pérégrinations

Thank you all so much for your guidance and encouragement! I really appreciate it. I'm so glad I found this forum. I feel more at ease just having more information and opinions. Best of luck to this year's applicants!

Thank you so much for your wonderful insight!! Of course it's so hard to know how things will really go down in the adcomm room, but it helps to know that there is a potential chance. I have one more question to throw at you: I could possibly retake the GRE Dec 21st, and I imagine that I will fare much better this time (I had the misfortune of having a high fever for the first round, and unless I have seriously bad luck, I should be able to manage a more respectable score in a retake). It will be past the deadline for the majority of the schools, but there are two who have deadlines beginning of January, so I could at least have a better chance with two schools. My question, however, is whether or not the other schools would consider scores sent after the deadline. Of course they would see my initial scores, and don't technically accept material post-deadline, but if they see other parts of my application and decide to consider me, could knowing that I can produce decent GRE scores help my case, especially because of the weight of GRE scores in funding decisions? Or would it be a huge waste of money to send a second set of scores to all the schools? Or worse, would it look bad to send them a late, last-ditch effort like that? Any insight you have would be much appreciated!

Hello All, I know that many departments have cut-offs (GREs/GPA) to make for a more manageable pile of applications, but I'm wondering if any other portion of the application is looked at at all during that process. Here is my concern: I just tanked the GRE. 147 Q, 159 V, felt good about writing (maybe 5.5?). I'm now considering which schools it is realistic to apply to this year. I planned on applying to all top tier schools (15 of them: Berkeley, Harvard, Penn, Madison, Michigan, NYU, Columbia, Chicago, Northwestern, Yale, Princeton, UCLA, Stanford, Brown, Washington), but I know those scores are LOW, most likely too low for the top schools. But other parts of my application are stronger: Good undergrad liberal arts school, decent GPA (3.5 overall GPA, 3.78 last two years) Fulbright Fellowship (gave me international ethnographic research experience) Masters in Soc at la Sorbonne (more international research experience) I'm wondering if my scores will prevent things like "Fulbright" and "Sorbonne" from ever being seen, let alone my SOP, writing sample and good recs. I knew I wouldn't have a stellar quant score, but hoped that a high verbal score (which I didn't get) and/or other parts of my application could outshine those scores. Does anyone have any insight as to how the process of cut-offs really works? Thank you!