GradSchoolTruther

MIA programs also want your money.

For top programs, I'm seeing median verbal scores at 165 and higher, while quantitative reasoning scores are generally 162 and higher.

90th percentile would never be considered low by an admissions committee. even in humanities programs. Sorry, but GRE scores aren't going to be the tiebreaker. At that point, it's LORs and SOPs.

90th percentile is not "very low."

Undergraduate publications don't matter for many fields.

After all your applications are in, have a conversation with the DGS or department chair.

Grad school is stressful. We can tap dance around it as much as we'd like, but at some point, you need to decide if you can cope with the stress. If you can't, that's OK, since lying to yourself that you can cope is, by far, the worst strategy to pursue.

The whole "cultural norms" stuff is bollocks, especially at the graduate level.

Need to contact the chair of the department. Chair has to be a member of the university you attended. Advisor, I assume, can be an outside reader.

How in the heck is a deadline for a paper to be published an extenuating circumstance? And how do you get a paper published in such a short time in any journal that would matter to an admissions committee?

To be more precise, half the class will be below the median. :)

There are many other schools out there, but most top schools do not give funding for professional master's degrees. If you want to work in government or a think-tank, concentrate on landing good internships.

Depends on the institution.

After WGU, you could always get a Ph.D. from Capella University, and then wonder why you can't get a tenure-track job.

Why spend the money for a master's degree from a program that has little respect in the academic community?

Find an advisor you can work with on a professional level, and also try to find one that will challenge you instead of just signing off on everything you do.

With those GRE scores, I wouldn't consider your "safety schools" as that safe. For example, you'd be in the lowest quartile for all of your GRE scores, and in the middle quartiles for your GPA.

Find out which programs offer assistanships. You likely won't find much help, though, for professional programs such as MBAs.

Devopment of rudimentary forms of social media among Anabaptists in the Swiss Cantons in the 17th Century.

Why is it trollish to tell the truth here? Two of the OP's LOR writers think the OP needs time away from academia to improve their social/life skills. That isn't something to gloss over and say "Their advice is meaningless. You can do it!" The one thing I've noticed about these boards is the lack of telling people what they need to hear. Grad school is not a place for people to find themselves.

Go to grad student activities. Make friends with people in the program. Helps with loneliness.

We all make our own decisions. No one can decide for us. But you either want to be guided through every step or be validated through every step.

Too often, Ph.D. students think they need to be a clone of their advisor. That's not the case. You're looking to work with a person or people who can grasp what you are trying to do and provide helpful criticism of your work and your methods to prepare you for the academy.

From the responses, I can see why you're LOR writers think you need some time away from academia. You need to be able to think independently to succeed in grad school and not rely on someone else to spoon-feed you information.

Your role as a scholar is to answer questions. Readers want to the "So what?" and "How are you going to answer this?" And you need to be able to boil down those answers to a few sentences, at least when describing your work.