rbear91

I'm dying. I'm supposed to leave to the US in 10 days but my visa is still under administrative processing and it's been 3 weeks. :(

I got accepted to Sloan Kettering!!!! I just returned from another interview trip in the US so I don't think it has quite yet sunk into my jetlagged brain, because I feel like I should be crying with joy. I've tried to imagine this moment so many times but it's finally here. All the hard work has been worth it. That is such a relief.

I recently received my list of professors who will be interviewing me. Out of 5, four are people that I specifically mentioned in my SOP, though I only established contact with one of them before turning in my application. Now that I know for sure that I will be meeting with some of my POI's, would it be a good idea to send them a brief email saying something along the lines that I'm looking forward to meeting them soon and learning more about their research? Thanks!

I am not coping well with the waiting anxiety at all. I'm currently waiting to hear back from a program for which I interviewed a week and a half ago. I know for sure that the decisions are coming out this week. In a normal time scale, 4 days is nothing, but in "hopeful PhD student" time, 4 days seems like an agonising eternity. I've already overanalysed my interviews to death and have pretty much convinced myself I need to brace for a rejection. Funnily enough, right after the interviews I felt they'd actually gone alright. I was even quite happy that I had felt relaxed enough to share a few laughs with my first interviewer. Now after reading some posts on GradCafe, I'm starting to think that was a huge mistake because the other applicants probably used all their time convincing their interviewers why they were great. And all I've got going for me is... I'm a good conversationalist? Also, anyone have any definitive answers to what it means when a prof says: "All the best!"?

My app is also showing the weird deadline. It's happened to me a few other times, actually - not sure what it means, but it may reflect some processing step in the application. Considering the interview dates are so close, I'm not holding my breath. It looks like it may be a rejection for me.

Could a thank-you email, if not written absolutely perfectly, really be a "kiss of death" at this point though? Surely the actual interview(s) itself is the main deciding factor as to whether an applicant will or will not be accepted, and not some courteous gesture that he/she may opt for afterwards. While I think a thank-you email is a nice thing to do, I don't think it's that necessary. If you bombed the interview, nothing you do after the fact will change that. Conversely, if you did well, not writing a thank-you email isn't going to make a school reject you. After all, I'm sure everyone thanked their interviewer in person right after the interview. I know I thanked mine a few times. There's no real need to overthink a simple thank-you email. If you really enjoyed chatting to a PI and genuinely thought their research was cool (and conveyed as much during the interview itself) then why shouldn't you come across equally as enthusiastic in your email? Just don't harp on and on about it, or write something egregiously bad, like angling for a response as to how well they thought you did. I wrote short thank-yous to my interviewers even though I was satisfied that at the end of my interviews, I came across as appropriately appreciative of the time they took to chat with me. I literally just repeated that I was grateful for their time, that I enjoyed talking to them, and if they gave me any advice, I mentioned this too. I also wrote that my interactions with them contributed to the fantastic impression I had of the school. The only deviation was that in one of them, I put in an extra thanks because my interview ran 15 minutes over-time and she was nice enough to keep on talking to me instead of cutting our discussion short. Someone else mentioned that they wrote an email to the program coordinator. Now that's a good idea and something that I think should really be done. Not only did they likely have a say in whether you got your interview, but they also organised everything and were willing to spend a significant amount of money on you.

JHU BCMB INTERVIEW WHAAT WHAAT!!

2 UCSD Biol. Sciences invites on the results page. O.m.g.

Me too. I emailed them back right away thanking them then following up with whether this had affected my review, got no reply after that. Not sure how to interpret this silence. Maybe they're not allowed to disclose such information. Gah. Bummed. I really care a lot about this application.

Yup, my story exactly. I thought it was probably a harmless system error, and i didn't want to bother the admissions people further because I had already sent a few emails whilst I was waiting for my transcripts to be received by them. (And their replies gave the sense that they were really busy and didn't really have time to be replying to emails.) So I thought I'd just wait. A friend prompted me to write an email today. If it's any consolation my application also states that it was completed today. Did they send you an email notifying that they had waived your TOEFL, or had you also reached out to them yourself?

Crap. I just emailed JHU because my application status was "incomplete" despite the fact that they had received all my materials. Turns out that it was because I hadn't submitted a TOEFL score (I'm international). I swear I had read somewhere though that international applicants who had undertaken their degree at an English-based institution were exempt. But I must have just gotten confused with all the other schools...

Help?!?! I saw on the results page that someone International had gotten an interview from GSK. I applied there, but didn't receive an email. But I decided to log on to my GSK application portal and saw that a link has appeared on my application that wasn't there before called "Interview Response" and upon clicking it, it opens a new window asking me to either accept or decline an invitation to interview. I am almost hyperventilating. Was this a system mistake or have I really been invited to interview?!?!?!! I haven't gotten an email!

Sorry to hear that But congrats on the interview offers you've got lined up! If you don't mind me asking... Did WashU notify you by email? I ask because I also sent in an application. It seems like they're beginning to send out emails now. My only hope is that no matter what my outcome is, they'll notify me early, because the wait is unbearable. I'm international, so don't know if that would make a difference...

Thanks, just sent it! It was from a school whose deadline had passed, but notified me that they still hadn't received my official scores (which I submitted last Thursday -- what's taking ETS so long?!) and gave me till midnight to send in an unofficial copy. I don't want to read too much into it, but hopefully it meant they are at least interested in giving my application further consideration!

If a school asks for an unofficial scanned copy of GRE scores, what do I send? On the ETS online portal, there's an option to print one's unofficial score report, which opens up a new window with a PDF (showing all the test dates, schools the scores were submitted to, etc.) -- is this what I should send? I never received any paper reports of my scores from ETS. Or am I an idiot and have missed some link where you can download your report...