Physics GRE Discussion Forums

I have always been curious how admissions committees view international applicants who graduated from a US college. Would we be viewed more closely to a domestic applicant, or an international one? I don't have rigorous data to back this up, but I feel people in the US college system tend to do worse on the PGRE compared to international students especially from PRC, just by the virtue of the teaching style in US colleges (emphasis on methodology, less on final answers). In some sense, do we have it the roughest i.e. score profiles subjected to international students standard, when we are in really much closer to a domestic applicant?

giga17 wrote:I have always been curious how admissions committees view international applicants who graduated from a US college. Would we be viewed more closely to a domestic applicant, or an international one? I don't have rigorous data to back this up, but I feel people in the US college system tend to do worse on the PGRE compared to international students especially from PRC, just by the virtue of the teaching style in US colleges (emphasis on methodology, less on final answers). In some sense, do we have it the roughest i.e. score profiles subjected to international students standard, when we are in really much closer to a domestic applicant?

I can't speak for other schools, but we put them in the same category as domestic students. I don't care what someone's nationality is...

But would funding be an issue, since technically we're not Americans?

giga17 wrote:But would funding be an issue, since technically we're not Americans?

No. Most places support all admitted students, regardless of nationality.

I think the only reason for someone to care is some possible preference for American permanent residents for some sources of external funding (i.e. NSF/DOE fellowships, etc). Since these sources have very little to do with Physics (almost all money comes from professor grants and TA block grants from the University), I doubt they'll care.

Hey admissionsprof, thanks for the replies! I was only wondering because I heard rumors that funding issues caused some UC schools to not even accept internationals last year, even if they graduated from a US college.

From what I've been told, a person's domestic/foreign status matters for being accepted to state schools. Funding for a student's tuition comes from the department's budget. Since domestic students are able, and expected to, obtain in-state tuition after their first year (and in some cases for their first year-making in-state candidates slightly more appealing), accepting domestic students saves the department a good amount of money. for private schools, where there is no difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition, I don't think domestic students are favored.

For every school I applied to, the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition, if there was one, was paid by the Dean's office, not by the department. That could have been a coincidence, though.