Scholars of higher education now recognize that succeeding as a student requires having or acquiring a good deal of tacit knowledge about college expectations and how to meet them. Indeed, advocates of equity-minded pedagogies have begun to encourage university instructors to consider the transparency and clarity of their assessments as a way of ensuring that students from less privileged backgrounds are not dealing with a hidden curriculum. The project described in this paper is motivated by a desire to understand whether there is a hidden curriculum that governs the transition between undergraduate and graduate school in Geography in particular, and if so, how students secure the information and mentoring they need to successfully apply to graduate school in the discipline.