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...

@finch I just checked the website, and received an email from the Grad School not long after. During interview weekend (did I see you there perhaps?) my POI (PM for details) more or less assured my admittance so I was expecting it, but oddly enough I haven't received any messages from him since the notification from OSU.

Resurrecting the perennial topic. Is there anything (current and fairly sound) out there besides NRC and US News? What metrics do you use in lieu of published rankings to gauge departmental reputation in your subfield? How much do you worry about departmental reputation re: eventual job prospects?

I feel the need to share with @FeelTheBern and pretty much the whole world that aforementioned SO was *just* accepted to Stony Brook (more or less his top choice), which means we just might be able to swing this thing if I don't flub up at NYU (or for that matter, if I get into Stony Brook). Dance dance dance of happy dancing! To @psychgal2112 : I'm finishing a master's, went back several years out of undergrad. Not my first go at applications, though my first go at Psych PhDs (I did a round of philosophy apps many years back and struck out, but it was very instructive experience.)

Hey, if he goes on 2/19 I can wear a funny hat, and you can tell him the funny hat person is someone you know from GC and...yeah, that would be strange, scratch the hat plan My SO is in Political Science (with a social psych/behavioral bent); there is a big area of topical overlap in our interests so we like to speculate about collaboration if we can pull off the move to PhD. @Gvh I had a very similar first interview! I prepped half the day for a 15 minute chat that resulted in an invite, but I was much better prepared for my in-person afterwards. You know, it's a funny thing: I am not a perception/vision/psychophysicsy person, but a lot of departments that are good fits for me have a deep bench there...I'm guessing because of the methods--I'm looking to do computational cognitive modeling.

@FeelTheBern two things: I agree about cog psych sluggishness and it's starting to make me crazy! I was expecting to hear from 3 - 4 more places these past two weeks, but crickets on the results board. Also, are you applying in conjunction with your SO? I am--but he's in a different discipline. We applied to mostly overlapping schools, his results are a few weeks behind mine historically. The anxiety hoping we'll get into colocated programs is *intense*.

If the goal of the MA is to launch you to a PhD, you don't need to try to accommodate all of your interests within the MA! There are a few directions you could go, degree wise, with that topical focus. Psychology. Neuroscience. Communication studies. Music cognition. Build-Your-Own. But. The question you should be asking about master's degrees isn't "what will I study" but "how will this help me" and "how will I pay" -- unless money is no issue for you, MA/MS (you should look into MS, too) degrees are pricey and typically unfunded, and some fields are more likely to have programs that provide some level of funding to students. I know neuroscience programs will sometimes fund, more often than psychology is the impression I get. I can't emphasize enough: start shifting your thoughts from coursework to research as your vehicle to knowledge ASAP, and the whole process will go more smoothly. If your goal is to improve your applicant profile for PhD programs, you need to focus on research activities and should be looking for potential advisers who do the kind of work you think you'd like to do, regardless the name on the department/program. "Unfocused" in general is something committees don't like to see/hear, but there's a difference between someone whose work is unfocused and someone whose work is focused but spans several domains. If you are in the latter camp, you can probably imagine the kinds of projects you'd like to work on. So then, think about 1) what skills you need to do that project and whether you could get those skills in your potential program, 2) what background knowledge you would especially need (that would be difficult to pick up on your own) and whether those courses are offered, 3) whether plausible advisers for you exist at that program, and of course 4) whether there are funding opportunities. You could potentially do a very cool project at the intersection of several of your interests through either a traditional or an interdisciplinary program, while picking up some knowledge from coursework (and literature) and looking awesome on paper. If in the former camp, get in the latter camp before making any decisions If you think you need the MA to figure out how to focus your interests, then getting the coursework coverage right becomes more important. I think you mentioned the Gallatin School in another thread, and that might be a great option for you in that case. But I would bet your interests are better-defined than you think. Parting thought: Cog and Cog/Neuro programs care less about traditional psych stuff (like taking the subject GRE, having a bachelor's in psych) than other specialties, with some PIs even expressing a preference for prospectives with certain "STEM"-y bachelor's/master's degrees over psychology.

Could have sworn earlier you were claiming it was "infinitely better". Now it's comparable to the help you can get from a mentor or friends, even? Sheesh. Nobody imagines the playing field is level. Some people have parents who are themselves professors, some people were raised by a single mom waitressing, and it's crazy to imagine there's some way to make up for that relative advantage at the 'applying to grad school' phase of the game. Some people can take the GREs 5 times a year, some can only afford to do it once. Etc. But we draw lines somewhere, and *buying* the help of someone who otherwise has no connection to you to massage every line of your application is clearly over the line. In my mind.

Some schools consider the above tantamount to cheating for the obvious reason that not everybody can afford to incur such grossly disproportionate advantage (there was definitely language to that effect on some of my application signature pages), so that may be why you don't hear people talking about it. That being said, to address OP's point: I can't speak to Clinical, but the overwhelming majority of applicants invited to the one interview day I've been to either had one (or more) master's, or were currently working on one, or had years of research experience after graduating. I met one person who was still an undergrad. I've heard it explained "a file is a file is a file"; if you have to go through steps x, y, and z to make your application competitive, especially research-wise, I don't get the impression it reflects poorly at all, provided steps x, y, and z did result in a more competitive app!

Big board now says someone received an invite as recently as yesterday for the weekend of 2/18 - 2/21, so I'll cling to hope for another day or two I think.

Did you hear back, @natnat1810? A bunch of invites went out over the last couple of days.