Application Process

This page is meant to answer questions you may have about applying to our graduate program and to help you give us the information we find most useful in deciding whether to admit you to our graduate program. Feel free to contact us with any additional questions.

Application Deadline. The application deadline for admission is January 15th with all supporting material so that the review committee can begin the review process February 1.  (See Application Requirements below)

Fall Admission. The curriculum is set for fall admission only. 

Application Fee. The Graduate School requires payment of a $55 application fee. The Graduate School may waive the application fee due to the applicant's need and in order to achieve greater diversity for certain underrepresented groups. In requesting this waiver, you would need to submit a supporting letter from the financial aid officer at your current educational institution along with your application. The Graduate School does not waive the application fee for international applicants.

Application Requirements. A completed application includes: transcripts; GRE scores; letters of recommendation; and a personal statement. A writing sample and CV are optional but encouraged. Please see the
details in the list that follows.

• Transcripts. We need transcripts of all your academic course work since high school. Before your application can be officially processed for admission, these transcripts will have to be official, that is, sent by the institution at which you took the course(s). If you are applying close to a deadline, however, we can consider your application based on your submission of photocopies or faxes of official transcripts. We specially encourage applications from students with a GPA of 3.2 or above in their final two years of undergraduate coursework.
  
  
• Graduate Record Examination (GRE). We require the GRE. We do not have a cut-off point, although we especially seek applicants with combined verbal plus quantitative scores above 1000 and a score of 5 or above on the Analytical Writing Examination. If your scores are not high, we may still admit you if other parts of your application are strong. As with transcripts, we can evaluate your application with a photocopy or fax of the GRE score report you have received, but eventually we will have to have an official report from the agency that administers the test.
  
  
• Letters of Recommendation. We require at least three recommendations. The Graduate School application packet includes a form for your references to use. This form only has a small space for comments. Please ask your references to add a letter in which they provide more detail. Specifics about their experience with you are particularly informative. If you are not currently in school, please take care in selecting the people to write these letters. We need to know how you are likely to perform in an academic setting.
  
  
• Personal Statement. This is usually a relatively brief statement of about two pages. We are especially interested to know how graduate training in anthropology fits into your goals and plans, including your professional and intellectual ones. Please indicate in your statement whether you are most interested in pursuing studies in our bioarchaeological concentration, our cultural concentration, or our environmental concentration, and why.
  
  
• Optional Writing Sample. We pay very careful attention to the example of your writing that you submit. We look for organization, use of evidence, logic of argument, and quality of analysis. Typical submissions include course papers and senior thesis chapters. We strongly prefer writing samples of approximately 15-25 pages in length. If you would like us to read part of a large work, you could attach an explanation of how the part relates to the whole