Infinito

3rd interview invite over the phone. And the curse of phone calls. I verbally committed while being barraged by a whirlwind of information to attend one interview, and then an hour later another program called me and their interview weekends conflict! Now to do the delicate dance of seeing if I can interview at another time. One program doesn't have an alternate weekend. I hope the other might (an umbrella program).

Just got a phone call invite to another program in the Northeast I'll continue being vague until after the Holidays / January. But know that they are going out in waves!

Shhhhhhh. Don't tell people. Don't need more competition. Lol, JK. This good stuff. Thanks for spreading the love <3

Me to Adcoms: "Hello... It's me... I was wondering if after all these year's you'd like to meet..." Adcoms: "YOU HAVE BEEN INVITED TO X." Months later when you're staring at people that were rejected and haters that didn't believe in you: "HELLLLOOO FROM THE OOOOOTHER SIIIIIIIIIDDDDE~"

There we go. Just got my first interview invite. I'm going to be courteous and not say which one of my programs it is so people don't panic and ask where there invites are, etc. I'll post all the ones I hear from in January. Breathe, friends. It's a skill that will take you far in graduate school, especially where there are no barometers that indicate how well you are doing.

No. Calm down. We're not here to feed into people's anxiety and worries. Plenty of invites have not been sent out. You already received an interview from a top university and should be proud and excited for things to come.

Don't read too much into it. There are many reasons for that. You could also, if you have a conflict, say you need the first weekend. But, it's usually either due to the following. a. The department of interest you have (within an umbrella program) puts on you a different weekend; b. It's set by the graduate school and not the department, so it's to make sure the whole campus isn't flooded one weekend; c. It's based on rolling admissions (i.e. someone's app was approved first so they designated them to come the first weekend until all slots filled up, then you got bumped to the second weekend); d. The lowest probability option is that the first weekend interviewees have a higher rank, but this isn't viable in most places because schools don't send invites unless they have too low applicants, or you have a 70% chance of being admitted because they want you. It's not cost effective to make people interview and pay for them to come if the department thinks you aren't already a viable candidate. So breathe. Don't think about it. Just go with it.

Thank you for that reminder. One of my friends who sat on the Michigan committee literally told me the same thing - to ignore people that have so far posted they have interviews. It apparently happens every year. It's this website's version of trolling. Hence, why I'd like people to consider not posting that they received interviews on this thread, and rather make a new topic like INTERVIEW RESULTS or INVITES or something. Because the spam that occurs when someone posts "I GOT AN INTERVIEW FROM X" followed by 2 pages of "CONGRATS!" and "WHAT, THEY ALREADY SENT OUT INVITES, I DIDN'T GET ONE! AM I REJECTED!?" is really annoying when this whole post is about people's stats and where they finally got into, as an easier method of searching the survey results. I'm not about reading 130 pages of posts like I had to last year, that was filled with off-topic discussion. I, for one, will probably just post all my interview invites in batches, starting in January. I'd hope people can consider doing the same thing, and not plaguing the rest with anxiety attacks.

This was addressed a few pages back, but then search function will help you as this was also tackled last year and in previous years. People in the international forum may have better answers. Here. http://forum.thegradcafe.com/ Apart from that, please contact the schools if they haven't given you clear instructions or options.

Just wanted to remind people about a few things as this thread gets heated, spammed, and becomes quite unhelpful for people that will read this in the future. 1. Keep it positive, but that doesn't mean criticism isn't allowed. I won't reference a recent post, but, yes, people should avoid talking about things they are not experts in. Unless you're a student on an admissions committee, please don't make it sound like your comments are fact. There is a lot of nuance to PhD admissions. 2. Yes, people are getting interviews. Calm down. Some schools utilize rolling interview invites. Most programs that have umbrella biosciences also have direct admit programs that send invites earlier. Other school graduate admission policies send out invites for all departments at the same time. The larger the application pool, the longer it will take. Us overachievers applying to top 20 programs should not expect to hear anything back until January. The best thing you can do is to just double check that all your official transcripts and test scores are in, and contact departments as needed to make sure a mistake wasn't made. I recently contacted a department that said I had only submitted an unofficial transcript, but found it that status was made in error and promptly changed it to official. 3. Instead of coming here every day and asking whether anyone has gotten an e-mail/invite/notification from X University's Y program, let's be more constructive. Here are a few time points people should consider. a. Wait until the Week of Dec 21 for programs that historically reply earlier. After that, most programs will be on holiday breaks, and they will ask professors to read applications over the holiday break and get back to the admissions committee by the New Year. b. Week of January 4 will be the next round of contact/interviews, but that is not the end-all, be-all. After this point, based on whether people decline interviews or not, there will be rolling communication with applicants that had not been contacted. c. Week of February 1: By now, most people will know whether they have already been rejected, or have an interview. A low percentage of people will not hear anything until after some other interviewees have had interviews. This is usually for schools that have multiple interview weekends. If you applied to a good swath of schools, you should be content with having heard positive things from a few schools by now. d. Week of March 14. Most interview weekends in the top 20 programs are done. If you haven't heard back from them by then, it's most likely a No. e. April 15. Deadline for people to accept program offers, as long as programs are part of the Council of Graduate Schools (which pretty much 99% of accredited programs are). 4. Breathe. Binge on Netflix. Find something to take your mind off the process. Pick up a new coding program. Send your LoR writers cards. Check out the Waiting It Out forum for more lovely Grad Cafe support HERE. 5. Post your stats on this thread. Especially if you've been lurking. This will be great for next year's round of applicants. And remember, as you hear back, or at the end of the cycle (which I intend to do after I get accepted to programs), post to the Grad Cafe Survey. Other than that, post away. And try to keep off-topic things restricted to private chat or another forum <3

Agreed. I applied to Neuro and CMB/Umbrella programs. Though, I'm happy for this to be the neurotic thread where people keep asking if people received interview e-mails or not, or heard back about stuff, in order to keep the other thread cleaner

I planned mine ahead of time for that reason and looked for conflicts. Either way, it's not important until you're invited, because those conflicts might disappear. If it came to it, I might just weed out some schools that conflicted, or ask for later Skype interviews with faculty.

Not international here, but most schools will not fly international students for interviews. They usually have you do Skype or something. Wasn't that part of your options? As far as how much it would be worth it for you to fly here on your own, I have no clue. I would assume that a good Skype interview would weigh just as heavily as an in-person one, except that you won't be able to get a good feel for the area, other graduate and potential students, and some of the minutia.

You're fine. It's not like they're just going to disqualify your application because of that. More than anything, they'll either skip your resume, or skip what your wrote on the work section. I doubt they'll read both unless your resume didn't include it. I personally uploaded a two page C.V. for that reason.

Oh, damn! Well, I guess it's better to find out sooner than later.

That's pretty much what my approach was; though for some programs I reached out to about 5-10 people, got about 3 replies, so it makes sense. It's time consuming, and your e-mail shouldn't be generic. I definitely investigated the PIs and their websites, and looked at an abstract that I felt was representative of what I would be interested in doing with them.

Haha, I'm probably going to apply for this next year when I'm in graduate school. After meeting some of the previous recipients, I feel inadequate haha. And don't get me started on the Hertz.

Looks like they extended the deadline for LORs until Friday, due to an outage that occurred on November 3rd. "This message is being sent to notify you that the deadline for reference letters for the 2016 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) has been extended to Friday, November 6, 2015 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time due to a FastLane outage that occurred on November 3, 2015. All reference letters must be received by the November 6th deadline; there will be no more extensions."

Contact their department, or their lab manager, or someone in the lab instead of them directly. Also call if necessary. I reached out to my PIs lab manager, and they have been handling all contact with my PI.

@pterosaur - Haha, I'm in the same boat right now. The best example of an awarded NDSEG I found was from HERE.

Is anyone converting their NSF GRFP application into something else? Like for the SMART or NDSEG Fellowship? Wonder if people have suggestions about easily and painlessly doing it, haha.

This is usually true, but insiders in academia have a bit more insight beyond mere school ranking and GPA correlations. For instance, I've heard before from professors at the Ivys that a 3.5 at Harvard will NOT be weighed more heavily than a 3.5 from an in-state University. Some of the Ivy Leagues have documented grade inflation (think Harvard, Brown), while others have deflation (Princeton, Penn, Columbia). It could actually be said that a low GPA from a top tier university with known grade inflation will hurt you. On the other hand, a low GPA from Caltech would be understandable. Then there are the unconscious biases where people might assume a low GPA in engineering is excusable as compared to a low GPA in a "soft science." Either way, I'm betting that top tier graduate committees have enough people that are aware of these nuances to allow for "holistic" admissions.

Submitted for Life Sciences. Time to take a break for a few days, then back to graduate school apps. Oh, and hounding my LOR writers to submit their letters to the NSF.

This makes me happy as I wrote about science policy as well in my intro and ending. Yay!

I'm pretty sure my LOR writers will do a generic greeting. There's no way programs will hold this against you; you can't control your writers so much.