During the author's first decade of college teaching spent at Harvard and Wesleyan he often wrote letters recommending students from those relatively prestigious institutions for graduate English programs. Upon moving to the University of Pittsburgh, however, he did so less frequently for two decades, partly because much of his teaching focused either on graduate seminars or courses oriented toward non-majors. Fifteen years ago matters came to a head when the author encouraged a strong student that he had been working with to think that she would have a fair choice of teaching assistantships by applying to her favored M.A. programs. She was sorely disappointed when only her anchor school offered her a TA--and the author was chagrined to think that he might have contributed to her disappointment by encouraging unrealistic ambitions. Rejections prodded the author to educate himself more thoroughly about the entire application process in order to improve advice to undergraduates considering graduate school. He not only volunteered to serve on the department's graduate admissions committee but began collecting information from Pitt students. To do so he devised the questionnaire presented in this article and distributed it to every Pitt senior he could contact who applied to graduate programs in English.