emie

I want to second everything 123hardasABC said. I just finished my PhD in Geophysics at a top 5 program, I got in to every PhD program I applied to, and I had a 3.45 GPA. GPA does not matter as much as it did for undergrad admissions. The really important things are research experience and recommendation letters, and it sounds like you are way ahead of the curve. I didn't start research until the summer after my sophomore year and never presented at a conference until I was in grad school. Stop worrying about getting in, and instead focus on figuring out what your passions are. People usually change their field of interest a bit between sophomore year of undergrad and grad school, and in my experience the difference between a happy PhD and a miserable one is a good match between student and topic/advisor. Start doing research into programs in the spring/summer after your Junior year, until then, relax.

I think your background actually sounds pretty strong. People get in to top 10 programs from unranked schools all the time, if they have good research skills, and good recommendation letters. Advisor connections help too. Don't discount your undergraduate research, either! Even if it's not quite the right field and it was a long time ago, a history of successful research and conference presentations shows a solid ability to do research, which is the number 1 thing they are looking for. So make sure it shows in your application. The most important things for PhD admissions are research experience and recommendations, and everything else like GRE, GPA, and school name come after. As for the GRE, buy some prep materials and/or consider taking a test prep class. My feeling is that your GRE scores just need to be high enough to show competence, and above some level the exact score doesn't matter. Not sure what that level is. It is important to talk to your advisor now about your desires to look at other schools, and tact is really important since his letter is going make you or break you. I would just approach him and say "I wanted to let you know I'm thinking about exploring PhD opportunities at other schools. Are there any schools you think would be a good fit for me?" If you want, perhaps mention that you could continue to work together during your PhD even if you are elsewhere, as many students collaborate with profs at other schools. My guess is that while he may be disappointed, he will understand and want you to succeed. If you wait to talk to him about it though he could feel he misled by you, so do it soon.

You might be interested in our computational geoscience program, which can either be done in 3 quarters (1 academic year) or in 5 quarters as part of a PhD track. https://pangea.stanford.edu/programs/compgeo/academics Of course, you would have to apply next year to start in 2015 at the earliest.

I am a student at Stanford in the School of Earth Sciences (SES). There are a lot of misconceptions going on here, so allow me to clear it up. We are 4 separate departments, not one single earth sciences department. Each department is in different (but close by) buildings. For the most part, the departments stay separate, with separate seminars, degree requirements, administrative staff, etc. However research collaboration between departments is not uncommon. Each department has 70ish grads and 14ish faculty. A typical faculty member might have 4-6 grad students, which provides plenty of personal attention. My lab has 6 students and I think it's a good size. I would say that 90% of the people (faculty and grads) in my department know me, and large fractions of the other departments as well. I never feel like grad student #167. I would say that our large size is because we are simply covering more research ground, with more specialties represented. If anything it's a really good thing, because for any earth sciences specialty we probably have someone who is an expert here. Overall I would say grad life here is pretty good.

I was an EAPSI NZ fellow last year. Acceptance rates are 10-25% for English speaking countries, and 40-45% for non-English speaking countries. This is due to both higher demand and lower supply I believe for Australia, NZ, and Singapore compared to China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They tell you this in the application decision info on fastlane, but I think applicants should know that before they apply.

It's 1000-5000 characters, not words, so that makes the 3 guidelines more similar. I wouldn't stress too much about the summary; I think the purpose is just to have a searchable public database so people can see generally what the GRFP program is funding. I second everything Tsujiru said about explaining like it's your grandmother - I was at the same NSF orientation, and it seems like they are valuing public readability over scientific precision for things like this, so words that are less specific but more widely known (i.e. not jargon) are preferred.

For New Zealand, the final acceptances were approved by RSNZ on Tuesday. I would guess that if you have a tenative acceptance, it's almost certain that you will have a final acceptance for other countries.

I got my tentative acceptance to New Zealand on Friday, with instructions to respond by Monday. Maybe they were waiting on some of those responses to get back to other people.

I won this year (yay!) and I have no publications, although I did present a poster at a major conference (AGU meeting, for others in geological sciences) and was a co-author on another poster. No reviewers complained about my lack of pubs, and in my field it is unusual for 1st and 2nd year grads to have journal articles, but is more common to have conference posters/talks by that time. I am a 2nd year student in a geological sciences field (don't want to be too specific as my subfield is small). edit: decided to add my stats, if anyone is interested. 3 reviews, E/VG E/VG and VG/VG with intellectual listed first. GRE is 800Q, 620V, 5.0 writing and one reviewer commented positively on my GREs. GPA was 3.45 in undergrad, 3.8 in grad, so apparently a 3.45 is not too low.