In this post, I am going to talk about the process of applying for universities in United States of America, but most of the parts are general and applicable to other countries as well. I am assuming that you are an undergrad or Master’s student and want to apply for Master’s or Ph.D. degree. Before starting to apply for universities, you need to have a reasonable resume, which means you have to learn different skills and have some research experiences in your field of study. Moreover, a good GPA is always important, so if you are a first year student, try to get good grades in your exams. If you don’t want to apply, there is no need to have a high GPA, and you can spend your time to learn different things or have fun or whatever you want, but since you are reading this post, you are thinking about applying for grad school, therefore you need your GPA.
The first step is improving your English skills (if you are from a country in which English is not the official or academic language). These skills are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. You should also expand your vocabulary and learn the grammar (which is not very difficult). I will discuss more about how to improve your English in another post separately.
The second step is taking the English exam (TOEFL, IELTS). If you want, I can write about the differences between the two exam, and which one is better to take for different people. For TOEFL, scores more than 100 are good, and for IELTS scores more than 7 and 7.5 are good. It varies based on your field of study.
The third step is taking the GRE exam and you need to improve three skills: Quantitative Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and Analytical Writing.
The forth step is to start looking for universities and professors, and decide about your research interests. You can use some ranking websites, but use them only for finding universities, not to compare them, since these rankings are not realistic. You can use QS or USNews. Computer Science students can use this perfect website. In each university find a professor whose research interests are the same as yours, and send an email to them. (Read How to send an email to a professor?). The next step is to write your SOP (Statement of Purpose) which is usually 1 page or 2 pages long. SOP is one of the most important parts of your application and you must put a lot of effort to write a good SOP. In SOP you should write about yourself, your passion, why did you study in this major, why you have these research interests, and a most important question, “why do you want to attend to grad school as a Master’s or Ph.D. student, and why this university”.
The last step is to decide what universities you want to apply, and start filling out application forms.
To sum it up, the documents you need to apply for grad schools in the USA are, transcripts, official TOEFL/IELTS score, official GRE score, resume, SOP, up to 3 recommendation letters. I wish you the best of luck!
P.S. I wrote this post in English because if you want to apply for a university in the USA, you have to be able to read an article of this length and difficulty easily :)