Zsick

Hello everyone, I was just sitting here, doing working for my first quarter of grad school, and I started thinking about what I was doing at this time last year. Basically, I was doing what you all are doing now, so I figured I'd swing by and share my experience. The grad application process didn't work out for me how I hoped. Because this is anonymous, I'll set aside modesty and say I was a "very competitive" application. My GPA was almost perfect, I had about two years of research experience in areas relevant to what I was proposing to study in grad school, and my GRE scores were fairly high (V 91rst percentile, Q 76th, W 96th). However, my partner was also applying to residency programs. Although she was also a top candidate, it was difficult to find well-ranked programs in the same city. I think I applied to three top ten programs (Yale, UC Berkeley, and UCLA). I didn't get accepted to either UC and I got wait listed at Yale. However, she had to submit her choices for residencies by Feb 18th, so only programs I had heard back from by then were even an option. I had only heard back from two, and they were both something of "safety" schools. My pride was crushed, and I was heartbroken. I went through a period of mourning. Dreams of Berkeley slipped away, and I felt doomed to second tier status for the rest of my life. I didn't cry, but honestly, I felt like it. Then life went on. I wish things had worked out differently, but they didn't, and I'm still happy. Going to a top program is like a gold star on your CV, but there are lots of benefits to going to a lower ranked program. For example, I'm at a program ranked around 30, and pretty much all of the faculty graduated from elite programs. So, although many of those in my cohort are perhaps less "hardcore" of academics than you'll find at the elite schools, I am still surrounded by people who attended the elite schools, and there is less competition to work with them. I'm in my first quarter, and I've already had several faculty members express interest in doing research with me. My mentor takes all the time in the world with me, talking not only about research, but about life as an academic in general. Also, for those of you who have strong academic records who don't get into top programs, you will be much more competitive for internal funding that will free you from having to TA so much, which will give you time to do research, which will make you more competitive for external money, and so on. Also, although some grads of top programs get placed at top programs, most don't. Most go to lower ranked programs and try to work their way back. Likewise, I probably won't be placed at a top program upon graduation. But what I do after that will determine whether or not I work my way back in. There is a self-selecting aspect to graduate placements. Most of the people from my program don't get placed in R1 jobs. But most of them don't WANT to work at an R1, so it's not really a failure of my program. There are definitely drawbacks. I don't have that gold star on my NSF GRFP proposal, for example. I'm not saying I am glad things worked out this way. I'm just saying that I'm still getting paid 25,000 per year, plus a tuition waiver, to earn two different graduate degrees. That comes out to over $1000 per week to do something I love. I'm not at Berkeley. I didn't get a gold star. But life is still good.

So you wouldn't have to TA or RA for the first two years?

Do you have to TA or RA?

Maybe resend it to them. It will show you're proactive: "Hello. I noticed on online forums that you have sent out rejections and placed acceptance phone calls. I have received neither. This leads me to the conclusion that you may have lost my phone number and email address, so I have included them both below. I certainly understand how this could happen. I lose email addresses all the time, so there are no hard feelings. I look forward to your call/message, whichever it may be."

It's tough to say. Different programs do things differently. Some of them reject in waves that represent their interest in people, rejecting the people they know for sure they won't admit first. Other programs seem to be much more arbitrary, like rejecting in alphabetical order or something. I wouldn't read too much into it. I had the same thing happen with UCLA, and I ultimately got rejected anyway. So it could go either way still.

Me neither.

Yeah, I didn't send my writing sample. Don't know how that happened. But it was an office assistant who sent the message. Not faculty or adcom chair or anything.

I got an email on February 13th saying they have been looking at applications and they needed an additional piece of info from me.

Have you heard a lot of analogies concerning this whole thing?

I did, and I assumed they would. Except the next day my boss, who is a director of research, asked me how long I'd been using the supplement. Apparently *older* people are still fooled by those things...

Seriously the one time spammers got ahold of my email was during application season, so I sent everyone in my recent contacts, including multiple Soc. departments that I had communicated with, a link to some exercise supplement site with "Check out this stuff. I've been using it and it really works!" written under it. In a situation like that, do you email everyone back and apologize, or just let it go?

It was

I believe the only difference is that CUNY is for undergrads. However, I stand to be corrected.

Berkeley has a good Sociology department?

Has anyone else not received an acceptance OR a rejection from UCLA? I see a wave of rejections, but I didn't get an email and I don't see that anything has changed on the website. I'm assuming it would be apparent where to look...