Bumblebee

I agree with @latte thunder. Grad school is vocational, not an easy way to avoid facing reality.
I would also like to add that I waited 8 years since I graduated from college to go to Grad School and I think it was my best decision ever. During these 8 years I've worked in 4 different countries, I've matured, I've found out what my real passion in life was, etc. In other words: I've enjoyed life! When I graduated from college one of my professors advised me to pursue a PhD. At that time, I saw it as a really scary thing to do, something I couldn't handle. When I finally applied to grad school, I was very excited knowing that I had finally found what I really wanted to do in life and knowing that these 8 years had helped me be ready for an MA and a PhD. After enjoying traveling and meeting people all around the world, I'm finally ready to focus on my studies for the next 7 years.
So, after this lengthy paragraph, this is my advice: graduate from college, travel, work, enjoy life, and think about what you really want to do in life. And then, if you feel you're ready, apply to Grad School.

I agree with @latte thunder. Grad school is vocational, not an easy way to avoid facing reality.
I would also like to add that I waited 8 years since I graduated from college to go to Grad School and I think it was my best decision ever. During these 8 years I've worked in 4 different countries, I've matured, I've found out what my real passion in life was, etc. In other words: I've enjoyed life! When I graduated from college one of my professors advised me to pursue a PhD. At that time, I saw it as a really scary thing to do, something I couldn't handle. When I finally applied to grad school, I was very excited knowing that I had finally found what I really wanted to do in life and knowing that these 8 years had helped me be ready for an MA and a PhD. After enjoying traveling and meeting people all around the world, I'm finally ready to focus on my studies for the next 7 years.
So, after this lengthy paragraph, this is my advice: graduate from college, travel, work, enjoy life, and think about what you really want to do in life. And then, if you feel you're ready, apply to Grad School.

On behalf of exhausted grad students everywhere, I present this seal to the Grad Cafe and its fabulous members.

Wanted to start by mentioning a huge THANK YOU to all the members of the forum for their sincere and timely advice that guided us along the hazardous path of applications and the equivocal journey of the selection process:

THANK YOU

MERCI BEAUCOUP

GRACIAS

GRAZIE

VIELEN DANK

ASANTE, etc!

Wishing you all the best in your postgraduate studies and all the plans and ambitions you foster!

Ad astra per aspera (A rough road leads to the stars)

I agree with @latte thunder. Grad school is vocational, not an easy way to avoid facing reality.
I would also like to add that I waited 8 years since I graduated from college to go to Grad School and I think it was my best decision ever. During these 8 years I've worked in 4 different countries, I've matured, I've found out what my real passion in life was, etc. In other words: I've enjoyed life! When I graduated from college one of my professors advised me to pursue a PhD. At that time, I saw it as a really scary thing to do, something I couldn't handle. When I finally applied to grad school, I was very excited knowing that I had finally found what I really wanted to do in life and knowing that these 8 years had helped me be ready for an MA and a PhD. After enjoying traveling and meeting people all around the world, I'm finally ready to focus on my studies for the next 7 years.
So, after this lengthy paragraph, this is my advice: graduate from college, travel, work, enjoy life, and think about what you really want to do in life. And then, if you feel you're ready, apply to Grad School.

OK! So. Today I accepted an offer at a school I'm very excited about. They seem to be excited about me, too, because they offered me a pretty prestigious fellowship. It was icing on the cake.

This school let me know their decision FOUR DAYS after I interviewed. I thought, "whoa. These guys are on top of things."

I only applied to two schools, and to tell you the truth, this one I accepted wasn't my first choice in the beginning. Then came the visit. The school that I THOUGHT was my first choice didn't turn out to be the well-oiled machine like the other. They kept lying to me, telling me I would hear my decision in a "few days" or "by the end of the week." It was always a different answer, and it was a two-month saga that exhausted me. This morning I emailed and asked one final time. Then I thought to myself (after consideration of much of the advice floating on GradCafe), if this school accepted me, would I go there? And when I realized that the true answer was NO, I just went ahead and accepted the offer to the school that wants me. I gave both schools a lot of thought, made pro/con lists, slept on it for months, and arrived at my decision. Hooray!

Fast forward to tonight. I'm sitting here doodling online and celebrating life when my inbox flares. (of course, right? it always happens that way). The adcomm apologized for taking so long to get back to me, and then asked me a bunch of questions about their concerns with my application. "what are you going to do when things get tough?" "Are you sure you have the passion for this?"

I mean, seriously? If these were the issues that prevented you from giving me a decision, why didn't you ask me sooner? Why keep lying and saying you are making a decision, and only respond to me after ignoring me for so long? It's... practically April. I predict they were waiting to hear back from other students before deciding if they should investigate me more, but I wish they would have been more upfront about it. I spent two months going through whiplash and not knowing what was going on.

I guess the point is that it doesn't matter. I responded with a kind email saying that, while I certainly have the passion necessary for their program, I accepted another offer earlier today. It felt good. I finally have closure. Now I can move on with my life! I just needed to tell this story because, well, I needed to share with people I knew would understand!

You guys on the GradCafe have been an invaluable resource for me. I so appreciate the laughs, support, and geeky cyber-friendships that we share. I wish all the best to ALL of you in this process. It's finally over for me!

Holly molly! Over 500 posts! newms, you need to do something with your life real quick!

Holly molly! Over 500 posts! newms, you need to do something with your life real quick!

Holly molly! Over 500 posts! newms, you need to do something with your life real quick!

Ok, thinking is good, praying is good, but what about some real action??

Don't forget that you can donate money to tsunami victims!

For example, here and here.

Let's do it!

Holly molly! Over 500 posts! newms, you need to do something with your life real quick!

I have just watched BBC live coverage of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and it really put all my recent worries and fears in perspective and made them seem small and insignificant. I suggest that we should stop right now obsessing about our application status or rejections or insufficient funding and think how irrelevant these things are compared to the great tragedy that has happened, that is happening right now. Let up pray for those who are in Japan now, or at least let us think about these people and may be our collective thoughts will change the course of events somehow... Oh well, it is a stupid idea may be, but I can't think about other things now, really.

Ha, ha, ha :-)




Well, for cheap international calls our best friend is Skype. I use it to talk to my family. If they are connected to Skype, it's free. If they are not (or if I'm calling someone that doesn't have Skype) it's 3 cents/min. I think (my calls are to Spain).
As for contracts, well, it depends on your needs. I use prepaid for two reasons: first, I don't spend enough so that the contract is worth it; secondly, I don't have credit history in the US (yet) so I had to leave a deposit of $500. Since I had to pay rent, food, books, some tuition, etc. I decided not to do it and keep my prepaid card.

during my first week, i had to sit in front of a panel of 6 professors from all subfields and get grilled on my dissertation topic, even though i was just starting my MA. they were nice about it, splitting the 18 hour interrogation (department requirement) into three six-hour sessions, no break. at the end, they told me all my ideas were worthless and i had to go in front of the entire faculty to justify my existence. there, the faculty took turns ripping off a piece of cloth from my body and spitting in my face before commanding me to confine myself to the library microfilms for three weeks until i could emerge with a real thesis project. after that, all i had to do was eat some broken glass and then, by about november, they decided to start actually giving me my fellowship paycheck.

no biggie, really. you'll be fine.

I just read the first posting - so please forgive me if I'm repeating what everybody else said.
I came across several postings like yours here and in other forums and I still think it's odd. I don't know if this is a cultural thing (I'm an international student and in my country people are allowed to drink when they turn 16) or not, but I don't really understand why so many people make such a big deal out of drinking. Some people drink, some don't. I do drink, but I don't like beer (like to you, it just tastes bad to me). So if you're invited to go out for a drink, just say yes. And get whatever you would like to drink. If you are at a cocktail bar and you don't want to sit there with a glass of water, just get one of those alcohol free cocktails. Or coke. Or whatever - it's your choice. Why would people care what you drink? (Unless the "goal" of the evening is to get completely drunk and puke all over the place - but this seems more like a high-school or undergrad thing to me - and personally I think it's just stupid and I wouldn't want to hang out with this kind of people anyway).

So what I'm trying to say: Don't worry about this kind of stuff. We are all adults. If somebody makes a big deal out of drinking/not drinking, (s)he is showing really childish behaviour. And I can't imagine that there are really that many grad students out there who would make fun of somebody for not drinking. It's a personal choice. Everybody drinks what he wants to drink and that's it.

Holly molly! Over 500 posts! newms, you need to do something with your life real quick!

Holly molly! Over 500 posts! newms, you need to do something with your life real quick!

I think I need to step away from the GradCafe before this happens to me

1. Chuck Norris doesn't apply to schools. Schools apply to Chuck Norris.

2. Chuck Norris only needed 1 LOR. It was written by Chuck Norris.

3. Chuck Norris' GRE scores: Verbal - No. Quantitative: Unquantifiable

4. Chuck Norris' Grade Point Average: Nothing is average about Chuck Norris.

5. In lieu of a statement of purpose, Chuck Norris sent photocopies of his fists.

6. When asked about financial support, Chuck Norris replied: How much do you need?

7. Chuck Norris isn't wait listed. Chuck Norris waits for nothing.

Ok...that's all I got. Good fun!

I've posted here before with my thoughts about choosing graduate school. Seeing how so many of you are in the middle of this supremely stressful time, agonizing over admissions and deciding where to go, I thought that I would let you all have some insight into what the process looks like from the perspective of an admissions committee member. I do this for three reasons. First, some of you could use the distraction. Second, many of you are facing the prospect of asking "why was I denied at school X" and should know how difficult this process is. Third, this is the first time that I've served on an admissions committee and I frankly was surprised at how hard this was, so now that it's all over I want to record my own thoughts.

Some background: I am an associate prof at a large department that is somewhere in the 20-40 range. We're good, not great, and we place our students fairly well. We admit an average sized class for schools at our rank. We have somewhere between 30 and 40 times as many complete applications as we have spots in our program. Another 50-75 every year are incomplete (missing GRE scores, something like that). We do not hold it against you if you are missing one of your letters of recommendation, but if you are missing more than one your files goes into the incomplete pile and is not reviewed.

From there, the process works like this. Every candidate who submits a complete application is given an anonymous number. We then do an initial pass through the applications to eliminate students who are simply unqualified based on test scores. The bar for this is very, very low, but if you cannot score at least a 100 on your TOEFL and a 500 on each of your GRE sections you are eliminated at the very beginning. This doesn't cut a lot of people, but it does have the benefit of eliminating students whose English or basic math skills are not up to snuff.

From there, the files are divided randomly into piles, which are divided up across the members of the admissions committee without regard to subfield or anything like that. Each file is read carefully by a committee member and assigned a numerical score from 1-10. Anyone who receives a "1" at this stage is automatically forwarded to the final round.

The remaining files that receive a 2-10 ranking are then given to another member of the search committee, who re-reads them and rescores them. Any file that receives a "1" in this second stage is automatically forwarded to the final round.

The remaining files from this stage (meaning that they received "2" or lower on both initial reviews) are then divided up based on subfield and given to the member of the admissions committee who represents that subfield. That committee member then ranks the files a final time. Any student that receives a "1" or a "2" at this penultimate stage makes it to the final round, regardless of the earlier scores from the first two reviews.

The point of doing it this way is to ensure that we give every student a fair shake. Each student receives a close read from three separate faculty members, each of whom can advance a student to the final round.

We end up with around four times as many files in final round as we have available spots. Each committee member then ranks these students, and we have a big meeting where we decide who to admit and to waitlist out of this group. We then bring our proposal to the subfield representatives who are *not* on the search committee, and they have the ability to lobby for different choices from the final round (although they tend not to do this). From there, the department votes on the proposed list of admits and waitlisters.


***********


So that is how the process works in terms of procedures. I suppose that all of you are probably wondering how we decide who gets one of the 1s. The answer is that it is supremely difficult to do this. We make mistakes, I am sure of it. Our goal is to find people--and this is important, so read carefully--who can successfully complete our program and secure a tenure-track job. That is the outcome that we are trying to achieve; we are not trying to admit the smartest, the most unique, or even the most interesting students (although we do want these people too!). It's possible that other departments that care less about placement are more interested in just admitting smart people, and I bet that for schools like Harvard and Princeton, that's probably true. But for us, we want students who will succeed.

The challenge is that it is really difficult for us to tell what kind of applicant will be able to do this. We know that you will have to be bright, you will have to be creative, and you will have to be highly motivated. But trust me, anyone who has gone through a PhD can tell you, it's not like anything you've ever done before. Unless you already have a PhD, there's nothing that you could write in your application that will convince us that without a doubt you've got the chops. We have to make a bet based on imperfect information (and in fact, we probably are facing a game of incomplete information too, at least about your own objectives). It takes a special kind of person to do this, and I'm not certain how much we learn from pedigree, letters, grades, and test scores, but that's what we have.

What I can say for sure is that even if we only based our decision on pedigree, letters, grades, and test scores, that wouldn't be enough to whittle down our choices to a manageable number. We are dealing with a massive oversupply of qualified candidates. In my first round alone, at least 20 students were Ivy League grads with 3.7+ GPAs, 700+/700+ GREs, and glowing letters. We could have populated an incoming class with these alone, yet each other admissions committee member probably had the same number of people with similar backgrounds. Then you dig deeper and you realize the number of people with incredible life experiences, great grades, great letters, and all the rest, but from other schools. Or they have great writing samples that make it clear that they know what a political science PhD is all about, even if they don't have the very best grades. Or you get a student who has worked two jobs to pay for an education at a regional state university, someone whose drive and motivation clearly signals his/her ability to bring a project to completion even if s/he does not have the best pedigree. Or someone who's at the top of her class at a top-rank Indian university. I could go on. There are simply too many of these people for us to admit all of them.

So what does it come down to? At the end of the day, it's seemingly minor things like "fit," or "interest," or "promise." Most of these are beyond your control as applicant. If you don't seem to have a good idea of what graduate school is all about--many applicants, unfortunately, do not--you don't make it. If you make a big deal about how you want to work with Professor X, and Professor X is considering a move to a different department, we don't accept you. If your writing sample doesn't show that you can express yourself clearly, there is little hope for your application. If your application emphasizes grade/scores/letters/pedigree, but doesn't convince us that you have what it takes to succeed in the PhD, you're not going to be admitted. If you've gone straight through from undergrad, without the sort of life experiences that convince us that you know why you want to go to get an advanced degree, the bar is a lot higher (but not insurmountable). And these are very fine distinctions, and again, we definitely make mistakes.

There are two things that you should take away from this. The first is that, at least this year, admission to my department (admittedly, not the best one) was fiercely competitive. Unbelievably so. I have never served on an admissions committee before (my department only allows tenured professors to be on this committee) but I get the impression that it's gotten much harder since I got my PhD. The second is that you should not sweat it if you don't make into the departments of your dreams. I'd say that at least 80% of the total applicants in our pool this year were plausible candidates for admission, meaning that I would have been happy to admit them. We end up making a lot of hard choices based on imperfect signals of future professional performance, and to reiterate once more, we definitely make mistakes. Nothing makes me more frustrated than when we admit a dud (it happens). I am always happy to see a student who didn't make it into our department succeed somewhere else.

Best of luck to you all.

A pamphlet, you say?

Presenting!

a preview!

Front side
Back side

We really should provide the community with a pamphlet, "When Someone You Love is Applying to Grad School". We can include sections like "Just Because Your Loved One is Smart, Does Not Guarantee Acceptance" and "How Adcoms Hold Your Loved One's Future in Their Hands" and "Why Telling Your Loved One to Look at the Bigger Picture is Frankly Insulting (No One Goes to Grad School for the Lulz)".

The two I hate the most from anyone, anytime are :

"Don't worry, you'll get in somewhere"

and

"I know how you feel".

In fact, I recommend we strike "I know how you feel" from ANY conversation, ever, about anything. What a dumb thing to say, when there is no way you can possibly know how another person feels. Something like, "I know how that feels" or "I can imagine that feels..." followed by a pertinent life-experience in similar vein MIGHT fly, but then again - if I'm wallowing, it's my turn to wallow, I am soooo not interested in your pity party at that point.

The most helpful and/or appreciated comments I have received in this situation are

"I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do to help you out?"

and my very favorite, ever:

"Those a**holes. How dare they reject you! Who the hell are they accepting, then? F**k them."

I actually laughed...and that came from a tenured prof who wrote a rec for me in a prior application cycle, lolol.

My roommates and I just discussed this. We decided that you don't say anything. You give them a hug, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, and complete control of the remote for the day/night.

I now give syllabus quizzes. Double proof and no excuses. Oh, you didn't know my late policy? Well, on January 19, you did. I also gave them an email assignment, because, despite the fact that I teach writing, my students seem to think that "okkkk so i missed class i was puking what did i misss????" is appropriate, even at the end of the semester. And I'm now refusing to answer emails until they are in the format I specified (in other words, that they employ complete, grammatically correct sentences, give their name, and address me).

Students seem to be extra vicious towards young women. My experiences vs. a male counterpart illustrate this, but it seems fairly substantiated in the Chronicle of Higher Education. If you fit that mold, take that into account. Students evaluate female teachers who are authority figures as bitchy, but love male ones who have the same demeanor.