EelPoweredHovercraft

There are some schools with later admissions, so it's possible that you could hear something. It just depends on which schools you applied to. If not, I would second what ilovelab said. If you can get funding, a master's could be very helpful, but it's not worth going into debt over. There could be funded master's programs still accepting admissions at this point, but I'm not sure that there would be a lot of them. I know there have been some discussions about that elsewhere on the forum. If you can find an academic lab to work in, you can increase your research experience and you may be able to take some courses for free or very cheap to help boost your GPA. I think getting more research experience could be one of the most important things you can do. It seems like so many people now are going into grad school having started doing research as a first year undergrad, so a year might not be enough to be competitive. You may also want to retake the GRE depending on where you want to apply.

I TA'd for Human Anatomy and Physiology, which where I was teaching was taken almost exclusively by nursing students. Quite a few of them didn't understand why the course might be important for their future career. It was concerning.

If there is something you really want to work on that you can't do where you were accepted, it may actually benefit you to work somewhere for a year and then reapply in the next application season. Your work experience, especially if it is in your desired field, could potentially make you a stronger candidate in the next cycle and lead to an acceptance at a place you really want to attend.

You probably already know about this, but if you don't, you should check out the Texas A and M Agriculture and Life Sciences job board. There are a TON of people looking for field assistants for bird projects. Some of them are just the summer, but I think there are some that go for a year. (But don't take that to mean I think you should give up hope! You definitely shouldn't, especially since it's so early.)

It cost $700 for 4 schools?! I saw someone in one of the bio forums say they had spent over a thousand but I think they applied to something like 15+ schools.

I only applied to 2 when I was appyling for my master's and I applied to 4 for my PhD. I have specific things I want to work on, so I only applied to places that were doing what I wanted to do. I also didn't want to apply to places that were obviously reaches just to see if it would work. My thought was that sure, I could apply to Harvard, or I could take $100 and set it on fire. The end result would probably be the same.

FoggyAnhinga, I also had a similar experience to this. I had a gchat interview with a POI at Arizona State that went pretty well and I ended up getting an interview It seems like they also had an early app deadline compared to a lot of other schools, so their response time/interview dates might not be a good indicator of how other schools would be. Anyway, It seems to me that having a POI interested in you is definitely helpful! Good luck! Hopefully you will hear something soon.