GeoDUDE!

They did. My undergraduate GPA is 3.05, probably equivalent to a 150/150 GRE. I had to do a masters first. It was in an undesirable location, at an unknown school, and while I enjoyed working there, would have preferred not to have made that detour. You can make all the assumptions you want, that's fine. I have trouble with languages, so I spent 2 years working on something I didn't have to so I could get into a quality PhD program. But those are also college level courses. The general GRE doesn't test anything at the college level. I'm proof that you can get into a good PhD program despite flaws in their application. I'd be really interested to see what the gender splits look outside the united states, in places where the myth (http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/the-myth-of-im-bad-at-math/280914/) doesn't exist. The test may very well be flawed, I don't know if it is. I have never said it isn't. I do respect the fact that there is a gender bias in academia. My mother went to pharmacy school because her research advisor in undergrad (chemistry) told her she was too stupid to get a PhD. That kind of thing happens more to women than men, especially in STEM. We aren't going to solve gender (or even help) equality by getting rid of a test. We are going to solve it by treating women with the respect and equality they deserve. If you believe otherwise, its a complete disservice to the cause. We might help gender equality by getting rid of social stigmas that are rooted in education, starting from preschool all the way to tenure committees. Why do we use GPA to evaluate candidates either? In my program, classes are a joke, a formality required by the graduate school to be enrolled in a doctoral program. Isn't it possible that programs want to get as much information on the student as possible? The truth is that we will never know how the students who did poorly on the GRE despite having a reasonable application beside will do in graduate school. How do we know that they won't have a higher drop out/ failure rate than the others selected? Furthermore, of the students who do well in graduate school despite the GRE, they were evaluated suited for other reasons. Maybe their SOPs were just dynamite and the other low GRE candidates were just not as hot as they really thought. But more importantly, graduate programs aren't stupid. They track students success internally, see who does well and who doesn't. I guess in the name of fairness, graduate programs could take some of the money they are given for research and teaching assistants and go through the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of apps without any basic criteria. A lot of graduate programs don't put a lot of weight on the GRE. What often happens is that the graduate school has minimum requirements: like a 3.0 GPA or a 300 combined on a GRE. Perhaps just getting rid of that minimum requirement would do a lot of good. I'm not sure. 300 seems awfully easy to get. Difficult problems are hard by definition, but solving these types of problems should be a graduate student's bread and butter. Perhaps if someone can't hunker down and relearn all the math and vocabulary they should have learned when they were in high school it should be harder for them to get in graduate school. Why shouldn't it be? Because the people who did poorly who did poorly on the GRE but somehow made it in did well? Isn't that selection bias ?

I've already addressed this in another post: But there is also a selection bias. People in physics and philosophy tend to score higher than people in education and english, and I think that physics and philosophy is much better preparation for the GRE than the latter 2 majors. And there is a major demographic disparity between those two groups. Professors and graduate students have to do different things, the GRE isn't meant to test one's ability to be a tenured professor. MS students outnumber PhD students, and the GRE is used for MS candidates. PhD students fail for a number of reasons. This is just one test. No one claims its perfect, but people who do poorly dismiss it because A) they can't test well they are not who they thought they are. I'd rather not have the test, but lets not be completely dismissive just because we aren't good at something. Thats not how we get better at stuff. I have difficulty with languages, I still passed latin, spanish and chinese. The difference is I don't whine about it.

When I went to my accepted students visiting day, I was honest with my now advisor. I told her that I needed summer funding to live in my current place, that I decided I would not be enough to live comfortably. She agreed, and while it wasn't guaranteed for most students, almost all of them get summer funding so it was easy for me to leverage. She also knew I had other offers at slightly less ranked schools but with a considerably better funding package. This bridged the gap. It wasn't really a negotiation at all, I just asked.

Just a note, if you have an assistantship, a lot of departments do not allow you to have a part time job or you have to clear it with them first.

Some schools do (WashU notified me, put a very small number on the wait list (single digits)). Some schools don't. Columbia09, is really early, you should be freaking out if you haven't heard anything by late march / early april. Do your self a favor and pour yourself into your studies and social life. There is pretty much nothing you can change now. I didn't get my MS acceptance until late Feburary. MS students are a low priority at many of the schools you listed. Its entirely possible they are just waiting to see if they can get PhD students before offering someone a MS.

I also was in a similar situation, I had to defend in June before my advisor left for field camp and then go on to a PhD program! My thesis ~10k words and ~20 figures was edited in 5 days because my advisor worked a lot to help me graduate fast, IE I sent him a copy, he sent me corrections, within a few hours ect.

Its a national holiday fwiw

Its probably better just to take it at face value instead of pretending this is the DaVinci code. I mean, that will keep you from going crazy at least.

Hey Sophie, here is some unsolicited advice: I think its a tough decision, but you know if you are interested in academia, what you do for you PhD is probably not what you will be doing 20 years after you finish your PhD. The important thing about PhD work is that you enjoy doing it, and fits within broad interests instead of specific interests. For example, I applied to work on computational geodynamics problems, but beyond that, advisor and lifestyle fit (and some prestige) s what matter more to me. It didn't matter as much to me if i was going to work on subduction zones or crustal deformation ect. What was important to me was that I had a mentor that could help me build the skills I needed to acquire to attack the difficult TYPES of problems I wanted to answer, but not exactly specific problems. I have also found that my approach to solving problems has improved exponentially in graduate school, so the type of things i'm interested investigating has also changed. I think the most successful graduate students in geosciences have 1 main project and a few side projects they work on with collaborators, and those collaborations (at least the ones im currently in) are on topics I never would have thought I would be able or interested in studying. When choosing where you go to graduate school it is imperative that you think about who might be at those places and not who you are now. Do you like the person you might become? Then thats a good sign to go. I am glad you see this season as a success, as I'm not sure Caltech/MIT is an upgrade from Brown's department (in general, of course). I have a friend there now, and my undergraduate advisor and masters advisor both did their PhD there. Have you visited the department ? I think it's very mature to think about not going to graduate school at all when you have such a great offer. But I also caution you to not overlook something because you had such a specific interest or your hearts set on another place. Either way, I don't think you can lose at this point... which is a great place to be!

You know, I was a huge procrastinator all my life, and I still am, and objectively I'm doing very well in graduate school. The difference between undergrad and grad is that because you always have stuff to do, you are always working on something at the last minute. I'm not saying don't try and change this, I'm just saying that procrastination is still possible (and seems very rampant) in graduate school.

I think most people over worry about how little their stipends are. I had a 13k a year stipend + 2k a year students fees and still pocketed a few hundred a month in the bank after bills. I ate out, went to happy hours, cooked whatever I want. Sure my rent was only 375. But Now i'm making roughly double and my rent is also double. So its still doable. You will find ways to conserve. I highly suggest you do not take out the loans.

Mine started in october (quarter system). So they vary.

Actually, now that I think about it, my friend applied to only 1 school (top 5) for graduate school last year and had not gotten in by April. He wasn't rejected or anything, but admissions offers had obviously already gone out. He won both the GRFP and Ford fellowship and he let them know and the next email was an acceptance. So yeah.

Same here... the PNW is completely devoid of my speciality.

My department sends offers to the maximum amount of spots (say 15 for example). Those make up the first and second tier candidates that year. If those spots are not filled, there is a small pool of 3rd tier candidates that get offers after they have been declined, but they mostly go unfilled because those candidates have already accepted another offer (this mostly happens after april 15th or so). We have a very high yield rate the past 2 years (~90%) and I'd expect that to be the case for most graduate schools (yield rates going up) so there are less and less spots being offered.

Geographyrocks has it right. Almost no place gets 100% yield (happens sometimes, but rarely). Even MIT has about 30%(if I remember from last year) of its applicants decline. There are so many factors when considering graduate school.

The point of that post is the nuance, yes its a discriminatory test, but taking it away won't stop the problems. Also, the GRE rarely keeps truly good candidates out of graduate school. Thats why we have holistic processes. Most cutoffs aren't based on actual percentiles, but objective scores: 300, 310, and 320 are common ones. I disagree that the GRE isn't based on what you have or will study. Its just not advanced material. Everyone needs to know how to recognize simple patterns. Everyone needs to know how to read a document and answer questions about it. Everyone needs to know how to make coherent arguments. Thats really what the GRE tests. Our preparation for the test is all different, some of it because of discrimination, some of it because of where we are in life. The test isn't the evil empire, and yeah it could be better, but you know the GRE as far as tests go is pretty cheap. The BAR exam takes thousands of dollars. The GMAT is 250. LSAT is 170. GRE is 160. While that is expensive for some, I realize that, compared to the price of graduate school that is pennies. Yeah, they make a lot of money. So do book publishers, music labels, banks, technology, oil, ect. And guess what, Colleges do to. The GRE is a VERY small component of a bigger issue. Getting rid of it will change very little, but I'd actually bet that you'd find more Americans failing out of graduate school if you took away the GRE. Another interesting note is that our "holistic" admissions process for college/graduate school came out of the early 1900s antisemitism. Admission into the best colleges (Harvard, in this case) was based on GPA + Test Scores completely. Soon Harvard found that their admissions classes were 40-50% Jewish. To combat this, Harvard changed the game, started requiring essays, extra curricular and background. The idea is that they weren't just interested in the smartest students at that point, but who had the most potential by the time they graduated from Harvard. Well that was the politically correct reason anyway.

That's exactly what you should do. I'd be shocked if someone won the GRF but couldn't find a home AFTER getting the award. The biggest reason for a candidate getting rejected is funding,minimum standards are actually really low relatively.

Yeah, Sarah is great darkstar. She's a researcher here, and runs a couple of the labs so she gets salary + soft money just like any faculty. She does take on grad students, but she is not faculty. My impression of her is she is a great advisor, at least from what I've heard from her students.

Apply for internships. Apply for grants to fund summer. TA classes over the summer. Before I accepted I negotiated summer funding into my contract. That might work for you.

Does UT pay for all these students to come out? If they have THAT many weekends for students who are not yet accepted..... that must mean they invite 100+ students.

Forgive me for being a little rude, but for being so "eye opening" you haven't really read my post. I never commented on what MOST people are doing in this thread, but what particular set of people are doing. its really disheartening that you aren't taking the time to listen(read) to whoever's points. I don't blame you, victorydance hasn't been the most eloquent or nice in his responses. I probably wouldn't bother responding to him either. I'm pretty shocked that I'm responding to you to be honest, because short of "f****", you have been just as dogmatic. And maybe your right, but it really doesn't matter, because I wouldn't call this conversation civil at this point. Point your fingers at whoever you want. And when did I ever state the world is fair and unbiased? In fact I said the opposite, and have been worried that in our attempts to create a balance we end up creating a society with a different imbalance, as evident by your vitriol. That we have to think critically of what we should and should not assume, because a world where we assume that everyone here is out to hurt us is the kind of world we read about in dystopian books. And while I realize that women might take the crown for the most discriminated group of people in history, and at present, I am no stranger to discrimination. I am just offering some thoughts, because my particular group of people have had a lot of trouble getting past that, and our country (Israel) falls into these problems all the time. Yeah, I just made that comparison, its not 100% equivalent, but the mentality is strikingly similar. I refuse to live in a world where I think everyone is evil. Maybe that is my "privilege" as a male or whatever. Perhaps I need to be checked.

I'm really hoping, that victorydance is just doing a lousy job describing a situation that requires a bunch of nuance (hahaha, a bunch of nuance, what an oxymoron). I don't think any educated person can say that gender discrimination, especially against women, is not a problem. What I have tried to suggest, and maybe victorydance ( I hope), is that when you start to assume a scatter plot trend (ie, the instances when there is discrimination) applies to every particular situation. I realize that this is a burden, and on online forums we can take stronger stances with less fear of consequences, but that assumption init of itself is discrimination. A group of X attacks people. Every time someone sees an X, he/she thinks they will be attacked, when in fact, the majority of the time X's do not attack. Thats when we get the patriot act.

Actually, and I might be wrong, LEDO, WashU and Uni of Chicago both put a lot of emphasis on balance of interests when admitting students. From what I know (and again, I could be wrong, because I haven't been in any of their meetings) is that they actually rank students before the POIs even see your application, and then, encourage POIs to nominate students from the top of their rankings. Again, I don't think there is a program where the POI is not important, especially when the have an open grant, but you can bet that POIs have MUCH less say than the consensus of the committee when its a department funded or TA spot open.

If you sent them a thank you email, what is the worst that will happen?