FakeDoctor92

Hey everyone, My letter arrived in London (UK) yesterday. To my pleasant surprise, I received a CGS. As someone who's been just scraping by and sliding further into debt over the last few years, this comes as quite a psychic relief. Some data for posterity: I received a score of 15.3 from committee 1 (fine arts/literature) as a direct applicant. I'll be starting my PhD this fall. My MA application, a couple years ago, was unsuccessful. I've had no academic publications--just one conference presentation and a couple of literary publications (which I can't imagine made much of a difference). I know my referees were quite generous with their assessment letters, and I suspect that made a sizeable impact--but then, who can really tell. I've heard so many stories of people submitting virtually identical application packages one year to the next and receiving vastly different scores. It is, as has been said above, largely a crapshoot. Whether that makes disappointments feel duller or sharper is another question. Best of luck to all still waiting!

I'm also a direct applicant, and while I was under the impression there was effectively no way for us to find out via department admins, as I'm living in London (UK) and not expecting the mail to arrive any time soon, maybe I'll give this a try out of sheer desperation.

Same here. I've had letters come from Canada to London in a few days and others in a few weeks--so there's really no telling how long we could be waiting...

The program I'm entering come fall is in Toronto but for the time being I'm living in the UK. I'm a direct applicant (my application was passed on to the "national competition"), and the university I provisionally designated as my "Organization to award the degree" in my SSHRC application package (when I had yet to hear back from either of the programs I applied to) is not the one whose offer I ended up choosing. I suspect this means there's no way for me to find out whether I was successful before the post comes... which I doubt will get here before the end of the week, if that. Looks like I'll be among the last to find out! As a side note, while I'd been reassured by a number of people that no major issues would arise in the event of my choosing a program other than the one designated on my SSHRC application--i.e. that were I successful I could take the award at the program I'd chosen--this longer-than-expected wait's given a lot of room for my anxieties to grow. I haven't counted myself out of the race, have I?