Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing well.
It’s been about 1.5 to 2 months since I applied to PhD programs, and I’m beginning to worry about having not heard anything back from universities. I got some immediate contact from universities confirming that my applications were complete, but I haven’t heard from them since then.
I think my academic profile is pretty good (GRE Quant: 160 / Verbal: 164 / Writing: 5.5 ; GPA ~3.7 (Anthro: 3.96, Informatics 3.5), individual research in my intended domain), and I’m reasonably confident about my letters of recommendation. Nevertheless, the "radio silence" is making me worry that I might not be as strong a candidate as I thought.
From what I’ve read and heard, departments send out acceptances to their first round of choices (with some probability applied; if the department can take 10 people and 75% of admitted students historically take a department’s offer, the department might offer to accept 12 students, expecting 9 to come), then work their way down the list from there until they're full. I understand that in some programs the process doesn’t look like this, but in Anthropology, at least at my UG institution, that’s roughly how it works.
If that’s all really horribly mistaken, feel free to derail this thread and set me straight. If that’s pretty much right, then does this mean that, if anything, I’m sort of in the “middle of the pack”? Or do the universities/programs I’ve applied to typically take longer than a month to turn around with PhD decisions? I'm seeing people who have applied to programs with similar deadlines hearing back positively, and it's making me impatient.
Clearly I’m stressing about this, probably more than I should. Definitely more than I should (whatever happens will happen in time, and this isn’t helping, right?), but I would like to figure out where I am in all this.