Monody

Did you receive a notification just now or already a few hours ago?

Ive to say re-reading an SOP feels somewhat like re-reading some sort of love letter you wrote as a child. Over the top and quite embarrassing in hindsight.

Received an invitation for an interview for the excellence scholarship at ETH Zurich (MACIS). Declined due to the other admission offers and because it is a Master program.

Congrats. Feels awesome, doesn't it?

NYU has been out for nearly two weeks. Waitlists as well.

Well, I just asked (not at Columbia, but at PennState). Even though the answer may not be unbiased, I am nonetheless quite curious about their perspective in the case that I were to get an acceptance at MIT or Stanford and would have to decide between Columbia and one of them?

How awful of an idea is it to ask a POI something along the lines of how do you compare your program with these others and why should I pick yours given these interests and goals?

Then I know what I will do later today. I am still waiting for the email regarding the travel arrangements. The flights from Copenhagen are surprisingly not as expensive as I thought they would be (around 450€ round trip) so that I am quite certain that I will be there.

I honestly would feel bad to visit as an international student and getting reimbursed with over 500$ even though I am practically certain that choosing Penn over Columbia would be foolish given my interests. Yes, they have a great program, great faculty, and great research opportunities, that's why I applied there, but as someone else mentioned earlier, it is being trumped in every category by Columbia.

How would you handle two admissions from two universities of which one is vastly better regarding its faculty, training, offer, and prestige than the other? I am now considering to decline the second offer so that they know what they are at and are able to notify someone on the waiting list so that he or she can still go to the visiting weekend? Is there any chance (in hell) that a department rescinds an offer given that there are no irregularities?

Do you already know where you would like to go to or are you conditioning your decision on the visiting weekends?

Anyone else regularly checking one's acceptances? It somehow makes me extremely happy every time I see that all the effort actually paid off (and the offer is still there).

Missed to post my results. Sorry.

Any chance for Stanford later today?

Id say I am somewhat happy that they have their journals, we have ours, and nobody forces me to read anything in that direction. The only thing that annoys me is the activism that grows out of this perspective (and the indoctrination of undergraduates) and the idea that they may at some points in time have some influence on policy decisions.

Well, the prof explicitly told me that quant is on its way out since all civil wars are different and there is nothing to be generalized. She said that with a straight face and cited as evidence the last few conferences she visited. Since she applies critical theory I just thought selection bias and kept my mouth shut. Nothing against her personally, after all she wrote one of the recommendations, but that is one some areas an actual perspective on the current state of affairs.

On the one hand, I agree with you, but on the other I am quite unwilling to decline their offer before I locked in another one and Stanford is still outstanding which for me would top Columbia. In the case that something obscure would happen to my Columbia acceptance I would still have PSU. And while rationality generally wins out, Ive a weakness for nice emails that care about my research after spending 2 years in an environment where quantitative work was generally looked down upon. In sum, I will probably let them know soon that I will attend someplace else and early enough so that a waitlisted candidate can go to the meeting in March.

Why can't the PSU DGS be less nice. This only makes the decision harder.

eMail from Piazza directly. He said that further information will come soon. I feel euphoric and bad at the same time as the decision is not as easy as I would have liked it.

Claiming PennState.

I wonder whether they could give him anything to leave Harvard that he doesn't already have or Harvard would be willing to give him to stay.

King to Stanford as well?

I agree with the above, but I would also generally add that GRE scores signal particularly little (doing high school Math and logic puzzles under pressure) and if they communicate anything then I would say that the message is more often than not negative if the scores are lacking. I only received one acceptance so far and I am sure that neither the rejections nor the acceptance were particularly influenced by the GRE.

You may want to have a look at this: http://gsas.columbia.edu/content/fellowship-information-doctoral-students

I considered it as a summer stipend for each summer over the 5 years.