museum_geek

Sometimes I wish I had never found out about the results page...then I think to myself, "it's been 5 minutes, better check to see if anything new was posted."

@eggz Congrats on the acceptances and welcome to GradCafe! If you don't mind me asking, how did UW Madison notify you? I'm applying for a different subfield than you (cultural) and there's no updates on the wisc.edu portal for me. I wasn't expecting them to notify so early - guess I'll be checking my email even more frequently now!

Just my two cents, but I think it's worth it to apply. You've mentioned before that you've had some trouble finding programs that fit your interests - I think if you find a place with professors who specialize in your topic then you shouldn't let differing regional interests stop you.

I'm so sorry to hear that! What are the other two schools you're waiting on, if you don't mind me asking?

That's one humdinger of a story, partner.

@EvelynD So sorry to hear that! Keep your head up - it seems like it was an especially competitive applicant pool this year. Not to mention they notified you almost a week later than me, so you were probably down to one of the final cuts!

@homogenius Congrats, that's fantastic! It's good to see things start to pick up - feels like application season has started in earnest.

Anyone claiming any of those WUSTL interviews? Exciting stuff, folks!

I don't know a ton about medical anthro programs but hopefully the thread I linked will help a bit. Good luck!

@youinreverse I got a really nice email from the DGS this afternoon. It was actually a pretty nice, thoughtful email as far as rejections go (at least compared to what I got when applying for MA programs). I wouldn't say you have zero hope of acceptance - they haven't sent you any bad news yet which is surely a good sign. Keep the faith!

Getting rejected sucks but I'm not super surprised tbh - my POI is on academic leave this year and I don't think my project is as specific as ND wants. Also, I just realized that I put my GRE scores in backwards on the results page. It should be 163 verbal and 150 quant, not the other way around

Just got the bad news from Notre Dame. Apparently over 75% of their applicants already have a Master's degree, which they said worked against me (even though I'm in the final semester of my MA program). At least they were direct about it - this sucks but it's definitely preferable to an implied rejection or being left hanging for the next 3 months.

@MedAnth2016 I'm also applying to Hopkins. Not sure why they extended the deadline - could be that they didn't get as many applicants as they wanted by December 15? It looks like they extended their application deadline last year too, so I don't think it's a big deal. @EvelynD I'll go with the others here and say late January/early February is when to start expecting to hear back. Did you apply to Notre Dame? After I submitted my application, I got an email from the DGS which said they would finish reviewing applicants by January 16 and that we should expect to hear from them with either an interview invite or a rejection by January 20. I'm counting on that being the first news - good or bad - that I'll get this season.

I applied to UW Madison's Anthropology PhD program and my application status page is now the same as yours. I guess it's a general Graduate School thing rather than being specific to any single applicant or department. In any case, I'm glad someone else posted about this, otherwise I would have seen it and started freaking out for no reason!

Happy New Year folks! Here's to a 2017 filled with acceptances and generous funding packages

Good call - better safe than sorry!

I spent a couple minutes poking around the website and couldn't find anything, and the Harvard GSAS website only says "writing sample needed when required." You might consider emailing the department secretary or DGS.

I'm not having too much trouble with the waiting right now because most schools are on holiday break and I know that adcomms aren't going to start looking at applications until after New Year's. I'll probably be a nervous wreck once we reach January, though.

I don't know much about Iowa other than they're known for their feminist anthropology concentration. Definitely worth checking out some faculty profiles to see if they have anyone who has research interests similar to yours. Good luck in your search!

Gotta agree with @Bschaefer here. I would also recommend emailing the department secretary, as they often deal with a lot of admin stuff regarding applications.

It's part of a professor's job to submit letters of recommendation. They know that it's part of their role in academia and if they aren't up for it then they shouldn't agree to write a letter in the first place. From what my current advisor has told me the letter itself doesn't really change from school to school aside from minor details - once it's written it's just a matter of uploading the file via the link that gets emailed to them. One of my letter writers submitted letters to 7 schools in the span of an hour the other day. Bottom line, it's not difficult to submit a letter of recommendation once it's written, and asking a letter writer to submit for more than 10 schools isn't asking too much. As long as you give enough advance notice to your letter writers then it shouldn't be a big deal for them to get this stuff in by the deadline.

Off the top of my head I know UConn, Pitt, and Boston University have strong medical anthropology specializations. Looking up medical anthropology on the AAA website's PhD program search should yield more results.

I feel your pain, applying for MA programs when I was working one full time job was bad enough. I can't imagine applying this cycle with two jobs! I can also identity with the "I'm sure you did everything wrong" nerves, especially since I found a typo in one of my SOPs where I had an extraneous comma. At this point all you can do is try to relax and enjoy the holidays - I'm sure January will be stressful enough as is!

The waiting really sucks but I feel like the end of semester grind is really exacerbating things. Once break starts and I have some time to unwind and not think of everything in terms of my next deadline I feel like I'll have a better grasp on the waiting game.

When one of your letter writers submits all their remaining LORs in one day