After graduation students ultimately have two options: enter the workforce or continue their education. Though students can wait to start sending out job applications, several graduate programs require planning and forethought.
Medical schools and law schools require that applicants take the MCAT or LSAT either the summer before or the fall of their senior year. But one of the first things students can do to prepare for graduate school is to have a strong GPA.
"I wish someone would've reiterated that your GPA matters," said Emily Pence '10, a current student at Indiana University's Maurer Law School. She, like many of the panelists at the Life after DePauw forum on Thursday, encouraged the use of the Kaplan Prep courses for their respective graduate school tests.
About 24 percent of DePauw students typically enter further post graduate education, said Bill Tobin, director of Institutional Research. Six percent of those students head to either law school or medical school with the other 18 percent pursuing post-graduate education in a variety of fields, according to Tobin.
Michelle Sollman Sharp'08, who went studied occupational therapy post-grad at Marian University, said students should "be your own advocate" - meaning that it is ultimately the student's responsibility to search out deadlines and the processes that are required for their respective graduate schools.
Adrienne Cobb '09 wishes that she had followed preparation more closely while she was at DePauw.
"Since we don't have a set pre-med major, I didn't have someone to spell it out for me," Cobb said.
As a result, she and several of the other panelists, especially those who went into the medical field, nearly missed deadlines to apply for graduate school.
Although the application process to graduate school is in many ways similar to the application process for undergraduate institutions, the differences end there. According to the panelists, the biggest changes between life at DePauw and graduate programs are the class size and the specialty necessarily involved in graduate studies.
"You are focused on one area," Sharp said. "The fun sociology class no longer exists."
However, despite the differences between the schools, the panelists felt that their time here at DePauw adequately prepared them for life after DePauw.
"I think that DePauw teaches you time management and to do your work," Pence said, which are two qualities she said are necessary for law school, or any aspect of life.
"DePauw is a small world that extends beyond to the real world," Sharp said.
In fact, Pence said that "law school is a glorified liberal arts school."
Pence, who plans on moving to California at the end of this year for work, said that she wishes that she would have known that it is better to go to law school in the state in which you plan to practice law. She had to compete with the law students at prestigious colleges in California such as Stanford or UCLA.
Yet the road to even higher education is not set in stone. Gerry Wallace '08, now an admission counselor at DePauw, took a different path other than the traditional jump from undergraduate to graduate school, to which he has no regrets.
"I wanted to go work for a while," Wallace said.
Wallace, a philosophy major and French minor, worked at a construction firm as a project manager and at an executive search firm, which led him to discover what he does and does not like.
He even went as far as to say he thought law and business schools like to see the "gap years" between college and post-graduate education. He said those years provide students with otherwise unattainable real life experience, which helps to set aside a student's application from the pool of students.
"It's not a race to get there," Wallace said. "Just go when you're ready."