overdetermination

I would also be curious to hear the reasoning and outcomes of people who actually contemplated making or have made this decision. I think I've decided what I'm going to do about my offers, but without the benefit of advice from anyone who strongly considered or decided to reapply. My reasons to potentially reject a solid offer are primarily personal/logistical, but also the thought that I'd be more competitive, as @dirkwww says, after publishing and with the benefit of having gone through the process once.

My understanding: in "undergrad GPA", the 'undergrad' refers to your educational status, not the course designation. So your UG GPA would not be recalculated to incorporate UG courses taken post-graduation.

If you were just talking about personality compatibility, shouldn't you encourage people to be themselves so everyone can suss this kind of thing out honestly, rather than trying to conceal some kind of mysterious "weird quirks"? Which @dancedementia suggests could be as trivial as liking anime? (The other points on your list are not "weird quirks" you could conceal for a day, they are behaviors that manifest precisely because people are trying to impress and are self-conscious.) I am honestly trying to figure out what you might have been talking about for this reason: You have populations of people on the autism spectrum, people who have social or performance anxiety, people from other cultures or subcultures, who might behave in a way that is different without at all being wrong or bad, unless you find deviations from social norms internally intolerable somehow. You're telling people like that that they can't be themselves, the their nature is a liability, and then putting the onus on them to fake it through rather than calling out the circumstances that apparently give people license to judge others academic worthiness on their hobbies or harmless personality traits. It's more than a little messed up, which I grant that this whole process is, but we don't have to actively contribute to it by adding in extra layers of judgment, fakeness and jerkery.

Can you provide an example of a "controllable idiosyncrasy" or "weird quirk" that reflects poorly on someone's capacity to perform in graduate school and would therefore be a reasonable ground on which to judge a prospective applicant?

I'm curious what others think about this, too. I don't think the fear is specific to clinical, but it might be a subforum norm set by the clinical folks and the relative intensity of that process. I say this as a cog person who caught the paranoia and started purging remotely identifiable information awhile back. Paranoia could of course be endogenous but it's tough to articulate what exactly I'm afraid of happening if some hypothetical thing gets back to some unknown one.

awesome sauce

OH GOOD thanks folks. I was worried about this, too.

I also wanted to say that outcomes in your prospective programs is something else to look very closely at. Even a relatively small amount debt is crippling if you can't get a job that pays a decent wage (and even if the eventual outcome is a good job, you may be spending several years after graduation as a poorly paid postdoc). You want outcome statistics, not outlier examples (oh, we just placed somebody TT at U-XYZ). It's extraordinarily tempting to assume you'll be among the lucky few, but don't. Assume you'll be in the bottom 50%. Especially if you are an aspiring academic, it's important to have a viable "Plan B" if that you can't get an academic job, so check out the alternative careers of people in your prospective lab (lab in particular rather than program overall, since alternative career paths will be determined skills acquisition).

The obvious thing to say here is that for the research PhDs, those figures include the apples and the oranges--both funded and unfunded students/programs. Which is not to say that people who walk into a program with full-funding necessarily leave with no new debt. Folks take longer to graduate than their programs would like/can afford, stipends don't stretch as far as they'd hope. But not knowing what the ratio of funded to unfunded PhD students is, it's hard to know what to make of that median stat of 30K--or of the 2/3 figure, as it pools PhD/health profesh/PsyD. I can't speak to any experiences accumulating debt at the PhD level, but my (possibly unpopular) opinion is that PhD programs that can't afford to fund their students should stop admitting or close up shop, and that no one should accept an offer without funding. And everyone should look very closely at their funding offers with respect to cost of living in the area, median years to graduation in the program vs. years guaranteed, consider whether they already have debt they should start paying down, and ask a lot of questions about funding--of current students where possible--when given the chance.

This weekend is (most probably) my last one, too. I am not looking forward to the wait-with-nothing-to-be-done that comes after...but I am looking forward to meeting your SO all incognito-like!

That sounds like a looming acceptance to me, especially if they don't conduct in-persons.

Can anybody claim the Rochester BCS invite on the results board from last week (or for that matter, the message below it regarding invite timing)?

Trust me, you would so much rather be opening this app 27 times an hour to see if you have a new cat or a enough fish to buy a burger cushion than refreshing your email at comparable intervals. The game apparently instilled in someone the will to live: http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/22/10800378/neko-atsume-review-life-changing It might keep you off this site for a little while! ...or you might be like me and inexplicably return here to post pictures of your virtual cats...

Don't know I did get an email from my POI so I have a little more info I can PM you.

@FeeltheBern, did you get new info on UIUC? On 1/14 someone PM'd me to say they'd not met yet so I've been wondering...