Eigen

You know, I don't necessarily agree that the history department was culpable for not being aware the application didn't make the GPA cut-off. Yes, they should have double-checked, but I feel the burden is on the applicant to make sure s/he qualifies for a certain program, and to get an exception in writing from the grad director if that is not the case. Probably the program just assumed the applicant, like all the self-selected others, met the Graduate School requirements and didn't double check. Or, some staff member just made a mistake when verifying the basic requirements and didn't get this one for some reason, eventually leading to the OP's unfortunate situation. People make human mistakes.

We expect grad programs to cut us some slack when, say, we attach the wrong files to our applications, but then we don't give them any slack.

I never said it was an individual prof speaking on his own behalf... I said it was an individual prof who was pushing for his acceptance (and got it). But then when it came time for the committee to have to (as a whole) request exceptions, the prof pushing for his acceptance could not convince the rest of the committee to request an exception- although he was able to push for the initial acceptance. Hence the committee (as a whole) deciding not to fight the administration in this particular case. It could also be a case of funding cuts limiting (after the initial e-mail) the number of grad students they could take in this season.

Just a thought.

People tend to view adcoms (or search committees, depending on what stage you're at) as the "enemy barring you from your career path", when really they'd like to accept as many grad students (or new professors) as they can, and are usually fighting the administration for as many acceptances as they can get.

You got an unofficial acceptance from the department, but something happened down the road from the department that forced them to rescind the offer. At least that's how I read it.

I think you'll find this happens even more on the job market than it does for grad school acceptances. Unofficial offers (or even official offers) for jobs get revoked all the time.

As has been shown by the PolSci Adcomm notes, as well as some computer science faculty posting recently, they certainly do post here.

That said, why start two posts in such quick succession?

So what do you want to go to grad school in?

Pol Sci/Public Admin are in quite a different vein than an MFA in creative writing!

I think you might need to refine your area of interest, instead of looking for "useful" MAs.

This is quite annoying. But also amusing. It almost seems to be people that want to brag about really high scores, but feel like they need a complaint to make it post-worthy.

Either that or they're really such perfectionists that ever getting a paper published is going to be quite difficult for them.

I can't speak for the new versions, but the old ones worked like this:

they start you out at a 500 point (average) score, and give you a question. If you get it right, you go up 200 points, and get a 700 point question. If you get it wrong, you go down 200 points and get a 300 point question. The point swings slowly drop (200, to 150, to 100, to 50, etc), zeroing in on the "point range" where you can consistently answer questions.

For each question you get right, you move up in difficulty, for each question you get wrong you move down in difficulty. The highest level question you can consistently answer correctly determines your score (hence the adaptive part).

The earlier questions have a much larger impact on your score- if you get the first question right and the second one wrong, you would be sitting at around a 600, whereas if you get the first question wrong and the second right you'd be sitting at around a 400. You're better off spending the time on the earlier questions as opposed to the later questions. You can still end up with a high score getting the first question wrong, it just takes much longer strings of consecutive answers.

The point values/question numbers here are approximate- they don't release exactly how the algorithm works, but they give you a general idea. It's not a test like the ACT or SAT where there are sliding scales for questions answered right/wrong and scores- it relates to the difficulty of questions you answer correctly- each question has a score value attached as relates to its difficulty level.

It also lets you feel how your performance is going... If you're getting lots of hard questions (or the questions seem to be getting harder) that's a good thing! And usually, getting the easy questions right is more important than getting the really hard ones right.

This is quite annoying. But also amusing. It almost seems to be people that want to brag about really high scores, but feel like they need a complaint to make it post-worthy.

Either that or they're really such perfectionists that ever getting a paper published is going to be quite difficult for them.

It sounds fine, but it isn't the way I would have gone.

I would recommend personalizing each e-mail, perhaps talking about some facet of the interviewer's research you found interesting- even paving the road for further conversation on their research.

Heh, I know I've worn shirts from my undergrad lots of times when interviewing/touring prospective grad students. It's simple: I have lots of shirts from my undergrad, and I don't seem to be hitting the "free t-shirt" events as often as a grad student. Nor do I really feel like spending the cash to buy something just to identify me as a grad student of the institution... That's what my ID's for!

And it's not like the prospective students don't know where you're a grad student.

On the Chinese student's question: Probably the only aspiring PhD students for whom a US MA has value are foreigners, since it gets you grades and recommendations from known people.

To the person complaining about 6 weeks spent studying for the GRE. Is it a waste of time learning to use and read English grammar correctly, or understand basic mathematical logic? Admittedly, the multiple choice and timed aspects of the test make it an imperfect test of these skills, but really any indicator we have short of a completed dissertation is an imperfect indicator of the relevant skills.

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From what I understand, that's not true at all. Just like a company can rescind a job offer at any time before a contract is signed, a school can rescind either the offer of admission, or simply the funding at any time before you accept and sign a contract with them.

An offer is just that, an offer. Unless you sign a contract with the school/employer holding them to their offer for a certain period of time, they can change or rescind that offer for whatever reason they want.

Once you accept, they can't rescind the offer... But until you accept, they are under no contractual obligation. It might hurt their PR a bit if they rescind offers too often, but I don't believe there is any legal barrier to them doing so.

I really don't think "if you write more, you get a higher score" is valid. I had 4 or 5 fairly short, well thought out paragraphs, and I got a 5.5. And honestly, there are quite a few times in grad school I've had 45 minutes (or less) to come up with a well reasoned response to something- either a short written summary/response, a presentation, or some combination of the two. And I'm not talking about class assignments here.

But the GRE AW writing section is not to "reflect the strength of a persons analytical writing skill", it's to provide a benchmark of their writing skill under specific conditions (namely, short time constraints & no references).

Also depends if you want to stay in academia or not.

In the sciences, at least, ranking is important... But the ranking of your post-doc is much more important than your PhD. So go to that small friendly department (that's not too horribly ranked), make good connections, do good work, and do a post-doc or two with a big name boss at a big name university.

I'll also note that who you did your PhD with is often way more important than where you did it- if you happen to work for a lesser known prof at a really well known school, that can often put you behind someone who worked for a well known prof at a lesser known university.

And when it comes to industry, I think the school name matters, but not often so much by how they're ranked. Some schools are known for good collaborations with industry, and that's more important than being a "top 5" school. Similarly, it's more important that your research was noteworthy than that you went to a big school.

What I've been told is to not completely discount rankings, but go where you'll be happy. Do well, get lots of publications, and put in your time networking, and you'll probably do fine.

I went to the lowest ranked school of the three I was accepted to- it was the best fit. And my boss here is well connected to big names in our field, which means if I do really well, I can probably get a post-doc with some of the top names in the field. And that will go a lot farther than getting my degree from a "higher ranked" university.

Wow, that's depressing...I scored 89th percentile on the English section of my GRE, received a perfect 6 on the writing section, and received an 82nd percentile on the subject test. I had a 4.0 GPA at the Master's level, and have multiple publications at academic presses including Brill and Routledge, alongside five years of conference activity and thirteen years of teaching at the high school and college level, and the writing sample I submitted is currently under peer review for a major journal in my field...and you are telling me that all of that means crap, because my Math GRE was a 480, thirteen years out of school.

If that is really the case, I sure wish that when I emailed to ask about that score prior to submitting my applications and fees, someone had told me "Don't bother, you won't make it past the first round because of your Math GRE score." But, I was definitely told that it would not keep me out of the running because of the rest of my application.

Realist, what program are you at.

I've posted here before with my thoughts about choosing graduate school. Seeing how so many of you are in the middle of this supremely stressful time, agonizing over admissions and deciding where to go, I thought that I would let you all have some insight into what the process looks like from the perspective of an admissions committee member. I do this for three reasons. First, some of you could use the distraction. Second, many of you are facing the prospect of asking "why was I denied at school X" and should know how difficult this process is. Third, this is the first time that I've served on an admissions committee and I frankly was surprised at how hard this was, so now that it's all over I want to record my own thoughts.

Some background: I am an associate prof at a large department that is somewhere in the 20-40 range. We're good, not great, and we place our students fairly well. We admit an average sized class for schools at our rank. We have somewhere between 30 and 40 times as many complete applications as we have spots in our program. Another 50-75 every year are incomplete (missing GRE scores, something like that). We do not hold it against you if you are missing one of your letters of recommendation, but if you are missing more than one your files goes into the incomplete pile and is not reviewed.

From there, the process works like this. Every candidate who submits a complete application is given an anonymous number. We then do an initial pass through the applications to eliminate students who are simply unqualified based on test scores. The bar for this is very, very low, but if you cannot score at least a 100 on your TOEFL and a 500 on each of your GRE sections you are eliminated at the very beginning. This doesn't cut a lot of people, but it does have the benefit of eliminating students whose English or basic math skills are not up to snuff.

From there, the files are divided randomly into piles, which are divided up across the members of the admissions committee without regard to subfield or anything like that. Each file is read carefully by a committee member and assigned a numerical score from 1-10. Anyone who receives a "1" at this stage is automatically forwarded to the final round.

The remaining files that receive a 2-10 ranking are then given to another member of the search committee, who re-reads them and rescores them. Any file that receives a "1" in this second stage is automatically forwarded to the final round.

The remaining files from this stage (meaning that they received "2" or lower on both initial reviews) are then divided up based on subfield and given to the member of the admissions committee who represents that subfield. That committee member then ranks the files a final time. Any student that receives a "1" or a "2" at this penultimate stage makes it to the final round, regardless of the earlier scores from the first two reviews.

The point of doing it this way is to ensure that we give every student a fair shake. Each student receives a close read from three separate faculty members, each of whom can advance a student to the final round.

We end up with around four times as many files in final round as we have available spots. Each committee member then ranks these students, and we have a big meeting where we decide who to admit and to waitlist out of this group. We then bring our proposal to the subfield representatives who are *not* on the search committee, and they have the ability to lobby for different choices from the final round (although they tend not to do this). From there, the department votes on the proposed list of admits and waitlisters.


***********


So that is how the process works in terms of procedures. I suppose that all of you are probably wondering how we decide who gets one of the 1s. The answer is that it is supremely difficult to do this. We make mistakes, I am sure of it. Our goal is to find people--and this is important, so read carefully--who can successfully complete our program and secure a tenure-track job. That is the outcome that we are trying to achieve; we are not trying to admit the smartest, the most unique, or even the most interesting students (although we do want these people too!). It's possible that other departments that care less about placement are more interested in just admitting smart people, and I bet that for schools like Harvard and Princeton, that's probably true. But for us, we want students who will succeed.

The challenge is that it is really difficult for us to tell what kind of applicant will be able to do this. We know that you will have to be bright, you will have to be creative, and you will have to be highly motivated. But trust me, anyone who has gone through a PhD can tell you, it's not like anything you've ever done before. Unless you already have a PhD, there's nothing that you could write in your application that will convince us that without a doubt you've got the chops. We have to make a bet based on imperfect information (and in fact, we probably are facing a game of incomplete information too, at least about your own objectives). It takes a special kind of person to do this, and I'm not certain how much we learn from pedigree, letters, grades, and test scores, but that's what we have.

What I can say for sure is that even if we only based our decision on pedigree, letters, grades, and test scores, that wouldn't be enough to whittle down our choices to a manageable number. We are dealing with a massive oversupply of qualified candidates. In my first round alone, at least 20 students were Ivy League grads with 3.7+ GPAs, 700+/700+ GREs, and glowing letters. We could have populated an incoming class with these alone, yet each other admissions committee member probably had the same number of people with similar backgrounds. Then you dig deeper and you realize the number of people with incredible life experiences, great grades, great letters, and all the rest, but from other schools. Or they have great writing samples that make it clear that they know what a political science PhD is all about, even if they don't have the very best grades. Or you get a student who has worked two jobs to pay for an education at a regional state university, someone whose drive and motivation clearly signals his/her ability to bring a project to completion even if s/he does not have the best pedigree. Or someone who's at the top of her class at a top-rank Indian university. I could go on. There are simply too many of these people for us to admit all of them.

So what does it come down to? At the end of the day, it's seemingly minor things like "fit," or "interest," or "promise." Most of these are beyond your control as applicant. If you don't seem to have a good idea of what graduate school is all about--many applicants, unfortunately, do not--you don't make it. If you make a big deal about how you want to work with Professor X, and Professor X is considering a move to a different department, we don't accept you. If your writing sample doesn't show that you can express yourself clearly, there is little hope for your application. If your application emphasizes grade/scores/letters/pedigree, but doesn't convince us that you have what it takes to succeed in the PhD, you're not going to be admitted. If you've gone straight through from undergrad, without the sort of life experiences that convince us that you know why you want to go to get an advanced degree, the bar is a lot higher (but not insurmountable). And these are very fine distinctions, and again, we definitely make mistakes.

There are two things that you should take away from this. The first is that, at least this year, admission to my department (admittedly, not the best one) was fiercely competitive. Unbelievably so. I have never served on an admissions committee before (my department only allows tenured professors to be on this committee) but I get the impression that it's gotten much harder since I got my PhD. The second is that you should not sweat it if you don't make into the departments of your dreams. I'd say that at least 80% of the total applicants in our pool this year were plausible candidates for admission, meaning that I would have been happy to admit them. We end up making a lot of hard choices based on imperfect signals of future professional performance, and to reiterate once more, we definitely make mistakes. Nothing makes me more frustrated than when we admit a dud (it happens). I am always happy to see a student who didn't make it into our department succeed somewhere else.

Best of luck to you all.

i think u may consider going to education school. and pick the maths education program.

Coyabean, I did not mean to be negative in my post. My idea was to provide a point of view that had not been previously presented--that even if you have worked hard and have achieved your goal of graduate study, having come from a less-than-privileged background, it is not necessary to develop excessive pride to overcome the possible lack of confidence and/or inferiority complex that you might (or might not) have. What I suggested was attaining the confidence and getting rid of potential inferiority feelings without having excessive pride, because other people have worked just as hard. You may disagree with this message and be defensive about it, but I see how it can also be interpreted as a positive, rather than a negative, post.

The point of providing my story was to reinforce the point I made at first. Namely, having come from a low-income background, I do not feel I'm better than those who happened to have been born in wealthy families. I do not think it should be a criteria by which to judge people in graduate school. Now, you can decide if it is a destructive or a constructive idea.

I apologize for providing anecdotal stories instead of results of diligent data collection. I'll go do that and report back to you. Would you like me to write a paper for you?

I'm not gonna answer every single thing you said. I'm not sure why you went through all of that effort, but I think your post was certainly more of a personal attack than mine. In fact, I think your attack on my post was way more douchebagy than my post. And your suggestion about censoring me...well, I think there are reasons for you to consider being embarrassed about it.

In any case, you may continue in the whining mode as much as you want, I just reminded of the possibility of looking at at it a different way.

Ok, forget it. You're right, I'm wrong. Keep it up. I'll go do some work instead, leaving you with some Kipling to consider: http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/poetry/rudyard-kipling.html

This whole thing renews my interest in an anti-douchebag internet filter, though. Could someone in one of the CS threads maybe get to work on that?

OK, someone has to say this--this thread seems like a collection of cheesy college application essays. You're already in grad school. Do you still need pads on the back? Here, good job, good job.

You know you did good work and made good choices. Other people know you did good work. But so did virtually everyone else who got into good grad schools. No one is going to look down on you for coming from low-income families or for being first generation students, and if they will--they're just a bunch of jerks.

I grew up in Eastern Europe and came to the U.S. at 19. My parents' combined income at home was less than $1000 a month, for a family of five, which wasn't much more when adjusted for PPP. Yes, I went to a college well below in USNEWS rankings than others I was accepted to, based on financial aid. Yes, I had to work crappy jobs in college. Yes, I studied while some other people went to Bahamas for spring break. Yes, I worked hard academically and missed some fun. But so did numerous other people from way wealthier families. In America, parents' income does not equal kids' income. A lot of my upper-middle class friends had to serve tables, work at supermarkets or for maintenance to pay their college bills, but they never asked for a pad on the back. I am well aware of the outcomes of my graduating class, and it's those that were motivated and worked hard that succeeded, regardless of parents' education or income. In terms of grad school applications, parents rarely ever know enough to be more helpful than, say, thegradcafe.

In my graduate program, the vast majority worked very hard to get here, and still work hard. Grad life is not a lifestyle of luxury for virtually anyone. Things valued in grad school are intelligence, motivation, hard work and humor, not family background.

So, I suppose it was worth answering someone who was unsure about the social environment and attitudes in grad school, but 5 pages of rubbing each other's egos for "overcoming the odds?" I thought it would end on page 2, at most. You've made it, congratulations! Now get over the "disadvantages you had to overcome" and get down to work to continue to succeed.

If it is a personal statement, including your background story is fine. I'd still keep it brief though (1 small para). Schools who ask for a personal statement are interested in knowing your personal journey to where you are now. For mine, the outline basically was:

Brief Intro Para 1: background story ending with why I chose the field i am applying for (this would be the 'fluff' portion)
Para 2: School experiences surrounding my major
Para 3: Life/Work experiences
Para 4: What I want to focus my studies on and why
Brief Para 5: Why I want to go to X University.


My entire statement was 1 page. Not double spaced or anything like that (2 pages double spaced I guess). It was tough to keep it short and sweet, but most places have word limits anyways, so it worked out for me. You want a WHAM-BAM-THANKYOU-MA'AM type of letter. Put it all out there as succinctly as possible. Use the best of your limited space!

PhD Comics for Every Occasion!

Grades Don't Matter #1

Grades Don't Matter #2

That said, I'm sure it is somewhat field dependent. In most STEM fields, B's are "meh", B+/A- are average, and As are good. I got a B+ my second semester, and it didn't really faze me at all- and hasn't really effected how any of the prof's view me. Even the one that gave it to me thought I did fine in the course, from what I can tell.

Everyone cares much more about the research, publications, etc.

You got a near perfect score. You'll live. Cut the self righteous attitude and sass because no matter where you are, it will only affect you negatively. And from the personality you portray on the internet, it will likely affect you behind your back without your knowledge.