a mini-guide
[this is still incomplete, hopefully i will get to it soon.]
All of the content below is a result of my experience with grad school applications, and is by no means a complete or correct set of rules one needs to follow. These are just guidelines which hopefully will be helpful in crafting your own Ph.D. journey. And with that said, while most of what I say is catered to Ph.D. applications in the U.S.A., some things might be generalized to M.S. applications, and Ph.D. applications elsewhere.
As a reader of this page, you might be in one of many stages possible vis-à-vis grad applications, but all of those stages reasonably converge into making sure you get into one of the suitable grad schools to do your research. You could be a first- or second-year undergrad starting to get into research, or a final year undergrad close to the applications deadline. Keeping this in mind, I’ll take a bottom-up approach and try my best to start from the beginning.
Depending on how one likes to do and plan things, this might be too early to actually start doing anything research wise, but I’ll still talk about some things that might be helpful.