moochie

Background: I have a long history of doing well on standardized tests. Double majored in chemistry and physics in college, and went to a liberal arts college so I never really lost the vocab/reading skills I developed in high school English classes. No history of testing anxiety or anything. Prepping for test day: This past June I registered to take the test on a Friday in mid-September, 2015. That left me a couple months to study while working full time at a national lab (I took a post-bachelor year to work). I sort of half-assed my studying until August, then I started freaking out and bought the Magoosh online study course and went HAM on it. I did every single question it came with (~2000 questions split roughly 50/50 between quant and vocab). I was dismayed to see that my first "predicted" score was ironically in the 60th percentile for quantitative and 90th for vocab. How could a science double major who has taken through linear algebra, statistics, and ODEs do so poorly on quant??? After some stress and reflection, I realized that it's not a reflection of my college math skills, but is instead just a bunch of memory tricks from high school math. That chilled me out and I was able to focus better and relearning the old math tricks I had forgotten that pop up ALL THE TIME on the GRE. In the end, I memorized a handful of geometry and algebraic shortcut equations, finished the Magoosh software, and scored 166Q/165V/4.5AW on test day. Note: I did literally zero practice for the AW. Being a native English speaker who took AP English in high school, that section wasn't hard. Tips: Bring dark chocolate and peanut butter granola as a snack. Endorphins + sugar + calories + tasty + some protein = no grumbly tummy or sugar crash. Also wear layers. Nothing is worse that trying to hold those standard number 2 pencils in nasty sweaty hands.

I targeted my proposal directly to the Army Research Office and the Office of Naval Research, so maybe one of them just sent their choices out around the 13th. Most of the people who posted about getting an award on 4/1 said they had written to the Air Force. I'm leaning pretty hard towards a branch by branch roll out of winners with the given info, but that's just my theory!

The number people "getting off the waitlist" this year makes me think that maybe it really wasn't a waitlist and actually was just that one or more branches hadn't decided on all the awardees yet. Especially because all four people who have posted on the results search, myself included, applied for basic science and not engineering, while most of the people who got April 1st acceptances were in some sort of engineering discipline. Idk I've just never seen this many people all get off the "waitlist" before.

Just got off the waitlist! Words cannot describe how excited I am! I called to make sure it was real, and it was!

I didn't come to the geosciences until after I had graduated with a double major in two non-geoscience fields (physics and chemistry), and then worked for a year as a systems engineer (also not geo). I'm attending CU Boulder starting this fall for a geology PhD, so you'll be fine! All my POIs were mostly interested in my quantitative skills (primarily my math and physics courses), so I definitely agree that taking ODEs is a smart move, even if it means taking one less geo elective (assuming you'll still be graduating on time and everything.)

Right? I've had to be strategic about rationing them so when people make decisions and post about them I still have positive votes left to give as congratulations!

Made my final decisions today! I accepted a PhD offer at CU Boulder in geological sciences with guaranteed RA funding during the school year plus double pay RA summers my first two years! I'm so excited! I got a great feeling from the department, my POI, and his students when I visited back in March. It felt like everyone genuinely wanted me there and wanted to support me in my grad studies. Plus Boulder is beautiful and has great culture and awesome food and bars and I'm really into backpacking, mountain climbing, paddling, and hiking so it's pretty much perfect for all of that. I withdrew my application from UCSD Scripps after sitting on their waitlist for months. I decided it wasn't worth it especially considering I had the better offer from Boulder. I turned down PhD offers at Purdue (with TA funding), Virginia Tech (with TA funding), and UT Austin (with fellowship funding). Good luck to everyone else on here as April 15th approaches!

The problem I see is that you still have more than a year to fix your grades, study for the GRE, etc and the way you asked the question makes it sound like you are trying to take the easy way out and just make up for poor scores/grades with a couple of research papers. This might not be at all what you are trying to do, but to me it sounds that way and so it's possible future POI's could misinterpret it the same way. I think profs value a good attitude/strong work ethic and would be more forgiving of GPA issues if you clearly had worked your ass off in your remaining time as an undergrad and also took the time to study hard for and ace the GRE. Papers will help, but they won't erase everything else. IN MY OWN OPINION: Bad grades + bad GRE looks lazy/unprepared for grad school. Bad grades + good GRE merits talking to the individual about why their grades aren't stellar (adjustment issues in college, medical leave, one bad subject etc). Good grades + bad GRE looks like a test taking issue or like you didn't take the GRE seriously. Good grades + good GRE looks like you are well prepared for grad school. None of those impressions are necessarily true, and probably are incorrect more often than not. But what I've gathered from going through the application process this year is you need to LOOK good enough on paper to get people to talk to you. Once they are talking to you, your application stats matter less than who you are and what you have to say. Is that fair? Absolutely not. But it is what it is. When I started emailing POIs last August, I just wrote the general, "Hi, I'm interested in your work on X. I am a recent graduate from X school and I majored in Chemistry and Physics. My own research interests are X and that seems to line up well with yours. Are you taking PhD students in the fall? If yes, can I talk with you more about your research?" I sent about 5 of those emails, and got 1 response. So I changed my email structure to say the same thing, but then after I sign my name I'd add, "PS. To assure you that I am a competitive applicant for X school's program, here are my basic stats. Double majored in Chemistry and Physics, graduated cum laude. 165V/166Q/4.5 AW on GRE. One year post-bacc research at a national laboratory. One summer research scholarship at same laboratory." I sent about 5 of those emails and got 5 positive responses. By framing myself in the best light possible I got my foot in the door at a couple top ten schools, and a handful of 10-30 schools. My point is, it'll be hard to frame yourself with good stats if you don't have any good stats. Profs don't have time to listen to everyone's life story, so you need to get your foot in the door somehow and GPA or GRE seem to be the easiest way to do so.

I got rejected for one fellowship, and waitlisted for another in the past two days. I'm still on a waitlist for my top choice school, and have been since January. Plus I have the kind of personality where I really like having things in my life planned and organized months, even years, ahead of time so all the uncertainty these past few weeks combined with the approaching April 15th deadline has been wreaking havoc on my stress levels. My body decided a great way to deal with the stress was to give me pimples like a 16 year old.

To those who said they were denied, what did your email say?

So the "still being considered" email basically means no, right?

I like your picture, germanhistory. I saw it and was like, wait I didn't post in that forum....

If I remember what I read in old threads correctly, it's fairly random.

No Award: G/E, G/E, G/VG Looks like I'm a good citizen with awesome broader impacts but am not super impressive intellectually. My undergrad GPA was average and my research proposal could have used some more development in retrospect. The feedback I got was very helpful though so maybe I can get a paper out or get to a few more conferences or something to convince them that I'm smart and win it next year.

I think as long as you are still early in your research career (ie an undergrad/no grad school yet) and have a solid research record with at least some presentations that came out of it you should be okay. My only "publications" are conference proceedings and classified technical reports (which due to their classified nature cannot be released to the public).