liveoak

log in prompt is up!! still error message for me though

This worked. Same error message that the username or password is incorrect. Thanks!

how do you pull up the bookmarks toolbar? i have windows 7... sorry, not the most computer savvy person

FYI to Northwestern applicants who haven't heard anything yet - I just checked my application status on the website and there was a link to a decision finally (wasn't there yesterday). Rejection, but still nice to get a definitive decision

Haha well I'm going this weekend so I guess I won't meet you there

pzh, when are you visiting chicago?

I lived in Austin for 6 years and it's awesome. Fairly mild winters (although I think they're cold), and very hot summers (~70 straight days over 100 last summer), but I don't mind too much. What field are you looking at?

I heard back via phone call from a professor that I had contacted in the fall. I then received the official letter from the department via postal service. If you decide to inquire about your application, a good contact may be Melinda Moore - mmoore@uchicago.edu. She answered very promptly when I emailed to make sure all of my supplemental materials had been received. Best of luck!

Ah, okay. I guess this would depend on whether the school you want to attend accepts students on a "master's-only" type track. At the school where I did undergrad, you would just complete a master's degree and leave if you didn't pass your PhD qualifying exams. If the school allows you to enter with the intention of only pursuing a master's, I guess you could tell them now (not sure, though). Otherwise, I'd wait til later I think.

If you haven't even started your program yet, I would say don't bother starting now. If you aren't ready to pursue a PhD right now, just take a job in industry until you're ready to go back to school for a PhD. Getting a master's now and PhD later would just waste the time (and income you could be earning) while you earn a master's degree, since a master's won't get you a more prestigious or better paying job than a master's. If you went through with just a master's degree now, you'd be losing money in the long run.

I currently work in industry with a bachelor's degree and can say that if all you wanted was a master's, you would have been better off not wasting your time on it. A PhD is a much better value than a master's in industry. Yes, a PhD puts you in a higher pay bracket, but a PhD will pay you back a lot better and faster than a master's degree. If it's only 3 more years, I'd stick it out and not put your last 2 to waste. In my opinion, better to take out loans if you need them, because you should be able to pay them back with your PhD salary. Maybe your wife can get creative and start childcare for other working parents to help supplement your income?

Congrats! Email or snail mail?

Although ranking certainly isn't everything, schools are ranked the way they are for a reason, and there are a lot of contributing factors. Funding, reputation, and renowned faculty members certainly play into these rankings, but they don't dictate admissions. Granted, a higher ranked school will likely have a larger applicant pool, but that doesn't mean that the admissions committee is more selective. A higher ranked program may have a better funding for a larger incoming class, and therefore be able to accept more students than a lower ranked program, so a student applying to both may certainly be accepted to the higher ranked and rejected from the lower ranked. You also need to look at how the programs stack up for different specialties. Some schools may be ranked a little lower overall, but have a very highly ranked analytical chemistry program, and therefore be much more competitive for analytical than they are for organic. Also, research interests are a large factor in admissions. If you apply to a program and indicate an interest in 3 different groups, but 1 professor is retiring and another is no longer taking new students, your admissions decision may be left to the 3rd professor who may or may not find you to be a good fit. However, if all of the labs you are interested in are growing and taking new students, there is more flexibility there. So all in all, it is perfectly reasonable to get accepted to a higher ranked program and rejected from a lower ranked program. This says nothing about the accuracy or reliability of the rankings. Always fun to keep us guessing, I suppose!

Dear Everyone, Please stop freaking out, pitying yourself, and asking if you should assume rejections from every school you haven't heard from. A lot of programs had very recent deadlines (Stanford, GTech, and Wisconsin-Madison were all less than 2 weeks ago!). You can't assume that the professors and admissions committees at these schools are looking at our applications 24/7. There are a LOT of applications to consider, and these things take time. So, CHILL OUT! I heard from 2 schools today - UChicago & GTech, so CLEARLY some programs are still making decisions. Hope for the best, and don't assume rejections for at least another month. No one on this forum knows whether or not you should assume rejection unless they've contacted the program and asked. Best of luck to you all SIncerely, Liveoak.

Just got an acceptance email from Georgia Tech. 2 schools in one day... I'm in a pretty good mood!