During the Summer Before Your Senior Year

  The summer prior to your senior year should be spent at a job or in volunteer work that will provide you with relevant experience related to the field in which you will be doing graduate work. Make sure that you also have time during the summer to deal with the following steps:

___  Continue to research the graduate programs in your field and the faculty in those programs.
___  You should have a good idea of where you most want to go to graduate school by the time your senior academic year begins. If you can afford it, try to visit those programs that interest you the most.
___  Make your tentative list of programs to apply to and request their application packages before the end of summer. You may narrow down your list of prospective programs later.
___  If you will be applying to programs where you will have a graduate supervisor, then establish personal contact with the relevant faculty members in those programs and with their current graduate students, if they have any.
___  Prepare for standardized tests if you haven’t already written them, or if you will be rewriting during the fall.