ampersand

I would send an email to the DGS or grad secretary and ask about scheduling a visit to campus. You can say something like you're considering several options and you'd like to visit X University to get a feel for the department. If a school is serious about getting you to attend, they should be glad to arrange a visit for you. They'll usually bring you out for a day or two, reimburse you for your flight, and book a hotel room for you.

It's a good suggestion to use a credit card, but if bubotuberpus doesn't have a credit card or is unable to put an airline ticket on his/her credit card, I suggest calling the department and explaining the situation. They may be willing to directly book your flight for you. I can't imagine that the department would essentially block you from attending the recruitment weekend just because you don't have the means to purchase a ticket up front.

I say keep the visit at WUSTL. It will be good for you to have another department to compare Northwestern to, and it will provide valuable opportunities for networking. It's worth exploring all your options, especially if your visits are paid for by the departments.

If anyone's curious, NY Times columnist Nick Kristof compiled a list of organizations that had their finances tied up with Madoff: http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0 ... ations/?em (the article has a link to a pdf document with more details). From my quick search through, it looks like the problem is that a lot of foundations that were donating to universities took a financial hit, so they won't be able to continue their donations.

Since schools make their admissions decisions on the department level, the admit list has to go through the graduate school before you're formally admitted. It could be that the department has decided to admit you but the grad school hasn't signed off on it. Don't worry, I haven't heard of anyone who was accepted by the department but rejected by the school; this last step is more of a formality. I think it's safe to start celebrating your admission to this school. Congrats!

A good GRE score will not automatically get you admitted to a school, but GRE scores are far from unimportant. Obviously this varies widely by school and discipline--most English and literature programs probably don't give two figs about applicants' quantitative GRE scores. But I'm sure many schools weed out applicants based on low GREs, and some schools use GRE scores to award funding. It may also be a way to set yourself apart from other applicants--it's very common in math and engineering for people to score 800 on the quantitative section, so an applicant who also scores high on the verbal section may warrant themselves a second look. While GREs are not the be-all end-all of your application, you should definitely take them seriously and try your best to excel on them. Also, props to gadhelyn for his awesome experimental design. Although you'd probably need group sizes of larger than 20 to make any decent probabilistic inferences.

Who is?

I disagree. This girl may not have taken a pen and imitated someone else's signature on a piece of paper, but I'm willing to bet that online letters of recommendation have some sort of box to check at the end certifying that the information in the letter is true to the author's best knowledge (all of my applications had a similar box at the end that had me certify that the information I had provided was correct). Checking this box counts as an "electronic signature." Whether someone else's name is signed on paper or the box is checked online, it's all the same to me and it's all fraud and forgery. By the way, we haven't heard from the OP in a while. Any updates/further incriminating statements? Sometimes it's just so fun to watch a train-wreck situation like this play out.

If you're Ferrero, you take a belligerent tone and yell at the office workers because HOW DARE they lose YOUR documents and don't they KNOW who you are and how much SMARTER you are than them? It establishes dominance, which will impress them and they'll be sure to admit you. If you're anyone else and want to make sure the graduate secretaries don't hate you and throw your application in the trash, you will be kind and patient with them. You will understand that this is an incredibly stressful time of year for them and they probably have thousands of pieces of paper to keep track of. For schools that track application statuses online it will take a few days for them to update after they receive your stuff. Your best bet is to mail stuff very early, and to maybe send it certified mail so you can track when it gets there. You will also be sure not to call every day, because that will irritate the office staff too.

The school you end up attending will probably want an updated transcript from you after you get your bachelor's degree (or whatever degree you're currently working on).

It depends. Public schools in states with budget crunches may very well have their funding cut, which could translate to less money to dole out to grad students. Some schools may cut the number of students they admit or reduce stipends. When I applied last year, the rumor was that a couple of the top schools in my field were facing severe budget shortfalls and didn't have the money to accept as many students as they had in the past. Private schools don't rely on taxpayer money to cover their costs and may be in a better financial situation than public schools. I think it's also very likely that the number of applicants will go up. People who have been taking time off before grad school may decide to shorten their time off, or people who have been unsure about going to grad school may be pushed in that direction by economic or employment insecurity. What you can do about it, of course, is make sure that your applications are stellar. Apply to a wide range of schools (both public and private), and you'll be more likely to get a funded offer. Keep in mind that if a school wants you badly enough, they'll dredge up some money for you.

Since the value of some of your experience is very specific to your field, maybe you should look through the CVs of professors in your field and see what kinds of things they include.

That was an unbelievably, mind-numbingly stupid thing for this girl to do. This kind of thing could completely ruin a graduate career. Besides that, I'd think these professors would be furious that their names were signed to a document they didn't approve, and this could damage the chances that future students from your school have of getting into the schools she sent the letters to. Also, how does she expect to survive in grad school and academia in general if she doesn't know how to interact with people and is scared of asking for help? /rant I don't think you should let her get away with this kind of fraud. Make an appointment with the department chair at your current school and tell him/her about the conversation you had with this student (don't do it over email). Frame it in terms like "I felt like you should know what this student did, because I don't want her actions to reflect poorly on the department." Refrain from going off on an angry rant and just stick to the facts as you know them. And then--this will be the hard part--let it go. You should trust the department chair to address this appropriately--they get paid more than you because they have to deal with a lot of problems like this. I'm sure you're understandably incensed at the audacity of this student, but you can't let it eat at you. You need to focus on making your applications the best they can be so that you can get into a good school on your own merits. You should also be prepared for this girl to be very, very mad at you. But hey, at least the semester's almost over and hopefully you won't have any more classes with her.

Perhaps I just haven't looked at the guidelines close enough, but are there page limits for the essays? I assumed one page each for the personal and previous research statements and two pages for the research proposal.

Since you're probably sick to death of looking at flashcards with strange words on them, maybe you can try to pick up some test-taking strategies. I think I used the Princeton Review book in my GRE prep, and it had a few strategies to help you figure out how the test works, where they try to trick you into selecting the wrong answer, and how to eliminate incorrect answers so that if you have to guess you at least have a higher chance of getting the right one. Maybe you could focus on those. Also, I recommend taking as many practice tests as you can get your hands on. Also, remember that the GRE isn't the only part of your application that will matter. As long as your application is strong in other areas, perhaps a low GRE verbal score will not matter so much. It also works in your favor that you were a hard science person before deciding to go the history route.