Thank you!! I appreciate your help and information a lot!! I will definitely talk to my PI and also the adcomms for suggestions to improve my resume for the next round!
It is very low on my ranking. The reason why I ranked it that low was because: research interest, overall ranking, job opportunities and interview experience.
What do you mean? Consider yourself in my situation, if the school you got accepted into is the school you applied because you knew you were gonna get accepted and maybe only one or two PIs match your research interest; however, you hoped to go to a school with more job opportunities and more collaboration in research, would you go to this school just because you want to settle down/you don't know what the situation would be next year/any other reasons?
I think what I meant by "deserve" is that the experience that I have had and all the effort that I have put into these four years should get me into a better school and I don't know if I should just settle down when I could've gone to a better program with more opportunities for jobs and research.
I think you might be right. I was kind of upset that they admitted me first and I was gonna go to a PhD program no matter what. At least that was the plan.
I got accepted into my safe school, which is ranked lower than any other schools that I applied. I was planning on going straight to PhD from undergrad and I felt like I deserved better schools than just my safe school. Although I don't feel like going to my safe school, I am an international student and the only option left for me is to work for two years max in the US before I reapply. Right now I am still waiting to hear back from schools and it would probably be a little too late to apply for jobs in mid April. I don't know what the situation would be two years later and so I debating whether I should accept the offer and settle down or take a year off to improve my resume.