svan

A complementary experience reinforcing the idea that math isn't the admissions panacea it's sometimes made out to be: I have taken (and received A's in) math courses through Calc III and Linear Algebra, and I scored ~90% on the Quant portion of the GRE. In this cycle, I was either rejected from or admitted without funding to the five schools I applied to [all in the 10-25 range].

I know it's difficult [i'm inclined to assume the same about my own pending status], but I wouldn't be quite so quick to assume a rejection--per the search, no one else appears to have received any sort of notice in either direction from UW-M. Furthermore, at least in years past, the department emailed those they accepted on the Monday which corresponds to tomorrow.

Being that last year's acceptances came on Monday (1/28) and 2013's acceptances came on Monday (1/27), I'm betting on Monday (1/26) for our first round of action from UW-Madison. It looks like (personalized?) emails were the notification method of choice in 2014 which broke from notice-by-post in 2013. Formal rejections appear to follow sometime thereafter (same-week in 2014, next-week in 2013).

In at OSU! Such a relief to receive an acceptance so early in the process--I earnestly hope you all get to feel like this soon.

Not to add to either your or the collective stress, but it looks like the first wave of Ohio State acceptances rolled out on [Wednesday] 1/22 last year. Based on the timing between last year's first phone interviews and those acceptances [7-10 days], it seems reasonable that we could have action on that front by the end of the week. I'm surprised more schools aren't jockeying for position early on in the cycle with respect to their acceptance date, as I've been [even more] fixed on OSU since my interview last week. I suppose deciding when to contact applicants is something like timing a formal announcement of one's candidacy for office insofar as there's a tradeoff between getting your name out there early and making sure you're fresh in the mind of voters [or prospective admits] when it comes to decision time. I know admission committees model out the likelihood that an accepted student will matriculate--I wonder to what degree they consider this phenomenon.

Ahaha I wish I had kept up to date on this thread. I've been getting spam phonecalls on my cell for the better part of a year now and generally don't answer anything from numbers I don't recognize. I received such a call earlier this afternoon and wasn't going to pick up until I realized at the last second it was from a Columbus, OH area code--naturally, it was a POI at OSU. I can confirm that the interview [which the POI assured me "was not an interview"] was pretty broad in scope: I think "what do you want to study?", "why [my alma mater]?", and "why OSU/Columbus?" were the only questions I was asked in any sort of formal/scripted sense. The rest was more or less just a conversation [which seemed overwhelmingly positive]. Echoing PA, good luck to everyone.