robobaggio

I ended up doing my Mphil at Cambridge in '06 but was also admitted to the parallel Oxford Mst (20th century or thereabouts, forget what it was called exactly), and I believe that I only submitted two recommendations. So I doubt very much that you will be disadvantaged seriously for sending only two letters. Good luck.

For the Berkeley status page (ourunit, or whatever it is): does everyone else have files listed under recommendations and transcripts that say "merged" and are dated January 31st? I doubt very much that this means anything terribly positive, but is it possible that Berkeley doesn't even begin looking at applications until February even though they have a December 8th deadline?

I saw that on a forum here, I believe (or perhaps it was WGI), and then a former professor told me that he has a friend at Chicago, and "would not be surprised" if they were reducing the size of their cohort. But this hardly concrete evidence, and it seems you know far more than I! Was I right that Chicago tends to admit in one round? I tried to gather that from the results posted here.

To be honest, wheel_of_fire, I think that you may have misinterpreted the email a bit. Chicago tends to make only one round of acceptances, and I've heard that they are accepting an extraordinarily small cohort this year (2-3 total acceptances), so my guess is that they've accepted those two or three candidates, and wait-listed only a handful of others. If one or two of those candidates chooses to go elsewhere, I'll bet that your chances are good. I'd be thrilled if I were you!

Agreed. The only thing that I can think is that maybe the poster means by "finals" the applicants who get past the original screen (for low GPAs, GREs, etc). It would make some sense that the writing sample not be needed prior to that screening process.