alienatedlabor

After you formally decline an offer, do you email all the professors/POI who have reached out to you to let them know? I emailed a few professors who had detailed conversations with me, but there were some POIs who simply emailed me with "congrats! let me know if you have questions". I suspect that they are busy people who don't really keep track of this and don't care that I've declined the offer, but I don't want to inadvertently leave them hanging or something, especially since the academic world is pretty small.

I did not post the UPenn acceptance on the results search but I was also admitted. I saw the email when I got up this morning-- it was sent at a weird time, like in the middle of the night. Email was from DGS and said funding details to come. Email mentioned: "You are under no obligation to make a decision prior to April 15, but if you do know earlier that you will not join us at Penn, please inform us as soon as you have made a decision. We have a few admits who are on a waiting list for funding allocations, and we cannot complete their offers until we have clarity on our numbers." Hopefully that helps? For what it's worth I will probably decline the offer; hope that opens a spot for someone else!

Thanks! That is really helpful to know.

thank you for starting this thread! I'm in a similar position-- really did not expect to get into multiple programs-- and am surprisingly anxious about fielding multiple offers. For me, the part that caught me off guard most is the recruiting calls/emails. One school I got into has hardly recruited me (two emails from current students, one email from a junior-level professor), but another school has been very aggressive (five emails from mid-level faculty and two phone calls). Both schools are actually of similar fit and rank. Should I be reading into this at all? My guess is that different programs just have different protocols for recruiting and some schools are more aggressive than others, but this has really given me the impression that I'm wanted so much more. I don't want to read too much into this, because I'm not sure if a lukewarm recruiting effort will actually affect my graduate school experience much. Is anyone else experiencing something like this? How much does recruiting matter?