Shortlisting Universities using admits.com

By admits.com Team•2024

Hey there! So you are an aspiring graduate student unsure which universities to apply to. We get it - we went through the same thing before getting here to the US to pursue our masters degree. We have built admits.com to bring all historical MS in US results in one place. In this article, we will be walking you through how you can use admits.com to shortlist your universities.

How to use admits.com

Explanations are boring. So we will give a walk through directly with some examples:

Disclaimer: The opinions and suggestions mentioned in the article are those of the authors based upon their experience and observations in graduate education. The article is not meant to endorse any specific university, program, or career path.

What are my chances at ASU Mechanical Engineering with a GRE score below 305?

When you want to answer such a question, there are multiple data slices that reflect the nature of the question:

Filters to Apply:

  • Filter 1: Interested only in Arizona State University
  • Filter 2: "get into ASU" => See only Admits
  • Filter 3: Interested only in Mechanical Engineering
  • Filter 4: GRE Total score < 305

To apply these filters on the data, simply click on the column headings of the respective fields and start applying the filters. For instance, click on the "Total" column header, and adjust the slider, restricting it to 295–305 (the lower filter is so that we keep the profile range tight).

For the textual columns like University name etc, you should see a text box appear. Don't worry! The Autocomplete system is pretty powerful and it can pretty accurately lead you to the university/college you are looking for.

Where did past students from my college receive admit from?

Here, you can apply 3 filters; one for admits, one for target major = Computer Science and the last one for undergrad college being "BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus". Once again, start typing the college name, and you should see the autocomplete assisting you immediately :)

Seeing profiles of Admits into U. Michigan Industrial Eng. over the last 3 years

Apply a filter for University, Status, Term, and Target Major. For the "Term" column header, you can restrict results to just "Fall" or "Spring" terms as well.

Complex Uses: See all Admits & Rejects for profiles similar to mine

For a more complex use case such as this, you can apply a filter to all columns that relate to your profile. For instance, if your profile is as follows:

Example Profile:

GRE Score: 322, GPA: 9.2, Work experience 2 years, TOEFL score 108, from PESIT Bangalore

You can apply these filters: GRE score: 318–324; GPA: 9–9.3; TOEFL scores 106–110 and College=PESIT Bangalore

This way, you are filtering for results which are a few points within the range of your scores. The reason why such a query could work is the size of data we have that could potentially support a wide range of student profiles!

A quick "Clear Filters" button to start over the search!

My favorite, a quick way to restart the process and start answering a different question, as I have plenty :)

We hope this is useful for all of you!

Do share it with your friends as we know how stressful it can be, without actually getting objective data points such as this.

Video Tutorial

We have also made a video explaining how to use admits.com.

Watch the Tutorial Video

Plans for Future

We were overwhelmed with the response we received. A lot of students pinged us telling how useful the tool was to them. We got a great feedback and suggestions too! We do have a lot of future ideas, however, we are short on time as we have full-time jobs which is our current bottleneck. Nevertheless, putting out the ideas:

Future Features:

  • Achieving a higher cleaning rate (99%+). Right now, we are at ~90%
  • Provide an option to flag certain rows as absurd, to ensure data quality and encourage crowdsourcing
  • Better mobile experience (seeing tables on a mobile is not great right now)
  • Smarter tools with recommendation engines / ML models that take it one step further to ease the burden on students

Thanks for using admits.com!

Happy to take any questions you might have in the comments section. Also, feel free to share your profile/results in the comments to make the database even bigger! :)

If you found this article helpful, feel free to connect with us on admits.com for more insights on graduate education and university selection.