BuddingScholar

Wow... you have a wonderful resume.  I bet you will be accepted by most schools, if not all of them.  Best of luck!

*Thread hijack*

I find it quite ironic how you preface your assertion by stating a qualifier "I taught high school in an inner city district". You may have "taught" in an inner city district, but it seems to me you have failed to really teach yourself about your students and the circumstances of their surroundings outside of the confines of your classroom. To suggest a "big" part of the achievement gap is due to poor students making "bad" choices really ticks me off. No, a BIGGER part of the achievement gap is having privileged people come into inner cities, 8-5, leave the classroom and go across the tracks back to their respective green-lush suburbs without interacting with the actual environment that those who you've taught had to live in and thus, making authoritative commentary about how they know the BIGGEST problem which ails their academic success. Have you ever stopped to think that a "big" part of poorer students making "bad" choices are those choices based upon SURVIVAL and not just "bad advice" like their affluent counterparts? Have you ever known any of your students whose parents tell them to not come in the house until they have such and such money for rent, no matter if they have to steal, rob, etc.? Survival. An affluent teenager drinking or smoking dope? Bad choices. See the difference? Sure, we all to some extent know right from wrong, but how can you instill that moral depth in a 5 year old when they grow up in an environment where a human life isn't even valued? Where they can't play outside without fear of being shot? Take that contrast to an affluent 5 year old, who is taught to value the environment, the polar bears, the trees and other nature-oriented things? It's staunchly different worlds. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but I see this "blame the victim" attitude all the time, as if poorer students are somehow incapable of making good choices. That is simply not true. A responsibility of privilege, like I was fortunate with, is daring to be uncomfortable with your surroundings. Want to know poverty and suffering? Try going to a minority-serving institution for college and living smack in the middle of the projects, as I've done and even others have done a lot longer than I have. Do that for a few years and I'm sure you will see how these kids arrive with their "bad choices".

None of the graduate students in my program "come from money". Most range from 1st generation college students, to middle class.

In fact, very few of the graduate students I've met in other programs "come from money".

That said, I think your metrics are off. You're basing what people have done in the past with their monetary background, when it could also just be different priorities.

I know lots of people who've been all over Europe and Japan, with no parental support at all. A plane ticket and a backpack isn't that expensive, after all. Especially in the humanities, many of the students I know make it one of their top priorities to travel during the summer- it helps with perspective for their work, language fluency, etc.

I'm 35 this year. I think I'm a little older than you! It just worries me.

Agree on not wanting to tell your recommenders you didn’t get in anywhere. Also not thrilled with the idea of potentially having to ask them to write another recommendation…

I am probably one of the few nutjobs who has a website.  That's right... a website!  So now I follow [obsessively] my website analytics to figure out where the hits come from and how long they are spending there.  I can report that Princeton and Yale have started looking at applications.

Is that too much paranoia?  Do you think ADComs are reading these posts here?  I wonder if, even here, we ought to write beautifully.  I know, I know, I am going insane.   

This is more general, but I absolutely can't stand that you can't be logged into more than one Applyyourself application at a time. It would have been so much easier to fill in the more rote sections (ie, educational history) all at once, assembly-line style, than to do each one individually. But maybe that's just me!

Thank you! Its quite discomforting to think that there are potential graduate students who are attempting to be part of top institutions like Stanford and think that they can just co-opt someone's struggle and lived experience to get "brownie points." It is a shame to think that these type of students will then go on to represent their institution.

So thank you again for this post runaway.

So I was filling my stanford application today when I noticed a section on diversity. I started wondering if anyone would make up a story to get brownie points on the diversity test and I thought that the easiest way to fake would be to lie about one's sexual orientation. I mean who can check, and you can always say that you are bicurious later.

Thoughts? did anyone do that successfully? I am just intrigued by this possibility and can think of a little john grisham'esque plot for a novel on these lines.

Just jumped on chat, but no one over there understood my art feelings! We should set up art history pow wow times.

Now I'm panicking. Mine has said "Documents Pending" for weeks. The only thing missing is Proof of English, which I don't need because it's my first language. I'll be in the fetal position under my desk if anyone needs me.

What I've heard from adcomm members at my program, and at a few others (although none that I've applied to) is that decisions are made before profs go out of town for CAA. Whether they inform before or after CAA seems to be random... or is it? Let's look at the numbers!
 
Culled from the GC results, I looked at earliest acceptance date to PhD programs. If the acceptance came a month or more after rejections, I noted WL for likely wait list admit. Those wait list admits as n/a when I looked at how many schools notify before CAA vs. after. I picked the 10 schools at the top of the "rankings" posted in the thread below as a sample group.
 
2007 - CAA Feb. 14-17th.
 
Berkeley: 3/5
Chicago: n/a
Columbia: 2/9
Yale: n/a
Princeton: 4/4 WL
NYU: 3/12
Harvard: 2/27
UCLA: 2/16
Northwestern: 4/4 WL
UNC: n/a
 
Notify before CAA: 1
Notify during CAA: 1
Notify after CAA: 3 
 
 
2008 - CAA Feb. 20-23rd.
 
Berkeley: 4/6 WL
Chicago: 1/30
Columbia: 3/6
Yale: 2/28
Princeton: 3/4
NYU: 3/1
Harvard: 3/4
UCLA: n/a
Northwestern: 3/3
UNC: 3/10
 
Notify before CAA: 1
Notify during CAA: 0
Notify after CAA: 7
 
2009 - CAA Feb. 25-28th.
 
Berkeley: 2/11
Chicago: 3/3
Columbia: 2/14
Yale: 2/23
Princeton: 2/18
NYU: 3/12
Harvard: 3/2
UCLA: n/a
Northwestern: 2/18
UNC: 3/17
 
Notify before CAA: 5
Notify during CAA: 0
Notify after CAA: 4
 
2010 - CAA Feb. 10-13th.
 
Berkeley: n/a
Chicago: 1/31
Columbia: 2/14
Yale: 2/23
Princeton: 3/2
NYU: 4/10 WL
Harvard: 3/8
UCLA: n/a
Northwestern: 2/18
UNC: 3/3
 
Notify before CAA: 1
Notify during CAA: 0
Notify after CAA: 6 (2 within a week)
 
2011 - CAA Feb. 9-12th.
 
Berkeley: 2/23
Chicago: 3/23 WL
Columbia: 3/4
Yale: 2/15
Princeton: 3/4
NYU: n/a
Harvard: n/a
UCLA: 2/18
Northwestern: 2/16
UNC: 3/1
 
Notify before CAA: 0
Notify during CAA: 0
Notify after CAA: 7 (3 within a week)
 
2012 - CAA Feb. 22-25th.
 
Berkeley: 2/14
Chicago: 2/4
Columbia: 2/24
Yale: 2/20
Princeton: 2/2 (unofficially by call from POI - 2/8 was the more common acceptance)
NYU: 3/9
Harvard: 3/2
UCLA: 2/9
Northwestern: n/a
UNC: 3/14
 
Notify before CAA: 5
Notify during CAA: 1
Notify after CAA: 3  
 
Range of first notification:  
 
Berkeley: Feb. 11th - March 5th; mid Feb. most common.
 
Chicago: Jan. 30th - March 3rd; late Jan./early Feb. most common.
 
Columbia: Feb. 9th - March 6th; mid Feb. most common
 
Yale: Feb. 15th - Feb. 28th; mid - late Feb. most common.
 
Princeton: Feb. 8th - March 4th; early March most common.
 
NYU: March 1st - March 12th; early March most common.
 
Harvard: Feb. 27th - March 8th; early March most common.
 
UCLA: Feb. 9th - Feb. 18th; mid Feb. most common.
 
Northwestern: Feb. 16th - March 3rd; mid Feb. most common.
 
UNC: March 1st - March 17th; early - mid March most common.
 
Conclusions:
 
This was not a useful exercise. Programs tend to notify within a established date range <1 month, regardless of CAA. The years closest to 2013 regarding CAA timing are 2007 and 2011, and for both, decisions tended to come after the conference. 
 
Other conclusions:
 
This was a welcome distraction. The most popular notification date was February 14th. Admissions committees are so romantic.

That's certainly possible, straightshooting. Though I will mention that I have lived in the downtowns of far larger cities than New Haven and greatly preferred them inasmuch as they were efficient and convenient to get around, either on foot or by car.

But yes, some people may like New Haven's quirkiness I suppose. If you are one, then I hope my message was helpful in letting you know what kind of place it is.

Two notes, though -- if you think that crime like New Haven's is "just how it goes in a city," then I'm sorry your urban experience has been so negative, and assure you that many of the United States's largest cities offer much more than you apparently have so far demanded of them. Second, even most of those in Yale who like a pedestrian, urban lifestyle far more than I do seem to be nonplussed by the unavailability of such basic necessities as food without going to the suburbs.

Good luck!

I'm also a minority and applied for a Jan 2nd deadline, and didn't get that email. So maybe it does mean something! Now I'm nervous...

But the status page is pretty nice, no? And at least you don't have to page through the ENTIRE app to get to the section where you left off, like Michigan and Brown.