ProspectStu8735

U Chicago says that my scores haven't been received, though I sent them in the same batch as another school that has them. Calling the dept./grad admissions today.

*********cartoonish nail-biting**********

UCSC Visual Studies results came out on Jan 19th the one year someone posted their results, with rejections coming few weeks later. Has anyone gotten an acceptance yet? My guess is the answers go out last week or next, but then again, the committee could have changed its review timing...

Does anyone else feel sharp pangs of anxiety every five minutes when the thought, "WHY did I ONLY apply to super competitive programs? Did I really think I could get into any of those places?" passes through your mind? Interviewed 3 places before applying because the PIs knew my UG thesis advisor and were available when I emailed at beginning of semester. Haven't heard anything since and I'm getting very, very worried...maybe my app was garbage, destroying all good will from academic nepotism. Please lord, no.

I think if I refresh my gmail one more time, its just going to stop working out of protest.

I was going to apply to UT Austin, but I quite because their application was so terrible. My reasoning was that a school that put such little care into the applicant experience probably wouldn't give much thought to its students. The application really intensified the perception I had of Austin as a giant, bloated, impersonal place - not the kind of place one wants to be doing graduate school.

If the scholar was influential to your intellectual development, I would strongly suggest you mention her research in detail. Admissions committees will be impressed that you are current on the most important on-going research in your field of specialization. Anyone who states that you shouldn't mention scholars by name is ignorant.

Oh, final point: the LSAT is loads harder than the GRE. I had some old study books lying around from back in the day when I considered that an option. If you can do well (missing say 3-4) on the reading sections from those, you'll def get a 165+ on the real GRE. That's just because law schools put so much weight on their test in admissions, so they make it much tougher. My idea in suggesting this is something like how pro athletes train. One might run 5 miles a day, even though the race is only 2 miles. That way when it comes time to run 2 miles it feels like a breeze.

You could also read a novel. If in the next three weeks you read something like the Bronte's or some other 18th-early 20th century novel written in English you'd probably hit 90% of the vocab you need for the test and also become comfortable with old syntax. If it wasn't originally written in English, try to find an older translation. Example: I read older translations of Brother's Karamazov and Dante, because of the antiquated language the translators used. I'd also recommend looking at a prep book - not for strategies but simply to become familiar with technical passages that come up in reading comp. This way you won't be intimidated when an article on "photopsypothalic recessive transmissions" or something comes up - this is especially helpful for humanities majors! We're trained as readers and writers, so its no help (and probably a poor indicator!) when our GRE verbal is sunk by a passage about physics or seismology. Once you've got this stuff down, I'd go back an look at lists of vocabulary, because after you've trained yourself as a critical reader, the vocab can be *brushed up* from the annals of memory, as opposed to crammed and memorize. I nudged my practice scores up a few points to the 97th percentile by looking through a few sets of "most important 600 words" from different companies. If there's a Barnes and Noble nearby, go have a coffee a few times a week and skim through these lists. This alerts you to the words that are important, but I'd say knowing them in context will help much more. That's why I'd recommend the novel first of all. I didn't study very much but made a point of reading a lot of novels in the run up to the test. I literally started think about grad school two yers ago, so in the mean time read some real tomes - Moby Dick, Brother's K, East of Eden, etc...Also, READING FICTION IS FUN. Its like a philosophical movie in your mind!

go with the research paper.

Thanks auvers-sur-oise and losemygrip. Very reassuring, both. I find it strange that the brand of the school carries so much weight in the admissions process, regardless if its simply that, "the weak freshman grades won't be held against you" or that admissions committees won't be alarmed in the least by a 3.4 from Yale. I would suppose, at any rate, that these biases among committee members occur with even greater frequency in instances where an upward trend accompanies the lower overall GPA from a top 3 UG institution. My case presents a comically exponential spread: below 3.0 to above 4.0. We seem to have achieved consensus that a disproportionate amount of attention is allotted to graduates of particularly flashy name brand institution. Is it possible, then, to articulate why this particular custom of elite bias is perpetuated? It seems in making an adequate assessment we'd need to particularize the types of departments in which this bias is displayed. For instance, Losemygrip asserts that: "Unless you're talking about another Ivy League institution, where they get many Ivy League applicants, your 3.4 at Yale is going to be more respected than a 4.0 at Eastern Connecticut," implying that at the top everything tends to flatten out. It seems to me that if a student has had adequate training as an art historian at the undergraduate level -- which I'd assess as exposure to the most essential art historical and philosophical texts -- then the name of the school should be of minor consequence, if considered independent of other factors weighing in the assessment of academic preparedness for research. (Aside: My off the cuff list of essential texts would be Plato, Vasari, Winkelmann, Panofsky, Sasseur, Kubler, Krauss, TJ Clark, the "Bergs" --and-- Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Weber, Freud, toss in Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Spivak or Frankfurt School, if you will.). I obviously only have my own experience, but I was under the impression that down through the middle tier of schools students were getting essentially the same education in critical texts. This assumption owes in part to the very bias that the present inquiry interrogates: faculty hires at state or lower ranked institutions frequently hail from same 5 art history PhDs: Harvard, Berkeley, Yale, Columbia and, with greater variation, Princeton/NYU/Chicago. These graduates, having attained an education similar to the one outlined above, would presumably devise syllabi similar to the ones through which they attained their expertise. (I realize Berkeley is technically a state school but for all intents and purposes...)

Penn state is a highly respected school and any academic or professional who is worth their weight will be able to separate their opinions of a sex scandal from their opinions of your department and academic advisors. I think you second point holds no water. I wouldn't worry about it.

Thanks guys! I suppose the informal 3.5 gpa cutoffs have got me pretty worried, especially given that I have a humanities degree from a university known to have pretty heavy grade inflation. I was in the top 25% of my major class, but missed honors on a technicality. Alas. If I get into a PhD program, that'll make up for it!

I graduated from an Ivy with an average GPA, though I had very strong performance in my last couple of years. I also took a lot of higher level courses and did exceptionally well in them. A few more details: I have very strong GREs (97th percentile verbal, also very strong in other sections), glowing letters of recommendation from well-known profs and several years of research experience. I am worried that my weak earlier performance will hold me back from consideration at top 10 programs. Do you guys have any thoughts?