2am_frosty

prestige of an institution should never be the decision maker for your PhD. which school has faculty that you're interested in spending the next 4-6 yrs of your life with? location is also not that big of a deal. you'll be spending most of the time in a lab, anyway.

now that i think of it, i think UF gator & i are soul mates. what video games?

second that. minus the gym, add riding my bike & sleeping a sh!t ton.

hey neuropsych, have you heard from carnegie? if so, when was your app considered complete?

If there were a senioritis club, i'd be the founder and president. i'm taking ONE class and one seminar, and i can hardly take it. i thought my senioritis in high school (post- college acceptance) was bad-- this is by far the worst its ever been. school is barely even a blimp on my radar.... i went from being overly ambitious freshman year, to "i'll be happy if i just pass" senior year. i am really hoping i don't screw things up last minute. so how have all my fellow seniors been spending their time? i mean i don't think i've been totally unproductive. i've definitely been spending more time in the lab and going to seminars, but i am absolutely loathing formal coursework at the moment. can't wait till grad school where grades aren't the end all be all.

i have a handful of bad grades, didn't explain a single one, and i still got interviews in neuro.

LOL LOL i was thinking of the SAME comic when i saw the previous post. too funny.

sounds good. appears that our recruitment weekends have very similar schedules (just different weekends). are they hosting yours at the beckman institute? let me know how it goes and how the weather is in illinois!

congrats with the interviews! I will also be interviewing at UIUC (neuroscience) in ~2 weeks and they told me to dress casually and comfortably, and to expect a lot of walking. they even went into specifics that "jeans are ok, but jeans with holes are not. please, no suits". i'm thinking khakis will work well, or black denim. as for tops, you can never go wrong with a button up. i was under the impression that UIUC is probably one of the more casual schools. are you going to be staying with current grad students in the department? if so, i recommend you bring both types of attire (dress up and casual) and ask them what interviewees tend to wear. good luck!

did you hear back from some other schools? I'm on the same boat as you. I applied to 7 programs (6 schools) for neuroscience. and so far have only 1 interview. is UPenn your first choice? i got an invite from my top choice, but it only makes me feel more anxious and nervous. crap. good luck to you. let me know how it goes down!!!

you'll have to figure out what your past research & hopefully future research fields have in common. considering technology now a days, i'm sure it wont be hard to relate digital image processing to wireless communication. with that said, you should address why you are interested in so & so's work and briefly mention how your past experience affirmed this (brief meaning 1 sentence). if you do this correctly, you may have an upper hand by being able to bring something "new" and "different" to so & so's research. good luck

a good SOP won't help you get in, but it can definitely hurt your chances, more so if the rest of your application is mediocre. i had a 3.3 GPA at the time of applications, and my GRE scores were far from amazing. I wrote different SoP's for each school, and the SoP that I feel was best written (got the most revisions, put the most thought into it, and did the most research about the school) was the last program I applied to. This program also happened to be the first school that I received an interview invitation from. I had some very generic SoPs, and yes, I did receive rejections from those schools. Coincidental? Perhaps. however, i wouldn't risk it. write a pretty SoP. you'll be glad you did and if your curious, I applied to PhD- Neuroscience programs. all top-ranked.

speaking as a mature, patient, soon-to-be-phD candidate (hopefully) on behalf of the biological/life sciences: most universities have program-specific departments (Molec & cell, neuro, pharm, etc) which tend to have earlier deadlines (dec.1-dec 15), in addition to broad/multidisciplinary programs (biology/bio sci) which have the later deadlines that you mention (after jan 1). usually the addcom meets soon after the application deadline (within a week) and chooses the first set of interviewees (~30-40). they send out these invites either before the holidays, or the first 2 weeks of january. after these specific departments have "matched" potential students with potential faculty, they asses the need of the remaining faculty (need for students or just more students in that department who can offer a multidiscp. approach). this will then influence the decisions of the more broad program (like biology), which of course may affect who is invited to interview (usually within 2 weeks of the deadline). top 10 programs either 1) reject you at the same time interviews are made (UCSF), or 2) wait until april, with no (helpful) assistance until then, to reject you. My logic for reason #1 is that the majority of students interviewed and offered admissions will accept (meaning they don't need to keep a "back-up" applicant list); for reason #2, many rejected students may feel the need to e-mail/call/whatever addcoms asking "WHY?!" or "WHAT CAN I DO TO INCREASE MY CHANCES?", and so forth. considering the reputation of the school, they want to appeal to the public and look like they care about all their applicants-- meaning they must put in a lot of time and energy to make recruitment week the best it can possibly be and tend to the needs of students invited to interview. Thus, they save the rejections until the very end where they actually have the time to answer rejectee's questions. non top-10 programs will reject students that obviously aren't well suited for the program and/or grad study in general. but considering the pool of applicants these days, the majority of people who do apply are quite qualified. these qualified, but not overly qualified students get put on an unofficial wait list. if many of the offers they extend are rejected (or people decline recruitment week), then they pull a couple people off this wait list-- one by one until all their spots are full. but lets be real. i am in the same boat as you so this is what i actually feel (right now): what the F*%*!!!! why the H-E-double hockey sticks does it take so long to make a decision? just accept or REJECT us already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and where the h3LL are my documents that i submitted 2 months ago? why is it that everytime i check the status, something different is missing. one school even DELETED my entire application because they had some technical problem with payment processing. if i wasn't OCD and didn't check my application every 5 minutes, this would of totally went unnoticed and I wouldn't even be CONSIDERED for admissions. don't tell me "please send all questions to unhelpfulperson@superduperschool.edu" if no one even plans on responding to my simple questions (ie. are some documents in my file actually missing or is this page just here for decoration and never actually updated). why do the applications insist on asking the SAME questions in different wording? example: please state your research, professional and/or other relevant experiences--- and then asks me to submit my CV within the limits of some file size too small in special-your-computer-probably-doesnt-have-it format. and one app even asked what high school i went to (i'm sure you guys can guess which school asked this)... because your high school makes such a huge impact on your abilities to do well in grad school. RIGHT. on the brighter side of things, i did get 1 interview so far... but you know whats ironic about this? this school was the LAST one i applied to with the latest deadline (jan 1). HAH! can't wait till this entire process is done so i can move on with my life and stop creeping around on gradcafe & collegeconfidential. phew. i feel much better

hey, I am a neuro applicant as well and i've been experiencing the same thing. i doubt most schools will find a polite email regarding admissions questions to be annoying. i know some adcom people will directly e-mail the student if they have not received all their documents (UCSF emailed me about GRE scores, UIUC about transcripts). Vanderbilt on the other hand has not responded to my email (I asked them if they received my transcript because I sent it in november but it still says that it hasn't been received) altogether. i uploaded an unofficial copy in the "additional documents" section. i think that most schools are just overwhelmed with the number of applicants and documents they have to sort through.... but it never hurts to double check. good luck to you! PS- what schools/programs did you apply to?

"why aren't you applying to MIT? people with good grades go there."