anatotitan

I got rejected from all universities my first time around (although I did manage to land an interview) in 2013. I was pretty beat up about it. I spent the next year doing research, contacting professors and honing my application a little. It paid off - I was admitted into an excellent program a few months ago. Honestly, my failure the first time can be attributed to my cluelessness about what Phd programs were looking for - I treated it as though it were a more rigorous version of the undergrad application process (which is rather more like what applying to med school is like).

Of Indian descent, born and raised in the United Arab Emirates.

Hey guys, I'm enrolling as a grad student this fall in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Nice to meet yall. Do you guys intend to live on or off-campus?

Anybody planning on going to U Chicago? Thaz where I'm headed.

Hell to the YEAH. Accepted into U Chicago Ecology and Evolution! Will be attending.

Hey Monochrome Spring, I'm applying to Michigan State EEBB/Zoology and will be interviewing there in less than two weeks! The departmental structure of MSU's evolution/ecology program is certainly curious. I can't really tell if my graduate school peers would be Zoology students or EEBB students - or both!

Wohooooo! Just got an interview invite from the University of Chicago Committee of Evolutionary Bio!!

If you are applying to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology-type programs (which seemed like it might be, judging from your listed program), then you almost certainly would receive full funding (in the form of teaching or research assistantships) for a certain number of years. I'm an international student and the programs I'm interviewing with all offer me 5 years guaranteed funding.

Ugh, I was told I wasn't eligible for those because I'm not a US citizen or permanent resident. Ughhh

No MIT or Stanford invite here either. I did, however, get an interview offer fom MSU EEBB. So that made me happy - I was beginning to fear complete annihilation this cycle.

Ugh, I'm going to explode if I have to wait for interviews any longer.

I was interviewed by MIT last year (I was rejected and am re-applying) and my invite came in on the 8th of Jan via e-mail. I'm fairly certain that we'll hear back this week. From what I remember from the 2013 application cycle, Stanford sent out invites the same week, and proceeded to send out a wave of snail-mail rejections to the remaining candidates in late January.

From what I can tell, most of them start getting back to us in February. Ugh.

Well - is it possible? I've worked very hard in the lab that I'm currently in (I have somewhere in the range of 1.5-2 years of experience in multiple labs), but I probably wouldn't land a publication within the next several months. My project turned out to be a great deal more challenging (read: soul crushing) than my faculty and graduate student advisors anticipated. Has anybody here had success in the graduate school application process without any publications?

I'm broadly interested in molecular evolution and phylogenetics - primarily among vertebrates. You're interested in plant ecology, I take it? If we're lucky, perhaps we shall meet at the MSU interview, haha.