morpheus

And to answer the last guy's question: nah, I'm not really still hoping. I mostly applied to Applied Math programs anyway

There seem to be a few of us on the Results page who haven't received a response from MIT's Mechanical Engineering Department. No need to spam that list If anyone has any news about this program, keep us posted!

Good luck!

You can probably get away with calling her as early as Friday. I know it seems like you're being annoying, but most professors receive hundreds of emails a day, and some messages get lost in the mix. My old advisers seemed to appreciate the occasional "reminder" note.

Haha it was all you, man.. Well done!

I think you made the right call in sending emails to this program and to your top choice. I would also recommend emailing your second choice school as you did your first choice. Any decent Director will not be annoyed by your emails and will certainly understand your pressing time limit! Otherwise, sit tight and try not to worry about this for the rest of the week. Do everything in your power to avoid accepting and withdrawing from this third-choice program, but if it comes down to that.. well, they're kind of asking for it with their absurd deadlines. Remember that withdrawing might prevent another student from getting admitted into the program. Do you have an adviser that you can ask for advice about this?

Hey congrats- it sounds like your presentations went well! I'd say the odds are good, but there's no telling who else she interviewed, and how their presentations went. Good luck!

Wow, that's really low of this school... and it's an American university? What field are you in? And how does your second accepted program compare to this one?

Hey, congrats! Well at least you don't have to spend the rest of the day worrying about it! Way to go

Cool, those sound like great additions to your application. Definitely let them know about it. Good luck!

That sounds like a good idea, if they asked for updated information. What field is it? And what's changed on your CV (other than GPA)?

All of my results- be they acceptances or rejections- have come in the afternoon (presumably when the committees are looking at the applications). Waiting sucks, but maybe this'll help you settle your mind a bit in the mornings

Yeah, I've totally experienced this, and ridiculously frequently since my last semester of college. When I'm in that apathetic/depressive state, I'm aware of all the things that will probably snap me out of it- working out, eating clean, rock climbing with friends, exploring new places- but I can't bring myself to care enough to do any of them. So as much as I like ChrisTOEFert's advice, I understand exactly how difficult it is to actually follow through with it. Oddly enough, the last time I was able to snap out of a funk was by doing something completely non-intuitive, and really wallowing in it... I read a long book on the history of philosophy. Then I read some of Albert Camus' essays on absurdism, and other nasty, existential works. Maybe after a few weeks of meaningless agony, you too will say "screw it!" and resume enjoying this silly universe.

As a compromise between staying silent and bugging your POI's... why not reach out to the staff admin? He's already given you a status update in the past, so there's no harm in sending out a casual follow-up email.

I only applied to MIT and Princeton (accepted!) for Mechanical Engineering, as the rest of my applications were to Applied Math programs. Looks like my chances of getting into MIT are steadily dropping...

If it were me I would wait a bit longer before requesting info. I've only heard back from about half of the schools that I've applied to- so chances are that the admittees to your program aren't ready to start turning down schools yet. We still have a month and a half to go!

Haha yeah, every week is like... made it through Tuesday!

If it were me, I would devote today to making the ANN presentation as good as possible. That way I could open the presentation with a topic that I feel confident presenting, and I can spend the rest of the week working on Deformation registration without worrying about going back to the little things. But, it's up to you! Whatever you feel is best

With 45 minutes, I would plan to devote 20 minutes to each topic. So I'll consider those two topics separately. ANN's: Wow- only 20 minutes to give a nice introduction to Artifical Neural Networks! I would give the talk as though the audience had never heard of ANN's before: describe the basic structure, explain why they're useful, and close up with a simple example (maybe MNIST) and famous applications. Luckily for this topic, you have a TON of online resources which demonstrate various ways of introducing the subject. I would look through how other instructors begin their ML courses and choose the best examples from those. Use this part to show off your teaching abilities for intro-level classes (and speak slowly!). Deformation registration: Old-school methods or new ones? Here's where you can show off your ability to teach slightly more advanced topics. I stand by the one-equation-per-slide rule: even as a math student I was told to adhere to it. We were told that people in the audience can really only process one equation at a time (with the occasional exception), and that if an equation is important enough to make it in the presentation, you must explain it carefully. So yeah: choose the most important few equations and summarize the general theory first. Then you can show some fancy examples and, if possible, finish off with a single slide on recent advancements in deformation registration, to demonstrate that you follow current research.

Then they were probably just interested in which advanced courses you've taken. If this were a math PhD they would also ask which textbooks you used in those courses

Me too! It's so demotivating... 1.5 months and it'll be over forever

Is your undergrad performance an issue? I'd imagine that most of the time will be filled by your presentation, and other questions they might have concerning your past experiences/projects.

Oh, so it's an assessment of your teaching skills? There are a ton of good practices to bear in mind. Spend extra time planning the flow of the presentation; begin the presentation with a goal or outline (and refer back to it); and keep at MOST one equation or algorithm on a slide- pseudocode only, unless you need specific implementation details. Time yourself when practicing to get a feel for the correct pacing. Here's a screenshot of my standard slide layout when I present Machine Learning topics- in this case to a weekly reading group (everyone reads the same 2-3 papers and we discuss together). And for the record- Spatial Transformers don't work in practice

It sounds like they want you to present on two projects that you've worked on in the past. What's your time limit?

I came across this old post from the Statistics forum http://forum.thegradcafe.com/topic/51483-scraped-admissions-data/ and I've been using persistent_homology's python script to mess around with acceptance/rejection trends in my own field. Is anyone else overanalyzing? For instance... here's the (rough) acceptance chart for "applied+math" acceptances in 2015 (February-April shown). Looks like we have an active week ahead!