The Berkeley application also asks you to declare an emphasis. If you are applying to work primarily with Society & Environment faculty members, list "S&E" as your emphasis. But it is totally OK to list faculty from several ESPM divisions on your application. You will then be assigned to the division of whichever faculty member takes you on.
Some other tips to keep in mind when filling out the Berkeley application:
• List both your GRE test scores and the GRE percentiles. We can't process your application without both.
• In the work history; section, summarize your employment experience briefly in the form even if you also attach a detailed résumé.
• Few S&E applicants have a lengthy track record of formal academic publications. In the "publications" section of the application, you may list jointly authored or forthcoming publications, conference presentations, informational web pages, and databases or other compilations of information to which you have contributed.
• ESPM requires that you calculate your undergraduate GPA on a 4.0 scale for "all course work after the first two years." Don't rely on the admissions staff to extract this information from your transcripts! If you attended college outside of the United States, or your undergraduate institution did not provide a GPA on a 4.0 scale, it is extremely helpful if calculate your own GPA and explain how you did it on an additional sheet. (And yes, this applies to graduates of UC Santa Cruz!)
In your statement of purpose, try to be specific about your goals in pursuing graduate study. What do you want to do here? What topics do you want to research? What specific skills do you want to acquire or improve? What interests, talents and perspectives will you bring that will enrich the program? What do you want to do after graduate study, and why do you need this graduate degree to do it? To be most effective, your statement should make an explicit connection between your field of interest and the research program of ESPM (and particularly that of the faculty member with whom you want to work). On most applications that we read, statements are about one and a half to two pages long (single-spaced, or the equivalent). Footnotes are optional, although a few applicants use them when citing works that have been influential to their thinking. But please be succinct: statements that run to 4-5 pages or more with extensive bibliographies are difficult for the committee to evaluate efficiently in the limited amount of time we have to review 100+ applications!
Frankly, the hardest part for us serving on the admissions committee is seeing how many highly qualified candidates cannot be accepted because openings for graduate students are limited each year. In the case of the Society & Environment division, fewer than one in ten applicants are accepted, usually about ten in all. Other divisions and departments at Berkeley and elsewhere may have better odds, simply because they receive fewer applications or have more faculty. Thus you will be well advised to consider all of the opportunities available to you in applying for graduate study. Nonetheless, if you decide that ESPM/S&E is best for you, we wish you the best in preparing a stunning application.
How Do I Know Which Faculty to List on My Application?
Indicating the faculty you want to work with is key to your application. Not only does it determine your divisional affiliation, but after your application is received and ranked by the admissions committee, individual faculty will decide whether to sponsor you for admission. No matter how meritorious your credentials, if no specific faculty member is willing to take responsibility for your program, you will not be admitted.
You may try to contact or visit faculty members prior to applying, but this is absolutely not required. Every fall, the faculty receive literally hundreds of requests for information about graduate study, and so may not be able to respond promptly or in any detail. Don't be discouraged or offended if they don't respond to you at all! Rest assured that your application will still be given full consideration. Make full use of other sources of information about faculty, such as their web pages, recent publications, and current graduate students. Students who have volunteered to respond to prospective applicants are listed on the Eye on ESPM page.
On the application form, list faculty members more or less in order of your sense of the fit between your interests and their work. Pay attention to what the faculty you are listing do. If you say that you want to study environmental history and then list several professors who work in systems modeling, it might suggest that you have not thought things through very carefully. Of course, we wouldn't want to discourage someone who can make a convincing case that the next transdisciplinary breakthrough in environmental history will use systems modeling, or vice versa! In fact, if you have a serious, demonstrated interest in the research of faculty in the other Divisions of ESPM - Organisms & Environment or Ecosystem Sciences-you might do well to consider listing them as potential faculty sponsors rather than only listing Society & Environment faculty.
You should know also that that not all of the faculty members affiliated with ESPM actually admit graduate students every year. In Society & Environment, faculty who have just joined the division and those with fewer graduate students are likely to admit more students than those who have large, well-established programs. In addition to having a "full lab," some faculty sit out a round because they are on leave, they have health problems, or for any number of similar reasons.
Finally, be aware that professors listed in Society & Environment as "secondary departmental affiliations" (that is, those who hold regular positions in other departments) typically do not accept students into ESPM. Students who are interested in working with professors whose primary affiliation is in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, for example, should apply to ARE rather than to ESPM.
What happens after you apply?
The general criteria for evaluating your application are described in ESPM's Frequently Asked Questions page. In short, the ESPM Graduate Student Services staff receives your application and supporting materials (letters of recommendation, transcripts, and GRE scores). They assemble these materials into a folder and enter your information into a database. The database calculates a "quantitative" score (on a scale of 1 to 60) based on your undergraduate GPA and GRE scores. The folders are then forwarded to the divisions' admissions subcommittees in mid-January, where they are assigned a "qualitative" score (on a scale of 1 to 40) based on your letters of recommendation, statement of purpose, and overall background and experience. Note: it is extremely important that all of your admissions materials, including letters of recommendation, arrive at Berkeley on time. The admissions committee members may not consider materials not received by the deadline.
Faculty members are provided with a ranked list of applicants based "on the "60" and "40" scores. If they are considering admitting students, the faculty may adopt one of several strategies for reading folders. They may read all of the folders, or just those from applicants who listed their names on the application. They may also read a few additional folders recommended to them by their division's admissions subcommittee. The faculty members then indicate which applicants they would be willing to sponsor for admission. The admissions subcommittees balance faculty requests and applicants' scores with the number of openings for new graduate students in each division. The entire Society & Environment faculty meets in late January to make a collective decision about recommended candidates for admission. The ESPM departmental admissions committee meets in early February to review the work of the divisions' subcommittees. The department's recommendations for admission are then forwarded to the Dean of the Graduate Division who has the final authority to admit students to Berkeley. Applicants are usually notified about these decisions by mid-March.
If you indicate that you want to be considered for merit-based financial aid (and who doesn't?), the admissions committee will use your application to nominate you for appropriate departmental and university-wide fellowships. About half of the department's fellowship budget is reserved for first-year students. Because the budget is not sufficient to offer fellowships to all new students, Society & Environment does not offer multi-year departmental fellowships (other divisions have a different strategy)-so don't be surprised or disappointed if you are only offered one year of aid from Berkeley. At the same time that you apply for admission you should be thinking about applying for outside fellowships like the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the U.S. EPA STAR Graduate Fellowship, or others specific to your circumstances. ociety & Environment combination of outside fellowships, one-year endowed fellowships from ESPM, half-year grants from the division, and teaching or research employment on campus.
Good Luck!
Updated April 1, 2001