Arcanen

Absolutely there is wiggle room, which is why even for top programs the averages for AW are around the 50th percentile and verbal the 70th percentile. This IS the wiggle room in action, as you wouldn't really associate 50th and 70th percentile scores in general with some of the best universities in the world. This is a far cry from 6th percentile and 28th percentile respectively; The OPs verbal and AW scores are least as problematic as the quant, and should not be ignored in favor of it. Since the OP did well in undergrad, it's quite likely that his poor quant score was also because of poor English, and improving his English over the next year is likely the most reasonable way to improve scores in all sections. I'm not saying that either; they are averages, of course there are people above that average and more importantly, below it. But there is a big difference between applying to a school with scores ten percentage points below their average for one section and applying with 30-50 percentage points below for every section. But the averages give you an idea of the ballpark you have to be in. The OP is playing ball on the moon.

"My GRE v:400 Q:700 AW:2.5" This is why. A great GRE score won't come close to guaranteeing admissions, but a poor score will cause you to be rejected. You would have been automatically rejected from everywhere on the basis of these scores (by administrative staff, not faculty) before anyone who knows your university had a chance to read your application. I'll use Georgia Tech as an example (since the information below is easily available on their website). Your verbal score is in the 28th percentile, so you did better than 28% of applicants. The verbal isn't very important for industrial engineering, but this score would be seen as very concerning. The average Georgia Tech percentile for the PhD program is the 73rd percentile (so the average successful applicant does better than 73% of all applicants). Your quant score is in the 64th percentile, so you did better than 64% of applicants. This isn't close to what you'll need to get into a decent engineering PhD program. The average Georgia Tech percentile for the PhD program is the 94th percentile (so the average successful applicant does better than 94% of all applicants). Your AW score is in the 6th percentile, so you did better than 6% of applicants. This would be extremely concerning for admissions. Considering the huge number of applicants who have English a second language, to only do better than 6% of applicants indicates one thing to admissions committees; that you can't speak English. Of course, your posts show that your English is passable, so it is hard to say why this happened.The average Georgia Tech percentile for the PhD program is the 49th percentile. So none of your scores in any category are close to being good enough. Your verbal and AW indicate (to adcoms, not me!) that you can't speak English, and your quant score just isn't sufficient either. The bigger issue though? You clearly didn't do much investigation into the programs you were applying to before you submitted. You list your scores in the old format (rather than the newer format out of 170 for verbal and quant), and so you must have taken your GRE quite some time ago. This means you should have a great deal of time to investigate each of the programs you applied to and to discover that your GRE scores were way below the average successful applicant in all three sections (as I said, the GRE score information is generally available on each programs website). You should have then had plenty of time to study to improve your scores (because the GRE absolutely can be trained for) drastically in order to align with your GPA and research experience. Whether or not the PhD admission process is fair in general, your rejection is. That you are in any way surprised at your rejections means you didn't give the admissions process enough time or attention, and rejecting such a candidate is definitely fair. But all is not lost, you can study for the GRE and improve your scores. With ScoreSelect, you don't need to send your current scores and so they need not ever work against you again. Since you clearly took the GRE some time ago, you might find that your scores will have increased naturally if your English has improved in that time (in all three sections, since a lack of understanding questions in the quant section could be a reason for your poor score there). Good luck!, and next time, make sure you read absolutely everything about what is expected of successful applicants at the programs you applied to.

Which topic are you most serious about? If it's financial engineering, you would be silly to go to Stanford or mit over Columbia as the former have like 1-2 top people in financial engineering. Columbia has like 10. If you want to do optimization, MIT is the clear winner. Stanford has strengths too etc. All three are top 5 OR departments (we are ignoring industrial engineering in this statement, they are often lumped together for some reason)

Visiting this weekend. Fortunately my department does seem to be the "top in the nation" for my particular discipline, so I'm mainly interested in getting a feel for the housing and the campus. I really like New York, but I want to make sure that being in a big city doesn't mean that there isn't a sense of community. I'd rather avoid moving into a nameless apartment block where everyone locks themselves in their rooms and doesn't really interact with the wider grad community.

Considering you haven't gotten in anywhere yet, you're much better off doing something to strengthen your application for next season (e.g. interning, lab work, publishing papers with professors etc) than spending time on what you think your thesis will be on. Chances are it'll change and you'll be wasting your time, and it could actually decrease your chances of getting in anywhere when you consider the opportunity cost.

Um, what?

So it seems as if one person has been contacted by Stanford. An out of the blue phone call to let someone know they were "short-listed" doesn't sound particularly official though, so I'd guess it's a POI interested in working with the applicant. Previous years don't mention anything about being contacted by phone at such a stage either. So hopefully the rest of us can maintain hope.

Columbia has a PhD in operations research with a financial engineering specialization. It's run by the IEOR department who also run a top 5 (2nd in the world on the advanced traders list I think?) masters in financial engineering program. I think most of their graduates go into industry, so if that's your plan it's probably the program to go for. It's one of the only doctoral degrees I've seen that really is a quantitative finance PhD (as opposed to a finance PhD or an operations research PhD where you can take a few finance classes), it has an unbeatable location for networking, and well, it's Columbia. I imagine it's difficult to get into though, the website says less than ten spots for a few hundred applicants. If a program at Columbia has a 2% acceptance rate, you know it's crazy hard to get into. Probably set for life if you make it though haha.

Every application I submitted explicitly said to list every bit of post-secondary education. Neglecting to mention the masters degree would (I assume) be considered gross academic dishonesty and grounds for immediate rejection. One of the books I read for my applications mentioned that all these universities subscribe to email lists so they can warn each other about people faking transcripts, letters of recommendation etc. So leaving out the masters isn't advisable. I'd suggest the best approach is explaining the low masters GPA in the statement of purpose, working with people to get better letters of recommendation etc.

A professor at my alma matter once told me he gets hundreds of emails a day from prospective students. As the poster above mentioned, most of them aren't qualified. If professors made sure to read and respond to each and every email, they wouldn't have time to do anything else. All you can do is send another email forwarding your original email and hope. You can't except them to be at your beck and call when literally thousands of students are trying to do the same each week. Really though, an enormous number of applicants aren't qualified, especially when it comes to the "prestigious programs." Do you realize how busy these people are? Do you really think they have the time to answer a phone call from a random person who statistically isn't prepared for their program anyway? An email or two is fine, a professor can read them if they are so inclined on their own time. A phone call that hasn't been organized in advance though? That essentially forces someone to put down whatever they are doing and respond to you on your time? It's such a massive faux pas I can't believe that you're the one annoyed at them.

There are two things that I can see. The thing that seems like it would be the most damaging is your graduate GPA; it just isn't competitive for the programs you've applied to. The perception at US universities is that grade inflation for graduate courses is enormous, and so almost all grad applicants are expected to have a 3.8-4.0 grad GPA. If you look at the results page, you'll notice an enormous amount of students who are very annoyed that their 4.0 from grad school doesn't cancel out their 3.0 from undergrad. Grad school grading seems to be viewed as so lenient that it can only hurt you, and adcoms likely see a 3.66 graduate GPA as a big red flag. Of course, I'm sure this is an entirely unfair way to view you, since you didn't do your grad (or undergrad) in the US, and so judging you with such standards may not be reasonable as they may not occur in your country. Yet you need to remember that you're competing with people whose applications don't have a single flaw. Which brings me to the second issue, that you're almost exclusively applying to extremely competitive programs. This I can understand since you're an international, and it may not be worth moving across the world for anything less. But really, consider applying to programs that are slightly less competitive, but of course are still good fits for you.

Someone just posted in a Berkeley IEOR rejection about the "top 5". What are these universities and does such a rank really mean much without going into specific fields? E.g. I've heard that Georgia Tech is the best place for industrial engineering, and that Columbia and Princeton are the best places for financial engineering. Such specialization could obviously have an effect on the overall "industrial engineering and operations research" rank, so do blanket ratings mean much beyond bragging rights (that aren't even necessarily a result of performance in an applicants intended field...)?

Considering the mass rejections from the Columbia IEOR PhD that have occurred since Feb 4 (i.e. no one has been posted as admitted since that initial posting of acceptances), I suspect that you're incorrect. Sounds like you've gotten a pretty rough deal. Were you doing the IEOR masters? I've read that they don't like to take PhD students from that masters.