Admissions

There are only 60 students in the Master’s Program, and because we work so closely with them as they plan and pursue their educations, those of us who run the office tend to know them well. When choosing students to bring into our community, we look for people with the intellectual power required to handle serious, self-directed graduate study and the intellectual passion to make something magnificent out of that opportunity. Some of our best students have been out of school for a long time, and the strengths they’ve developed since don’t always come across in their college transcripts. Consequently, we pay special attention to the ways in which candidates write and talk about what they’d like to study and why they’d like to study it. We don’t ask candidates to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), because we don’t believe that it measures those qualities it takes to do well in this program—the ability to take initiative and follow through on challenges, the courage to choose the questions you care most about and to chase them, the flexibility of mind to discover connections between things that seem unrelated.