OSU is DEFINITELY the right school for glaciology. The chair of the department I'm in still works with OSU and travels to several glaciers to retrieve ice cores. It's really fascinating work. If I didn't hate the cold so much, I might have went that direction.
However, I hear OSU is really hard to get into due to popularity. I do think the majority of Masters candidates aren't notified until later. Good luck!
I keep having two daydreams about the Committee... in one, a professor runs in with my application, and as he bursts through the doors exclaiming "this is the one!" a shower of confetti explodes from the ceiling and a curtain pulls back to reveal a choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus as the dean wipes a tear from his eye.
In the other, the Committee has my application pinned to a wall and are throwing darts at it while laughing.
Does anyone else engage in endless imaginary committee meetings, where you analyze your application as though you are the committee? I'm in the weird situation of having been on the committee of the department to which I'm applying, and I know the people and the process almost too well (I have seen the sausage being made, my friends, and it is ugly.)
So I sit almost every day since i hit the submit button and play the committee in my head:
Does doobie make it past the first round?
158 applicants, 6 slots, 6 subfields
about 50 don't have the grades, gre's, sop to be considered, so they go (doobie is fine) (this is all sorted out in the first week of january)
108 to go, give them to two readers, who scale them from 1-4, 4 being the highest, based on 4 different criteria
readers are: professors, and sometimes two students, sometimes the dean (6-10 people)
these apps are read the second week of january
1. academic accomplishment (grades, GRE)
2. research potential (SOP, letters, writing sample)
3. leadership, extracurric (small part, but matters)
4. "personality" (Do I want to be stuck with this person for the next 6 years?)
I've got weak-ish grades in my MA but very strong in my BA and GRE, so maybe a 3 academically
In my own head I think I have research potential, but who knows what the committee will say? maybe if i'm lucky a 3.5
lot's of volunteering, particularly tutoring/teaching. maybe a 3.5 or four
personality gets tricky. the adcom REALLY knows me well--did I make a good impression? will this backfire? depending on who reads it, a 3.0 or a 3.5? could I dare hope for a 4?
at this point i probably average a 3.5-3.75, depending on how nice my two readers are (pure luck). then the office secretary puts together a ranked excel sheet, at this point NOT split by sub-field. bottom probably 25 people are almost automatically out, unless they are URM.
it's now the first week of february, and the application goes to chair of subfield (in my case my POI, who is also my letter writer); chair picks the top 5 people for the subfield from the spreadsheet
committee has the first actual in-person meeting at this point (first week of feb, probably a friday) where they hash the top 30 picks and reduce them to maybe 10, maybe 15. This is where the politics starts, and the nitpicking gets ugly. This is where I'm afraid I will come under scrutiny for a few B's that I got in grad school. Granted these were in very, very tough classes (advanced coursework in the world's second hardest language) but in the face of 30 other perfect candidates this may be enough to sink me. I also have a few small-ish errors on my SOP; again, in the face of perfection, this might be the straw that breaks my back. This is where my prof will need to "fight for me on committee," where alliances are made and broken.
If i make it into the top 15 (about 2 for each subfield, give or take) now it comes down to the question of which subfield gets people this year (last year mine took two, so it does not look good for me) and which advisor gets a new student (mine took one three years ago, so maybe this year will be the year). This is all hashed out in the second in-person meeting, maybe the wednesday of the second week of february, and this meeting is a doozie.
Then the chosen six go to the dean of the entire school, who (usually) rubber stamps the picks--unless GRE or GPA is super low (below 3.3, below 65%)
If you make it into one of the chosen 6, your POI will probably email you and let you know "congrats!" by the third week of february, at which point you have pulled out all of your hair and either gained or lost 15 pounds, give or take 5 pounds (ahem, cough cough, must stop eating Macdo as I cry into my SOP). And if not, the radio silence that lasts until march 1 is a good indicator that all of your hopes and dreams--at least for this round--are dead.
JM15 reacted to serotoninronin in Favorite Rejection Quotes from the Results Page