Online Application

In order to apply to the program, applicants who are current UW students or transfer students must complete an online application and provide the information and materials listed below. The next application cycle will be for autumn 2020. The application will open in late winter/early spring 2020 and have a deadline in early April.

Schools and Transcripts

Applicants are required to provide information about all schools where they have earned academic credit and are required to provide a transcript for each.

Applicants who have taken a prerequisite course at a school that does not have a transfer agreement with the UW (typically these are schools outside the state of Washington) will be asked to provide a syllabus and/or course description for the class. These applicants will be contacted directly after the deadline passes or can email this information at any time to iask@uw.edu.

Prerequisite Courses

Applicants will provide information about the prerequisite courses. If the prerequisite course was taken at the UW, the student will select that option in the application. The system will automatically pull the course and grade information into your application. If more than one course was taken that will fulfill the prerequisite requirement, the system will automatically select the course with the highest grade.

• Current UW student prerequisites
• Transfer student prerequisites

Application Document

Guidelines

In addition to providing information about prerequisite grades and academic history, applicants will submit a 1-page document (formatting requirements provided below). The Informatics admissions committee will review this document to learn more about why you want to learn what we teach in Informatics. While you’re allowed to communicate anything you would like, the committee is most interested in four aspects of your life:

• What grades on your transcript do you think best represent your ability to succeed in Informatics? This might be your performance in Informatics classes, your performance in classes you view as related to Informatics, or independent learning you believe is relevant to Informatics.
• What experiences do you have designing information technology, building information technology, or working with data?
• What is a time when you have demonstrated hard work, persistence, or focus toward a goal? Did you achieve the goal? This does not have to be related Informatics.
• How is completing an Informatics degree related to your goals post-graduation?

Address all four of these topics, but do so in whatever form best fits the answers. For example, you might address each question separately, you might tell a story that implicitly addresses all of the questions, or you might create a visual representation that addresses all of the questions. The committee will focus on what you communicate, not what media you use to communicate, or how you structure your response. However, your communication should be clear, concise and captivating.

However you present the answers, focus on telling your story, not platitudes and generalities about data, information, or technology. We want to understand what makes you unique relative to other applicants. The admissions committee is not looking for just one type of student: we need diversity of all kinds to promote critical learning about people, information, and technology.

Your audience will be diverse, including faculty, advisors, and current Informatics students. Therefore, to prepare your response, we recommend you first think about what you want to communicate, who your audience is, and then devise a way to convey that information that best communicates your narrative. Test and refine it until it communicates what you intend.

Formatting Requirements

You can put anything that you want on this page, as long as it satisfies the following requirements:

• It must be a single 8.5" x 11" page, submitted as a PDF.
• Any static content is fine, including text, images, or vector graphics.
• No links are allowed, unless they are for reference (e.g., a link to a company website). The content must be entirely contained within the PDF. Reviewers will not follow any of the links in your document.
• Any fonts are fine, but should be at least 12-point and should be embedded in the PDF. Most applications that produce PDFs do this by default to guarantee that anyone reviewing the document sees the same thing, but you should check to be sure. There are several resources online on how to verify that fonts are embedded.
• The file must be less than or equal to 3 MB in size. Be careful about including high-resolution images.

Applicants will only be able to submit the materials listed on this page. The Informatics Admissions Committee will not review any additional materials (recommendations, resumes, etc.).

**All application instructions and requirements are subject to change until the application opens.**