It’s the end of your junior year. You know you want to go to graduate school, what degree you want to obtain and have been preparing for the required standardized tests – now what? How do you choose the best-suited program and university for your further studies? In this final installment of the grad school advice series, we will be looking at a variety of factors you might want to consider when creating your shortlist of graduate programs.

First of all, I’d like to get the potentially most controversial statement of this article out of the way — the best school overall isn’t always the best school for you. Ivy League schools and institutions like Oxford and Cambridge are rightly known for their academic excellence. However, especially when looking at graduate programs, it can be useful to look at university rankings by subject, rather than overall. This is because, now more than ever, the quality of the department will matter more than the overall prestige of the institution. This is not to say that you should rule out the top-10 institutions, just that you might want to consider checking out leading schools in your field.

After having considered purely academic factors, it might be worth looking into other criteria, which may be important to you, such as employability of graduates, student satisfaction, or student:instructor ratio (especially for taught graduate programs). We all have different priorities when choosing where we will spend the next several years, so your decisions may not look like those of your peers, and that is fine. Some students will choose the best universities in the world, regardless of their location, and others will choose a specific country and narrow their search down to a smaller region. This can be affected by family, friendships and relationships as well as other personal factors, so there really is no golden standard I can recommend.

Another aspect you might want to consider is the cost of attending each program on your list. This includes, most obviously, tuition fees, additional costs for textbooks, public transport (where applicable), health insurance, costs of immigration and rent. Some universities offer merit-based or needs-based funding, either in the form of a full or partial scholarship. Other times, there are few to no internal scholarships available, but it is possible to obtain funding from external institutions or your home government. When applying to global scholarships, such as the Marshall, Fulbright or Schwarzmann scholarships, students can seek guidance from NYU Abu Dhabi’s Career Development Center. There are special scholarships for students with U.S. citizenship, as well as scholarships for study in Europe, such as Erasmus Mundus. Doing your research about expected costs and possible funding for each graduate program is essential, since some scholarships and grants require you to apply well in advance or to submit an essay or personal statement. Lastly, you might want to consider what kind of university you are applying to. Is it a campus or city university? Is student housing available to graduate students, or would you have to find your own apartment in town? Is it a walking town or would you be better off with a car and a driver’s license? Do you speak the language, do many people speak English, or would you have to start learning a new language? These might not be aspects you consider during your initial shortlisting of graduate programs, but you might want to take them into consideration in later stages of your application and selection.

This article, along with the two previous graduate school guides, which you can find here and here, does not form a complete overview of applying to graduate school. However, I hope it helps you get a better idea of how you might want to go about it. I believe the most important takeaway from this mini-series of articles is that applying to graduate school is a lengthy, tiring and sometimes frustrating process, but it can be made much easier when making and sticking to a plan. Best of luck to this year’s seniors and juniors who are either about to apply, thinking of applying, or waiting for admissions decisions. I have confidence that you will find the place where you belong — whether or not it was your first choice.