sigh

it made me change my password a couple of days ago when I tried to log in, but everything still looks the same...did that happen to anyone else?

My comments seem to back this up. In retrospect, I'd say I took the enthusiastic approach. I had one reviewer who loved me, while the other two were quick to point out that my actual, concrete accomplishments and plans weren't quite up to snuff.

I thought the comments would depress me, but they are so hilariously arbitrary that all I can do is laugh at them. I got one VG/G, one E/E, and one VG/VG. Looks like I'll just have to try again next year... Also, I get the impression that the way they evaluate these applications is not entirely dissimilar to the way they evaluate grant proposals. The evaluation process is obviously flawed, but as an academic you need to learn to work within it...

Cherrifaery, me too. I wonder if they took the list down when they realized people were accessing it?

My name is on that list - it looks legit?!

I got all excited when the NSF applicant login page took a long time to load, but it was just because my internet connection had died. Looks like I'm going to have to resign myself to failure on the fellowship front this year. Maybe I'll get an honorable mention?

No luck. At least they notified us when they said they would...

Secretly, I think you're right, but that's still not enough to keep me from refreshing the NSF GRFP website every five seconds or so. Plus, watching you eat your rejection email would make the rest of us who get rejected feel a little better...

Funny, my email is malfunctioning too. Looking back over previous years on here, it seems like they tend to release the results pretty late in the evening (5-7pm), so there's still hope!

I was told that the only time you might want to think about retaking is if you're applying to big fellowships (like NSF, if that applies to you), because they're more likely to have an absolute cutoff. I ended up being too busy over the school year to retake the test and try and surpass my pathetic 550V, though, and I won't know about the fellowships for at least a few more days...but in terms of getting in to grad schools, it definitely wasn't a problem.

Want to try and take a stab at when we'll get the results? I'm guessing it'll be this coming Friday. I've gotten so worked up over trying to pick a grad school that I didn't think I could possibly spend too much time worrying about the NSF Fellowship, but I'm starting to. I think I bombed the research proposal, though, so I'm not very hopeful. Anyone waiting on other fellowships? I also applied to NDSEG. Luckily they didn't ask for a research proposal, so I'm golden as long as they don't notice that the last time I did community service was in high school

It's a very good school, but when I think of Purdue, I think of chicken. As terrible as it sounds, I couldn't bring myself to apply to "The Chicken University" as an undergrad. I doubt that helps you, though.

"You'll hear back March 15th." I got the acceptance package in the mail later that day (which, incidentally, was in mid-February). At least the truth was better than the lie in that instance...but at this point I don't trust any responses I get from grad admissions offices unless they're very specific (like, "We've already sent out all of our acceptance letters" - I believe that, unfortunately).

Penn isn't particularly unsafe (although I suppose you could call pretty much anything unsafe if you compare it with Ithaca), and it is most definitely warmer than Cornell. Normally I'd recommend Cornell for engineering, but if you're really serious about the business thing then Penn might be your best choice. There's a very strong business/entrepreneurship culture that permeates engineering at Penn (at least the undergrads) because the business school is so prominent, which you might not get at a place like Cornell.

This might be a fit for you: https://ese.wustl.edu/faculty-research/research-areas/Applied-Physics.html On the whole, though, I'd take a look at materials science departments. Materials science is usually classified as "engineering," but it doesn't suck (I started out trying to double major in materials science and EE, so I say this from experience, although I'm still probably biased). Some places to get you started: MIT, Northwestern, Berkeley, Cornell, UPenn, WashU, UIUC, Vermont, UMichigan, UT Austin... It might be easier for you to get in to a materials science program with an engineering background than it would be for you to get in to an applied physics program.

How do you get the car to drive from Syracuse to Ithaca? I'm not sure how old you are, but for us under-25ers flying to Syracuse and renting a car would be basically as expensive as flying straight to Ithaca (although I suppose I could have just rented a car and driven the 4-5 hours from here...oh well).

You get $375? The department at Cornell who accepted me is only giving us $300...not fair. I just sucked it up and bought the ticket to Ithaca, although I'm flying from the east coast and $300 still doesn't cover it. I have taken Greyhound from NYC to Ithaca - it's not fun, but doable.

My two cents (while I was writing this, others said similar things, but oh well): The way I learned it, affirmative action is supposed to work like this: given two applicants who are otherwise indistinguishable in terms of qualifications, you should go with the one from the historically disadvantaged group, because they've overcome more to get to where they are. (Whether affirmative action works this way in practice is a different story, but that's irrelevant here.) A common argument against affirmative action is that no two applicants are ever equally qualified, but I'm not sure that even that is true when it comes to applying to grad school. I get the impression that there are far more qualified applicants than slots at nearly every grad program, and that adcoms are really scrounging for ways to differentiate the applicants they admit from the ones they reject. And quite honestly? If I were a professor, I think I'd prefer a student who had struggled a bit to get where they were. Grad school takes a lot of perseverance and dedication, and someone who has dealt with other issues seems more likely to me to have the drive and purpose necessary to succeed. (I think "drive" and "purpose" aren't necessarily easy to discern from any other part of the grad school application, so it seems fair enough to take personal history into account along with letters of recommendation, statement of purpose, etc.) BUT...why should this have anything to do with race? If you have had to work extra hard to get where you are because of active discrimination against you, or because your family wasn't so well-off, or because you had to survive in a rough neighborhood, or whatever...fine. But to assume that someone has struggled just because they belong to a historically disadvantaged group? Yeah, that is racist. I know plenty of people at my university who can legitimately check off a box other than "white," but who are at least just as privileged as the average student here (and since "here" is an Ivy League school, the average student is pretty darn privileged). At its worst, I would say that affirmative action favors students who are unusually well-off among others of their race, and thus accomplishes pretty much the exact opposite of what was originally intended. Even schools who openly tout the importance of "diversity" should look at the whole picture, and not just the race of an applicant. I don't think or expect that people should stop applying for scholarships particular to their race/ethnic group...I think you should take any advantage you can get, and if you don't apply then someone else will. I am a female applying to PhD programs in the sciences, where women are historically underrepresented, and I certainly wouldn't say no to one of the NSF's "Women in Engineering and Computer Science" scholarships if they offer me one. But I can't say that I've had a tough time in the sciences just because I'm female - that's simply not true. For schools that asked me to write a diversity/personal history statement, I had to address the elephant in the room, but I talked about how the great role models I've had throughout my life have inspired me to be a role model to other young women interested in science. At any rate, I sincerely hope that I've been admitted based on my merit as an applicant, and not my gender. (I've been to one visit day so far, where 4/30 of us were female, so it certainly seems like gender wasn't much of a factor there...)

Say all the bad things you want about Ithaca, but don't dis Collegetown Bagels. Ok, so I've never had their coffee, but why should that matter when their sandwiches are AMAZING. I spent a summer at Cornell and I ate lunch there pretty much every day. I'm living in a big city now, and there's no place quite like CTB here. One of the things I liked about Ithaca is that it hasn't allowed itself to be completely dominated by Cornell, unlike some towns which are out in the middle of nowhere and essentially half college (I'm thinking of, say, Dartmouth). Of course, Ithaca does have a very tree-hugging/granola-munching vibe, so you have to be into that sort of thing at least a little bit. And yeah, I'd say you need a car.

Personally, I don't think it's worth it if you aren't getting funding. Also, I'm not sure about this, but I think a M.Eng. is usually viewed as a terminal degree, rather than something to get on the way to a PhD. It seems encouraging that Cornell would accept you into their master's program, though. If you'd really like to get into Materials Science but you think your lack of background is holding you back, you might want to think about trying again next year...and in the meantime take some MSE classes part time, and/or try and convince a materials science professor to let you do research with them for a year. Or do a master's degree, if you can find someone to fund you. I don't know if either of these options are feasible for you, or maybe you're happy with the PhD options you have right now, or maybe you're sick of this whole process and never want to have to go through it again ...but it's worth considering.

Also, I think that some of these people with too-good-to-be-true stats are master's students, or people who have been in industry for a couple years. Here's another example: "GRE Verbal/Math: (780/800). Dual degree undergrad with 9 publications, extensive industrial experience in electronics, and own startup. MIT's loss." At the very least, a lot more is expected of these candidates, and I think some schools are even more reluctant to accept them because they want to be the ones to teach/train you. Playing devil's advocate here, is it possible not to be a good fit for MIT EECS? In terms of research interests, I mean. Their department is absolutely huge, and I get the impression that there are at least a couple people working on pretty much anything you could ever imagine working on.

I don't mean to underscore the importance of research/publications - it's just that everyone talks about research experience first, and networking is only occasionally mentioned. Networking is one thing that will make you stand out in a pool of well-qualified applicants, but you need significant research experience to even be considered "well-qualified." I agree with 123456789 here. Some professors are more supportive of undergrads than others. One of the best professors I've worked with told me right from the start that, if I succeeded with the project he gave me, I would get a first-author publication from it. As long as I was willing to put in the work, he was there to give me the resources to take the project as far as I could. Work for someone like this if you can, and I would recommend talking to several different professors to get a sense of how undergrads are treated in their labs (a bad group can hinder your research as much as a good group can help it). Don't give up! I know some "mere mortals" who got into MIT - there's a lot of luck involved. Everyone in my department who applied to grad school has gotten in somewhere that's top 10 in our field (my school is well-known, but not for engineering in particular). If you're thinking about this now, and you put in a lot of work, you're in a good position to do well.

I know nothing about language departments, but let me get this straight - you've already been accepted, right? I'm sure these schools did scrutinize your record closely, but they obviously didn't have too much a problem with your language background, because you still got in. So what's the problem? These visit weekends are to help you figure out which school is the best fit for you, not the other way around. The best way to answer the questions you have is to go and visit the department! If they give you the cold shoulder because you don't speak well enough, you probably don't want to go there anyway. Remember, you're the one in the position of power here. It sounds like you've got at least a few viable options, so you shouldn't have trouble finding a department that caters to what you want to do.

I don't know if you got this when applying to competitive schools for undergrad, where someone would ask, "If I want to get into your school, should I take the honors class and get a B, or take the regular class and get an A?" The reply was, invariably, "You should take the honors class and get an A." I think the same is probably true for admission into the most competitive grad schools...try to have a high GPA and a publication! You don't have to be first author, and even conference proceedings help. But yes, having just come through all this, I can also vouch for the fact that networking is super important. You'll still need a high GPA, GRE, lots of research experience, etc., but a very supportive letter from a well-known professor who has connections at your dream school, and knows you well, will really boost your chances. Most people don't think about this when they're sophomores, but getting to know such a professor now might be one of the easiest things you can do to help you get in to the school of your choice in a couple of years. It might be too late this year, but a variation on this is to do an REU at a university you'd eventually like to go to for grad school. These sorts of things really do help.

Anyone into electronic materials? I'm waiting on MIT EECS, as well as Princeton.