nervouscomparativist

Thanks. I was already getting nervous, they said official letters would be out this week.

Have any of the Columbia admits yet received the "official" letter that was mentioned in the mass email? Any info on funding?

In at MIT as well. Assuming UCLA and Harvard are done accepting, this is the end of the process for me, which by itself makes me happy.

Excellent thread. I was also not sure what to ask when I got some emails offering phone calls etc. I´ve gotten around that now, but still unsure about what to ask professors during visit weekends... Well, I guess I´ll just be spontaneous ;-)

Well, I guess what poppory meant was that dropping out of a program (e.g. because the weather sucks and you hate to live there) probably isn´t good for your career either.

Have any of the UCLA admits been in comparative? I really want this thing to be over so I can celebrate... ;-)

Congrats to those who got into UCLA! Did your email mention the date of the prospective student event?

In at Columbia, rejected at Princeton. Man, it was a wild party yesterday...

I´m not fully convinced we´ll hear from Columbia today, but it would certainly be a good start of the weekend (or, a really bad one)

Speaking of funding... do people here have experiences with stipend negotiations? (sorry, slightly off-topic)

I also got that email; why do you think it´s a problem?

Also rejected from Yale; feels weird, but i better get used to it I hope Berkeley isn´t done with admissions yet, it´s the grad school of my dreams ...

In a way you´re right: If the adcom knows the prof who wrote the letter (and thinks that the prof himself is a smart guy/gal too), that certainly adds credibility to the content of the letter. However, my main point is that GPAs don´t really say anything (even if obtained at a good institution); looking around, I would say it´s true that most smart people have high GPAs, but the opposite is not true. For many majors in undergrad, and especially so for polisci, grades measure effort rather than talent. So while it certainly doesn´t hurt to display effort, a professor saying that you are a really bright kid and have all these great ideas is certainly better, especially when adcoms need to distinguish between many many people who all look really good on paper.

Thanks. I´ve been wanting to say that forever. I think it´s pretty obvious that the objective criteria many people are posting here (GPA , GRE and so forth) don´t go a long way towards explaining admission success. That´s good in a way, because GREs are a pretty bad indicator of academic ability, and GPAs are not easily comparable. Other professor´s opinions are probably more highly valued; for example, think of the many many ambitious and hard-working students with low to mediocre intellectual creativity (or even interest), some of which are interested in academia primarily for the career (and the title). An Adcom cannot possibly sort these people out by GPAs and GREs (they are probably even disproportionately good at those), but other professors can (and do). Of course, this does not imply that people that got rejected even though they had good objective stats are always part of this group. But, relationships with professors certainly matter (and their importance sometimes gets diminished in this board, because they are unobservable from our perspective). In terms of research interests, I ´m pretty sure that it pays to be rather specific (and demonstrate proficiency); not necessarily regarding your interest in the future, but at least about some research that you have done before. There is no better way to judge the research somebody will do than by the research he or she has already done (which is, by the way, why the writing sample, another "unobserved" component" of the application that is often neglected here, is probably pretty important).

Yes. My absolute favorite. I really hope they´re just playing with some of us until tomorrow... Actually, SuddenlyParanoid, it´s a good sign you haven´t heard from them yet, because they are going to admit you for sure, and will certainly do so tomorrow...or am I dreaming?