DALLAS – April 13, 2016 – During a time of tight budgets and increasing demands, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences has found a unique way to recruit new students. The program is now attracting prospective students through Gradschoolmatch.com; the online platform connects students and interested program administrators and then allows them to start a two-way conversation.
“Gradschoolmatch.com has allowed us to find more candidates at roughly half the cost it takes to travel and engage students on their home campuses across the country,” says Assistant Dean Lisa Gardner, Ph.D. “It’s definitely helping us attract majority and minority students as well as those from overseas. The student profiles are easy to read, and when a student includes his or her research experience, it is highlighted in a useful way.”
Gardner says the applicants are very competitive, with a large percentage receiving interviews and offers of admission.
Gradschoolmatch has discovered that the typical student researches only eight programs of the hundreds he or she may otherwise choose. The service has found that identifying prospects costs as little as $1.06 per student, a great savings over traditional methods.
The proprietary matching system was founded by TJ Murphy, Ph.D., a who teaches at Emory University in Atlanta. He envisioned a simple and inexpensive way to seek out the prospects his program needed anywhere in the world. He and his colleagues built an algorithm that matches students with graduate programs.
The system also allows programs to highlight their academic fields, rankings, stipends, scholarships, application deadlines and other details. www.gradschoolmatch.com/graduate_programs
Gradschoolmatch’s unique messaging service allows prospective students to communicate directly with grad school faculty so they can get questions answered and start to build relationships. National Association of Graduate Admissions Professionals research indicates personal engagement drives recruiting success.
“The coolest feature of all is that the schools can show interest in you, even if you have not yet found out about them, which is unprecedented in the search for a graduate school,” says Teague Cole, a student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
In addition to UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, graduate programs from over 100 universities use Gradschoolmatch, including Georgia State University, the University of Arizona, Columbia University, Vanderbilt University, Washington University, University of Virginia and many more.
There is no cost for students to use Gradschoolmatch, and currently more than 375,000 students are part of the process.
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