ChrisTOEFert

If you've been accepted, you've been accepted and they want you. Simple as that. If they didn't want you, they wouldn't have offered you admission! What I was getting at for the poster was that they could choose to answer them up until the end of the business day on April 15th. If the university took offense to that and acted all annoyed that they hadn't decided yet, they should not have offered the poster the option of thinking on it for so long. If you have an Apr. 15th deadline, it does not mean you are less of a candidate than other students whom may have earlier deadlines. Conversely, if you still haven't heard yet that doesn't mean you should abandon ALL hope. Admissions do rarely continue until end of April to mid-May. So just relax

Yes, please do. Surely they get a handful of these emails each year, they should be used to it. If possible, would you mind submitting what you sent and what they sent back (obviously with initials, shorthands, and any other identifying info blacked out)? Maybe you're just reading too much into it. On the other hand, if they've given you a couple of months maybe they are frustrated because they know you're dragging it out to hear from another program, which isn't rude, it's entirely your right to do that, but I could see how it could get mildly irritating for them. Having said that, they shouldn't have given you an April 15th deadline then if they didn't want to adhere to it.

I'd agree with your profs then and get a mini-deferral from your China offer the non-profit seems like more of a career builder.

I thought you got into a master's program? Are you deferring for a year now? The way you were wording it in the other thread you started it sounded like you were over the moon at getting the acceptance and had no other opportunities. As for what to do, I also thought your area of research was human-animal interaction? Based on what you've given us here, none of those are going to help your grad application, at least for that topic. If you've decided to change topics, go with the job that is going to be as closely aligned with your research interests as possible. But as one said, I wouldn't defer one job offer for the potential of another. Same with grad school, if I were biting my nails on a waitlist and had a decently funded offer and it was closing in on April 15th, I wouldn't even bat an eye at removing myself from the waitlist and just happily accepting the paid offer. I think you need to give us a little bit more information on what your end goal is for your research, and for the jobs. I mean, the second one sounds like it could snowball into a career, so personally, if I liked the job, I wouldn't quit to go to grad school when I had already established myself in that career for 1.5 years. But that's me! If you are passionate about grad school (and human animal interactions??) I would probably take the job in China (as it is firmed up and a definite thing) and work on improving GRE scores, your SOP, etc. when you're over there. Just a heads up though, a letter of recommendation from somebody at some random company isn't likely going to hold much weight to an adcom. If you do pursue these, stay in touch with your professors and see if they will write them again for you next year.

It sounds like they may have already made their decisions and the only way to get in at this point is a rave review from a faculty member. I could be wrong, but this seems strange. Most offers are based off of your profile (GPA, GRE scores, research outline, etc.). While professors do agree to work with students and "nominate them" for admission, essentially by saying "Oh yeah, crossbonestyle and I have been e-mailing back and forth a little bit, they have a pretty cool project that would fit well into my grant I just got," I am not sure how else it would work. I have never heard of it going the way you are describing it where you have to contact a prof directly with an application instead of sending one generally.

You won't know by April 15th, because that is the deadline for everyone else to accept/decline offers. You'll find out in the coming days after that. Don't panic though, you have a few options. You could always let your top offer know that you are still waiting on one more program and if they could extend the deadline a little bit longer for you. You could also let them know that you are going to accept their offer, but may withdraw once you hear from a couple of other places. One of my friends is doing this currently at two schools for anthropology. Both programs understand that this is a stressful and nerve-wracking process. Everyone makes SGS and adcoms out to be these tyrannical entities with no souls. Don't forget most of them went through the exact same process we are right now. Just hold tight, send them an enquiry email as to your position on the list and based off of previous years what your chances of being accepted would be. Worst case is they say there is no chance of being advanced at your position and you accept your best offer and move on.

It honestly could be any of those three scenarios, nobody knows that goes on behind the doors of adcom meetings. From what I understand, schools usually do things in waves. Wave one is usually the definite must-haves and the definite no's. Wave 2 results only seem to come out once they get some feedback from the first group (usually declines of offers for students who already have a better offer or the program just seems like a very general fit), and they will send admits to those high up on a waitlist and await their response. Wave 3 is basically the same as wave 2, where you'll only hear if you're kind mid-high on the list. Chances of getting funding at this point are usually pretty low (for U.S. universities I understand) because most of the money is going to the first two waves. After this, they probably send out a second wave of rejections based upon how many people are on the waitlist versus how many more open spots they have. Using admission statistics from previous years they can calculate how many offers will be accepted versus how many admits they offer. The final wave of admits is usually after April 15th as you've had everyone make their decisions and then they see if there's funding/spots for a few more students who are middle-y on the wait list. They probably give them until the end of the month to decide or so. Once everyone has accepted or declined based on the offered positions, then comes the final wave of rejections that is pretty common from mid-April until the end of May. Personally, my rule of thumb is, if you haven't heard back by now, you're probably either on a waitlist (and low on that list) or you are rejected and they are just sending out all the rejections en-masse at the end once they know who is attending officially. In my opinion, if they really wanted you, they wouldn't risk sending out an offer so late in the game when you could be snatched up by someone else right from under their nose. But again, what do I know? I've never been on or seen one of these committees. Good luck and I hope it works out.

Awww that sucks. But Oklahoma has better weather you'll like it. My sister lives down there.

Got into my top choice too!!! Extremely generous funding package!!! I have to relocate to Copenhagen from my home in Toronto. There is still hope everyone! Now to just sort through the craigslist fakes/scams and to find a decent apartment that isn't going to break me!

That's probably a good idea unless they are giving you some sort of ungodly amount of funding and promising you the world. It never hurts to have options, until you have to make a decision, then you just wish you only got in to one place

There was a person in another thread where they received the same e-mail with the wording like "Congratulations, we are glad you can join our community. Here is your new ID, email, and password. We look forward to seeing you next semester" or something like that from the school IT department. They emailed their applications department asking what was up because they hadn't heard anything in regards to being admitted. It turned out it was an error and they were accidentally put on the list by somebody and had actually been rejected! Long story short, these emails me nothing. They could be a way just to add your name so you can access the application portal. I know I got one from 2 schools I applied to almost immediately. It just makes it easier for you to check the application portal without sending the department 100 emails asking if you've been accepted/rejected.

If you're happy with the offer from Texas Tech, are you going to/have you rejected Oregon? It might be a good idea if you see yourself going there over Oregon, so you open up a spot for somebody on the waitlist instead of making them wait another month with no word and having another contributor to this thread hahaha. The other way I look at is if you're happy with TT and their offer, you could always just accept! No more torture!

I agree with others here. Hold out for a better financial package from one of your other options (even though they may not be as high on your want list) because grad school is really expensive and they pay you pennies. You can't think if you can't eat or pay rent. You could even ask the school you are currently accepted to to look for more possible funding and definitely apply for as many scholarships as possible. Even a few $500-$1000 mini-grants would go a long way. That could be 5-6 months of rent right there. What you want to be careful of though, is a lot of those school offered small scholarships are only available to you once. Since a PhD is 5-7 years or so (assuming you're a US student), you'd have to find and hope you land multiples of these scholarships each other without doubling up. That could be tough. There are also large government funding packages as well, while they are highly competitive such as NSF, they would definitely give you some breathing room. I think your first course of action is to explain to your PI and the grad co-ordinator/person in charge of funding that you there is no way you can attend the school with funding how it currently sits. Ask if there is anyway you could get tuition coverage, additional TAships/RAships etc to help cut down the cost substantially. If they so no, I would decline their offer. No PhD is worth making yourself basically homeless and starving or putting yourself in financial ruin. Worst case scenario, apply for some jobs, get some money, build up your credit with a cheap credit card and re-apply in a year or two. Who knows, maybe you'll love the new position so much you won't want to go back to school!

I wouldn't lose hope quite yet. You're still a month out from when most universities require a response, which is still plenty of time to extend an offer. Most decisions from what I understand roll out this week and next in large waves. If you check the results board, there were very few per day last week (like only 7-8 pages) and now there are 12-17 pages of results per day by noon/early afternoon when I tend to check. It's quite likely that they extend offers in waves, I know most universities do that. They extend offers to the must haves and then give the rejection emails to the ones who are definitely not being considered anymore. From that point they want to fill their roster with as many of the must haves as possible and then wait until they have their decisions and send out the rest of the accepts/rejects to those who are on first, second, and third level waitlists. As brutal as it may seem, I have heard of acceptances and rejections going out as late as July!!! Some schools just have a really slow admissions process. Don't forget, they are also human too, so things like life do sometimes slow things down a bit. Like the loss of a loved one, a medical emergency etc. can really impede the speed of rolling out the answers. I am in the same boat as you with one school, I haven't heard a peep. At this point, I'm not too optimistic frankly. Every other school has reached out to me by now so I feel like if they really want all the competitive applicants they can, they would have sent something out when all the other schools do as well. But then again, my last school is in Europe, so they don't follow the same rules, and schools over there may have later admission dates. Either way, I'm not really holding my breath for positive news at this point.

I'm going to be firing an e-mail off at the end of the month if I don't hear anything. I am assuming it is a rejection because we are past the late Feb/early March loose feedback date they have on their website (but just barely) and no word. It is also very late in the game if they want to attract the applicants they want, I'm not holding my breath at this point for a miracle. Previous years on the results board have shown responses by early February for both accepts and rejects. Although I do have options, it's still infuriating to me that my earliest deadline I am still waiting on. I wake up every morning anxious and when I see there is no email I harumph and grumpily go make breakfast. It sucks too since the program is in Germany, 9 hours ahead of me. When I get up it is basically early/mid afternoon for them, so they definitely would have had a chance to send out that ListServ notification. Even worse, I liked Germany, it was neat.

I third their recommendation. Not a good idea to hold your breath when you have two other options, especially one that you are very interested in pursuing. If I were you I'd accept and notify the other school you want to be pulled from the waitlist. This preserves your sanity, jussssstttttt in case they offer you admission but then string you along without funding info for a month or two. Then you find out its not worth it and kick yourself for not having accepting your choice that you were happy with in the first place!

I have heard of it as well, but it's not the norm. I think what is more common is if you apply to a PhD and they reject you for that, they will sometimes offer you a position in their Master's program if they still think your research is interesting/important or they rejected you but just barely but you'd 100% make cut off no questions asked for a Master's program. I know some people as well who are currently paid/funded by the biology department but actually study in the anthropology department doing evolutionary genetics on anthropological topics. Short answer: it appears yes, but it's not very common.

You'll get in somewhere. Even if it isn't this year. Your letter writers would not waste their time on you if they didn't think you'd be capable of excelling in a graduate program. Think hard about the master's, it may be a good leg up to leverage you for next year/two years from now if you don't get into the PhD's you are hoping for.

Did she not leave a voicemail about what she called about? They're probably calling about 1) funding, if you don't have any, you probably do now, or 2) asking about your decision. I wouldn't worry about it, I'd just call back and ask what's up.

I think that is reasonably normal. It depends how deep the applicant pool is, if they only have 100 applicants for say 20/30 spots (i.e. a big program) they might just wait it out and see how everything falls into place on its own before they make a final rejection decision. So they might line up all of the spots and wait until it is 100% confirmed before they say no. Two schools I applied to for my Master's a couple of years ago did this, and while it sucks immensely to be told no after waiting forever, I can appreciate them getting settled in as opposed to having a chaotic system and having that IT problem happen to you :/

I would agree with that. I was being pretty generalized in my description there, but it seems that most schools tend to follow the Apr. 15 deadline in the U.S. I was given less than 2 weeks to decide on the place I decided to go. I just closed my eyes and jumped so to speak. I didn't have all my offers yet (was waiting on 2) and was trying to get more funding from a third but started thinking to myself there was no way I could live with myself to pass up the opportunity if I let it slide and decided too late. Maybe some other schools will begin to push this mentality forward, it really adds clarity to a situation IMO if you have pressure. Sitting around and hemming and hawing over a couple decisions for 2 months doesn't help things along, I feel it just makes you find equal push vs. pull factors at each school instead of going with a gut instinct.

I think Euler answered it pretty well here. If they have 10 spots, they extend fully funded spots to 10 people. Using admission statistics from previous years they know to give waitlist spots for, lets say, 5 people. Statistically, I would bet 3-4 people are going to turn them down outright for other programs as chances are if they got in there, they got in at least to one other school. Again, just being general here, obviously we know that sometimes an applicant gets in everywhere, or only gets into just one place, or gets waitlisted everywhere...but they have no idea of knowing who falls into each category. So they extend 10 yes's, and extend 5 waitlists. So let's say now 4 people reject the program for something else, now 4 waitlisters have spots. However, the school has no control over when these waitlist spots open up. In my own experience, I was accepted to one program on February 8th, and they said I could take as much time as I needed as long as I let them know by April 15th. I declined it within a week, but in theory I could have let someone sit in waitlist limbo for over 2 months and the school still would have no new information to give that applicant other than "You're on a waitlist, sit tight." By now, someone may have heard back from another school and accepted, but didn't notify that they wanted to be pulled from the waitlist, so now the school has to offer another new position to somebody who was maybe on a back-up list composed of another 5-6 students just in case. I can see where the frustration comes from the students, but I can also see why it takes departments a really long time to finalize things as there are a lot of things going on that need to be taken care of. Is there a better way for the system to work? Probably. The best way to do it would be to send out a mass e-mail for all accepted students, a second e-mail for all waitlisted students, and a third wave for all definitive rejected applicants. Now a lot of you are not going to like this part, but I really think U.S. schools give you wayyyyyy too much time to decide where you are going. I think a reasonable amount of time is one month, not the 2 they give you. If schools followed the system of sending out the 3 groups of emails and then gave the accepted students a hard and fast deadline of one month to decide where they want to go, everybody would have a definitive answer in 2-2.5 months after the first acceptance e-mail went out in late January/early February. But again, looking at it from the opposite side again, from the adcoms, they have to send out the acceptances, get the interested students all coordinated to come for a visit to show off the school, give them another 2 weeks or so to decide, and then notify all waitlisters who get accepted and give them the same treatment. It really is a logistical nightmare and people who want immediate notification plus 2.5 months to decide where they want to go can't have it both ways. One side has to give in order to make it reasonable for the other side, and at present, it seems like neither side wants to budge.

Hey, I agree with you. There are definitely better ways things could be done. Unfortunately, we, as the applicants, are in a position of no power. We pay them and send in our stuff and hope for the best and keep our fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong along the way. I guess that is a good metaphor for life?

I would say that happens in only extremely rare cases. At least from my perspective, and talking with friends, and following this board for a couple of years now as a lurker, it seems that it does happen...but rarely. In most cases I would attribute it to either a clerical error on the school's end, such as a name was left off of the mass-mail list or it bounced back and they have no way of contacting the party so they just waited for a "what the heck happened to my app" email that never came. Sometimes it could come down to an incomplete application that again never really gets noticed by either end (the applying or the school) and it falls through the cracks. For instance, we hear about forgetful LOR writers all of the time, so maybe someone got notified that a prof did send in a LOR but since it was well past the deadline it was ignored and the application was never pushed forward for review, thus leaving it in some sort of limbo. I think a good way to make sure this doesn't happen to you is to mail each school you haven't heard from by the end of April. Sure, there are a very small number of schools that still haven't made up their mind as they are outside of the weird April 15th agreement. But I feel like by then 99% of departments have decided and have had applications for at least 2 months by that point (assuming a mega-late deadline of mid/end February) and should be able to comment. If for some reason there is still no response, I would email every possible person that could potentially have even been in the same room as my application, be it POI, grad director, grad coordinator, SGS, dean of the faculty, grad secretary, etc. There is no excuse to pay a fee and hear nothing. I have heard of some places sending out super-late rejections in July/August/very early September, but I feel again that at least they heard something. But at that point I would have sent an email a couple of months ago along with some follow up ones if I heard nothing.

I'm going to re-post a kind of Cole's Notes from a different thread I posted in. While your situation is horrible to be in, I feel for you, and the anticipation linked with the disappointment is surely maddening. Not that this is going to help in the slightest, but there really isn't anything you can do right now but wait and hope. You submitted your application and there is so much going on behind the scenes that determine who gets accepted and who doesn't that it is basically a crap-shoot each year on who gets in. Some years a 3.2 GPA with weak to middle GRE scores could get accepted over a 3.9 GPA student with better GRE scores due to increased funding being pushed towards one lab or niche research idea and others lose funding. Sometimes a PI may think they are going to have an opening and agree to review applications and then boom, something happens to one of their grad students and they need to extend their current position for 1-1.5 more years and fund them. There goes the funding and placement for one other new student. Further, the adcom committees have no idea how deep the applicant pool is until they have all of the applications in front of them. I have heard that some years are stronger than others, but by and large they tend to average out over time. Maybe you just got really unlucky this year and the pool was extremely deep and they had to nit-pick over details. "Oh, applicant Iristar only has a 3.9 GPA and almost perfect GRE scores and one first author publication, while applicant Y has the same GPA and GRE but an additional second author pub, we are going to take them as our final student," or something to that effect. The key is to not let it bother you, which is awfully hard as it is intrinsically tied to your self worth as a student and academic, but these crushing blows are normal for academia. A paper you worked your ass off on for 1.5 years gets rejected or is beat out by 1 month by a publication from a rival lab and they get all the recognition, or you get serially rejected for very important government funding that will ensure you can eat and pay rent in your dumpy apartment for another year, etc. I know it doesn't mean much coming from me as one glance at my signature will make you think "what do you know about rejection? You got in!"...well I was in your shoes 3 application cycles ago. I got rejected from all my Master's programs my first run through, by my own undergraduate school, by my own thesis advisor! That hurt! But I used that anger and confusion and sadness to pour everything I had into the application cycle the following year and got into a better ranked MSc program than my undergrad home offers. If by chance you get rejected everywhere and you are not happy with the Master's option being held for you, I suggest you take a good hard look at the areas you can improve. Trust me, there is always some aspect of your application you can work to improve to make you a more competitive candidate that you have direct control over. Be it better grades, better GRE/TOEFL scores, more research experience, more volunteer experience, conference attendances etc. Letters or recommendation are outside of your control, the only way you can kind of improve those is if you form a close bond with two/three profs who really care about you and want to go to bat for you. So best of luck on your remaining few applications. But remember, a Master's degree is not all bad. You may find that employment opportunities are the same with both an MA/PhD or the pay differential at the beginning is not worth the extra 4-5 years a PhD would take you, especially if you have to take out student loans the last 2-3 years. Keep your head up and stay positive.