palindrome

How do you handle this? Thank-you emails? Nothing? How many days after the interview do I have to get in touch?

I think a lot of the shock at the stinginess of the offer on here is caused by the different funding expectations that science/math/engineering students have compared to humanities students. Offers in science can come to $30K/year. In English departments? Not so much. So just be aware that you can't compare this to offers from different departments. Good luck.

Thanks for commiserating, caput mundi. My biggest concern is that they'll reschedule this interview weekend for another weekend that I have an interview--I had an interview lined up for the next 4 weekends, and one of them already involved rescheduling. I have practically no wiggle room until mid-March. I just hope it all works out, somehow.

So I have been looking forward to attending an open house at a certain school in Sunny California, my top choice, for about a month. All of a sudden this blizzard comes along, and before nary a snowflake has fallen, my flight is canceled. No make-up flights are available until Saturday, by which time the open house will be done. What now? Will this hurt my admissions chances? The only contact I've had with these folks is when a professor cold-called me to invite me to the open house; needless to say I was a nervous, inarticulate mess. Has this happened to anyone else?

I was actually going to do this to my top choice, but they actually pre-empted me by calling me and inviting me to Open House weekend. When I mentioned on the phone that I was thinking of stopping by anyway in a couple of weeks, the professor on the phone did not at all seem enthusiastic. If anything, I think this hurt me.

*Start the process early (this was easier said than done for me!) *Email professors early. A last-minute email convinced me to apply to one of my top choices, but I would've been able to save myself some time and stress if I had contacted professors early! There are some programs where I didn't email the professors because it was too late, and I'll always wonder "what if?" There is no way of knowing whether anyone at a program is currently interested in your research subject until you contact them. Hell, I was recently surprised to learn that several faculty members at one of the institutions I applied to were interested in my research project. I had never even thought of contacting those people because they didn't list it among their research interests! *Be comprehensive in searching for programs that would be a good fit. There were tons of programs I didn't apply to because I had no idea they existed or because I thought there was no chance I'd get in. I got interviews at at least 3 of the 4 schools I actually ended up applying to, so I probably could have thrown in another program or two for good measure. *Statistics are (almost) useless (i.e., Your Mileage May Vary). The statistics may serve to divide programs and applicants into tiers of selectivity, but at the end of the day every case is different, and if you have a good rapport with a professor and share the same interests, you're likely to get in; otherwise, you're not.

I am going to disagree slightly with some of the other posters. UC San Diego had no word limit (I wrote 1400 words, and I got a callback). Chicago's psych program specifically stated that the committee found that the best essays were around 1200 words. There is no hard-and-fast rule. As long as your essay is engaging and there is no extraneous verbiage, it can be 1000+ words (so long as it's under the word limit)

Cool stuff! It's crazy that the Nestorians once rivaled the Roman Church in extent and influence (Nestorian churches in China! Priests in Genghis Khan's court!). The spread of Syriac Christianity is a really great example of how globalization is not a modern phenomenon, and of how West and East have come to terms with each other throughout history. Good luck!

I'm applying to Cognitive Science programs, with primary interests in psychology & linguistics and a quantitative/computational bent (I was a math & econ major in college). Good luck!

I applied to two separate but related programs at one school (not CMU). I was told the programs didn't even share notifications of invitations to interview or admissions decisions with each other.

Thanks. Just an update: the next day I emailed the secretary and received an email with the invitation. I also emailed the professor a thank-you note. He replied pretty tersely but politely. I never heard from the other professors he said would contact me. Did I mess up? I guess I'll find out when I go to this interview weekend...

I applied to 4 schools, all of them within 3 hours of the midnight deadline. None of them got my transcripts or GRE's before the deadline. I have heard back with invitations for interviews from 3 of those 4 schools so far. So I would say they understand that people need time to get their recommendations, transcripts and scores in. Most schools don't start sifting through their apps until a little after the deadline (usually after New Year's).

So I was just getting ready to go out the door this morning when I received a call from a strange number. I lost my phone a few months back and there are lots of people whose numbers I don't have, so I thought nothing of it and picked up. A professor started identifying himself, said that they hadn't made any decisions yet but my application was very strong and that they'd like to invite me to interview in February. I was incredibly nervous and caught off guard (I really didn't expect to hear from this program except for a rejection notice!) and I talked for 50 minutes, babbling kind of inarticulately and not very insightfully. The professor had told me during the conversation that some other people (the grad coordinator and three or four other professors) would contact me later today...but I have not received anything yet. I know that maybe they haven't gotten around to it, but is it possible to mess up so much during an invitation to interview that they change their minds?

<br /><br /><br /> Same here. I am definitely very glad to get in, and can't wait to meet the faculty. Good luck to you with your apps!

<br /><br /><br /> Maybe that's not what I mean--I am honored to be invited to a program, and I am quite impressed by the faculty there. I was just concerned that this acceptance meant I wasn't in at other schools with similar timelines. I think having some options is good when you're making a decision that will define your life for the next 5 years!

Hey, I also heard back from Cornell (yesterday). I hope you have further good luck in the admissions process!

I just heard back from a program with a Dec. 15 submission deadline today. It's a bittersweet revelatioin -- good that someone wants me, but it makes me worry that I didn't get into the other programs! Has anyone else heard back yet? EDIT: I just saw that this place has a "Results" page...awesome! That kind of calms my nerves.

I think taking the GRE should be necessary (though maybe I'm biased--I did pretty well on it). There's evidence that the qualities that it measures do correlate with academic success. Of course, there are other measures that contribute, but I think the GRE has something to contribute to the application package. But at the same time, as someone from a disadvantaged background, I think that it is downright wrong for the ETS to charge such exorbitant fees ($20 to send a school an email and CD w/ your scores???). It should be inexpensive. From the same perspective I believe that preparation classes should be proscribed as a matter of academic integrity (like plagiarism). That is, if they actually have any effect on scores. Our education system should be totally about merit and not at all about socioeconomic status. It's certainly possible to do well without preparation. I know this would be difficult to enforce, but so are plagiarism provisions--anyone who is found to take a prep class should suffer a severe disadvantage in admissions.

Ah, ok...you've done your research then! I've worked for both of them, and they were the people that I thought of when you mentioned your interests. Honestly I'd say it was a good choice to drop Columbia, though. The department tends to focus on social neuroscience these days. Herb Terrace is practically emeritus at this point (and no chimps any more, hehe), and Senghas, though fantastic, is technically at Barnard and not Columbia psych (like many of the most interesting psych profs currently at Columbia from a langauge/cognition point of view).

I was actually a math/econ major in college, since my school didn't have a linguistics major, or a cogsci major. I took every class in linguistics that I could at my school, though (and even took some that I couldn't!). I think I'm going to apply to schools better known for cog sci, but I guess I'll also apply to a few linguistics and psychology programs.

I'll do one better than that, eucalyptus--I'll PM you with an article. I hope you enjoy it. By the way, I see that you're interested in Columbia. Who are you interested in working with there? I know a thing or two about the department

Ha, if stupid things that happen in my life can make someone giggle, then it's not all a loss One of my goals as an academic is to use the word "pwnage" in an article so the lexicographers have to add it to the dictionary, hehe. Any way I look at things, they don't look good. If he wasn't interested in working with my prof, then I'm in trouble, because my prof wrote me an LOR. Also, if he's not interested in working with (or at least responding to) my prof, why would he be interested in working with me? Now it kind of makes sense that my prof seemed a little strange when I asked him to write a recommendation. I thought it was because he didn't like me at first, but other people told me that he spoke very highly of me to everybody, and that maybe he felt uncomfortable since he's fairly young (only 5 years out of grad school). Thanks for the encouraging words, though.

No, he wasn't the only one that I wanted to work with, but that only makes this situation worse. I love the department overall and its close integration with the linguistics department. You could even say I was enamored with the program more than withh any of the individual professors, even--so there were tons of other research interests I could've mentioned. I just happened to choose this one. I don't even know how likely a communication problem could have been. I got really excited about how this guy's work tied in to the stuff we are doing at our lab because I stumbled across a paper by the guy that recently came out. Connecting the dots I now realize that my PI is one of the editors of the journal in which the paper appeared, so my PI probably read the paper while it was in preparation and contacted the guy back then. If he was ignoring my PI even as the editor of the journal he wanted to get published in, then that's not a good sign, right? Anyway, it's good to see other linguistics people here. What are your interests in linguistics? Where you a linguistics major?

So, I submitted my app to my top choice yesterday. The research interests that I wrote about on my SOP were pretty much a synthesis of the work of my current PI (experimental psych work) and the work of one of the faculty members at the school I'm applying to (he tends to work with primates and in ethnography). Busted my *ss perfecting it for about a month. Today, I brought up this faculty member's work to my PI and how it tied in so well with what we were doing in our lab. My PI told me that he had contacted the guy a few times and the guy wasn't interested in the experimental work--the guy never even got back to him. Pwned. That's 2 weeks of work and $80 down the drain, not to mention I'm not getting into my top school. My PI was pretty much the only one of my professors who DIDN'T see my SOP before I submitted it, as he was pretty occupied with other things. Still, why didn't I bring this up earlier?

Hmm. That was a dumb question on my part. I guess it was more an issue of distribution than average load. I never took less than 16 credits, but in two semesters I took 20+ credits (6 or 7 courses). 15 credits/semester was enough to graduate. Thanks for the input, it was very helpful.