emburst

Irvine is truly great. I wouldn't bother with Johns Hopkins —Irvine is clearly the rising star and they offer an incredibly generous fellowship. 

I actually grew up in Irvine —went to high school 4 blocks away from UCI. let me know if you have any questions about the area. 

EDIT: Plus, Irvine wins hands down against the gash of humanity that is B'more (sorry....)

Because not all people gravitate towards the same kind of work. People will react to someone's writing in different ways. They have experiences and preferences and preconceived notions that shape the way they react. And people's moods change the way they read something. They're reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of writing. It's reasonable that they would tire of a certain subject / style if the past number of samples all just so happened to follow the same style / content. And then there is the space issue. If they accept 5, and the waitlist is 5, still, that is just 10. The top 10 of 500 (or more) applicants. It's also reasonable to believe that committees make their offers based on the likelihood of an applicant's chance of going to their school. It's reasonable, I think, for a school to pass over an excellent applicant for a lesser so applicant that is more likely to accept. So they are any number of reasons (didn't even touch on the SOP and LOR factors), one's we can probably never know, unless we are on one of these committees ourselves.
 
Lesson I learned during this application season: Rejections don't invalidate my work. Also, acceptances don't necessarily validate my work either. I still have much to improve.
 
Edit: Forgot to mention -- if anyone is waiting to hear from Vanderbilt, they are notifying applicants tomorrow!

7 replies and nobody has bothered to ask for the relevant data in this situation?  
 
Pictures, man. We need to see pictures of this girl before we advise on the correct course of action.

Uh, no. The comment was inappropriate and misogynistic. Joke or not, this is not a place for these kind of comments. And this is coming from a guy...

You should compute it yourself

Easy to answer: It's never done, you just run out of time or collapse from exhaustion.

Although I did not need to submit a writing sample for my graduate school application, I think this is a common theme for a lot of things graduate students face (e.g. homework assignments, term papers, research articles, grant applications, dissertations, etc.)
 
In my opinion, the answer is "when you have other things you need to do and the time spent on this is no longer worth it". For things like this, we can always keep editing and working and after awhile, you quickly get to "diminishing returns". At this point, the time you spend on this is probably better spent on other efforts (SOP? studying for exams? relaxing to maintain sanity? etc.). 
 
But how do you know you got to this point? Mostly past experience -- you probably wrote a ton of papers in undergrad leading up to this point. You know when you've done a "good enough" job. Trust your instinct! An important part of graduate school is knowing when to let go and spend your efforts elsewhere.

When your facing diminishing returns, exhaustion and a growing heap of other shit to do your done.

Normally, I think it would be okay for you to remind them at this point (for deadlines on the 15th and 17th). However, since you only have had the link open for about week, I would wait until 2 days before the deadline (most people probably open the link about a month prior and send a reminder a week prior). Or, if you feel that you would be too pushy sending a reminder only 2 weeks after the first request, perhaps you want to wait until after the deadline to send the reminder (since most deadlines are for you, not for the LOR writers). 
 
When you send the reminder, I wouldn't just email them though. If possible, I would go into the application website where you entered your LOR info and click on "send reminder" if that is an option. This will cause the system to send your profs a reminder email that contains the link for them to upload their recommendation. Having the link handy is convenient for the prof and will probably make them more likely to do it faster!