caprette

Hi all, Two weeks ago I had a Skype interview with a professor at one of my top-choice Ph.D. programs--he's a new hire fresh from a post-doc at my alma mater, so I hadn't gotten in touch with him previously or mentioned him in my SOP. He told me that I was a top candidate, but that other professors were looking at my application, too. He said that he would get back to me in "a week or two" after he talks to the other professors who are interested in me. The optimist in me is thinking that he wants to see if any professors with more seniority want to "claim" me first, but the pessimist in me says that's perhaps wishful thinking. Since it's at the end of the two-week timeframe he gave me, part of me wants to send a polite email just checking in and asking where I am in the process. Should I wait another few days? Is it a terrible idea to send an email like that at all?

Hi all, I'm applying for interdisciplinary environmental Ph.D. programs to start Fall 2014. I'm applying to Berkeley, Yale, Duke, UCSB, Michigan... pretty much all the schools with the most prestigious environmental programs. I took the GRE in July and I've been going back and forth on whether to take them again. (My boss, an anthropologist, thinks it's a bad idea to take them again, but my mother has started nagging me about signing up to take them again every time I call her.) My scores are 164V/161Q/4.5 writing. Not sure what happened there with the writing score, since I'm a good enough writer to be currently writing research papers for a living. Also, are the verbal and quantitative scores good enough? They are in the 93rd and 81st percentiles, respectively. If I take them again, I guess it will be sometime in mid-late October. I assume that will be enough time for programs with early December deadlines?