TK2

ETS's free stuff is pretty good for the AWA, from my experience - they put up literally all the possible prompts for both essays, so if you're mad enough, you could go through all of them. (I would try to choose one at random and write an essay-a-day for the few weeks before the test, and even did it a couple of times.) My recommendation is to study closely the ETS's guide and examples to what makes a good or a bad essay, practice writing a lot - focusing on getting a high wordcount and working out techniques for arguments that you can use for a lot of different prompts. Overall, I think you do need a little bit of creative thinking and being able to imagine the situation they present and come up with some stuff to say about it. I got a 5.5 (and slightly mourn the 6 because I know exactly why I flubbed it) at least in part because I got lucky and had both topics actually be sort of relevant to my studies - so I had lots and lots to draw from, not to construct some rigorous academic argument, but just the ability to keep rambling on the topic and coming up with more and more angles and references. And, and maybe I'm trying to be a good commie here - grade other essays, its more helpful that asking for yours to be graded. This forum (or any number of others) host reams of people begging for someone to look over their essay. Do it! Nothing like breaking down someone elses work and seeing exactly what mistakes and problems it has to make the same issues jump out in yours - at least, it helped me.

Ouch, eh. The first day of my Bachelors degree was my 23rd birthday. I'm a week from my 30th. Life, dude. It's like the joke about the woman who never smiled because it would make wrinkles happen faster. You can date and be a PhD student all at the same time. Maybe not also cultivate a career as a professional forest ranger, fair enough, but the dating and PhD should be manageable.

My strongest recommender was wildly unpunctual, as in, no hint of a letter more than a month after the earliest deadlines and a week for the latest, and after it had actually impacted one application - there was more going on there, late physical transcripts and stuff, but also the missing letter - and it finally took really telling her all that and saying 'this is urgent now' for it to happen. All that said - I don't believe for a moment that it impacted the quality of the letter in the slightest. Lots of professors are busy and lots are absentminded and lots procrastinate and postpone stuff (and lots are all of the above.) I can't imagine the one who would let that turn into a miserly recommendation letter they had promised after it was late because you reminded them, especially if you otherwise expect them to be your best recommendation. (I got waitlisted and admitted to the two schools with the early deadlines that had had to wait ages for that letter, fwiw.) My worst moment was meeting a potential supervisor at one of the top programs in my field at a large conference. Now, I'm from a small country with only a handful of departments in my (or anyone elses, really) subject and, as it turns out, there's a certain level of mutual snobbishness and competitiveness between the two most prominent ones, say Universities A and B, (of four all told, so where we all get off being cliqueish, I couldn't tell you.) I had arranged to meet POI by email and we finally synched up at some giant, ivy-league alumni event thing in a crowd next to a cheese bar he seemed a lot more interested in than in me. Fair enough, I like cheese too. I get that its on me to be more interesting than the onion dip at this sort of thing. The moment it got really cringey, however, was when what turned out to be the head of said top program in my field shuffled up for chit-chat and was promptly introduced to me as, oh, you don't say, being from the same small country. He kind of looked me up and down, asked if I was from university A and asked if I was doing program-related-to-my-field. I said, yes, and my-actual-field. He snorted, observed there was no such thing as my-field at University A, and proceeded to ask me if I even speak the language-of-the-small-country (while actual POI and another random prominent-scholar-in-my-field kind of stood around chuckling.) Now, I speak English well, but all higher education is carried out in the local language, so I have no idea what he was even getting at at this point. I spent the rest of the conference wandering around with a constant esprit de escalier, just hoping to run into him and engage with a series of well crafted but cutting remarks showing what a brilliant, stubborn and generally un-cowable and un-impressed by him potential young scholar I was, partially because Small-Country is not known for its respect for formal heirarchy and obesquiousness to status, not least to itself. Who does he think he is, doing the patronize-a-random-MA-student-with-my-fancy-title thing, like we're Americans or something? I took that back home and it turned out he was from University B originally and it was all part of some A/B stuff presumably going back decades. Probably fortunate that it was just a half a day left at that point and I never did run into him again. But I will some day! And it will be awkward! Oh, yes it will!

Foment anarcho-syndicalist revolution. That was always Plan A, this academia detour of the last year is clearly some sort of identity crisis. In fine syndicalist form, I will honor the will of the array of committees (a committee of committees, even) who reject me and go back to spending most of my time coming up with stuff to write on placards. Or I'll mope a bit, finish my thesis, work on publishing something and try again. I just realized that it all starts again in like six months at the latest. (In truth, I think I have an informal admisson at one school, but it was so informal I'm not really sure its a thing. POI called to say I had "drifted to the top of their pile", but also ask if I was even still interested and point out that they shouldn't be my first choice, but ok, he'll take it back to the committee...)

Sounds brilliant!

Thesis, thesis, abstract for presentation about thesis, quasi-argument with advisor about thesis, thesis, some exams and studying for stuff that isn't the thesis, four (!) separate part-time jobs at the university and now starting another one at a gov ministry, all of which together just scrape past monthly minimum wage together with my thesis scholarship, which bring me back to, right, thesis, thesis, hanging out late in the department working on my thesis and getting a nostalgia trip from a senior professor rearranging his office at half past 8 pm, making me doubt - on a deep, dark coffee break of the soul sort of level - the whole notion of going one inch further in an academic career but also getting tips for, yes, the thesis.

I don't know about the US, but planning programs here at least do position themselves as being interested in people of every background imaginable, and in my experience that's pretty true in terms of my classmates. A legal background sounds like a huge plus to me - exactly the kind of multiple experience and accreditation planners often tend to need. Again, I really don't know the US dynamics, but it doesn't sound at all like you're at any disadvantage.

The earlier the better, obviously, but since it's not for another six months or so, I don't see why you can't sit on it for another month or two, at the very least until you've officially accepted, you know the financing will absolutely work out, etc. I had the same job interview this week...they really wanted a one-year committment and I told them I had applied but was really, really unoptimistic, so then there was a long back and forth with the guy interviewing me where he said a lot of things like 'well, officially, it's very important, of course....who knows, things come up in life...just saying, maybe no one else needs to know right now...particularly when you fill out the forms...'. It took me longer than it should have to stop earnestly and unapologetically going that I had applied and wanted to be very honest with them.

I don't know what the structure or expectations of you program is, but for example I contacted the person I wanted to be my thesis advisor - we'd never met at that point - over the summer between my first and second year (during which I was abroad) and had a very long email back-and-forth (and a few calls) ironing out my research proposal, etc, all before the start of the year. It seems perfectly appropriate to discuss reasearch and various expectations, directions, etc, If you're an admitted crudent and this professor has agreed to be your supervisor.

Haha yeah, that last post turned into venting by the end of it. I disagree on the POI* contact thing. Not how departments or individuals choose to use/ignore/whatever, but how these things are communicated to applicants. I think its an area where expectations are needlessly fuzzy, frustrating and with little information provided about norms, expectations, role in the process etc. This is exactly the kind of thing that isn't very important (in the US system, at least) while being unclearly positioned as a requirement nontheless. In other words - stick it in the FAQ if its a thing. Personally, it would never have occured to me to contact anyone in the US if I hadn't had people with the relevant knowledge to approach who egged me into it. It was pretty random, just the professor I had a good relationship with happening to favour the lots-of-contact approach, I think. The role of this kind of stumble-upon advice should be minimized, not expanded. My experience in working in a number of countries at very diverse levels of development is that a huge gap in people's academic ambitions - people who on paper have equivalent BA or even MA degrees - is in the soft skills. Like what's expected when contacting a professor. Lacking public guidelines, that gap is magnified even more. I wonder how comfortable anywhere would be actually publishing their deliberations, with indetifying information redacted? Not at all, I imagine, but there's an article out there somewhere of a study of the role of diversity in admissions, really, and the author sat in (and quotes) during admissions committees meetings. It's vaguely horrifying/titillating reading, at this point. It felt like that time I accidentally overheard part of a teacher's staff meeting about other kids when I was in middle school...equal parts fascination and transgression. *What does that stand for? I've never figured it out. Professor of Interest?

Thanks for that thoughtful response! Yes, I would agree that its more about what's communicated to applicants, and how we understand application, rather than what the actual process any given school or department puts those application material through. Better information I think would be a huge help, and I wonder why departments tend to be so stingy with it, particularly in official formats. Often the most useful, frank information about what they're looking at both in general, and from a specific piece of the application - like, a minimum of such and such maths classes, or specific things to mention in an SoP - you can find is buried in a PDF from 2007 posted on the dean of graduate students' personal website under a tab titled 'My favorite 70's Latvian polka vinyl records ranked and other personal miscellany, beware the leopard.' (I'm only sort of kidding.) Its not that it seems to be a secret or something individual faculty are particularly wary of sharing, but no one seems to really care to put up that level of detail the official FAQ. I believe the reasonable applicant can understand that even if that section will list Linear Algebra or whatever now, that isn't a hard requisite, but can take into account that its something committees like to see, or sub-specializations that they're applying to like to see, etc, and will weigh their options accordingly when deciding where to apply. (or sign up for some summer classes to improve their chances based on actual knowledge rather than guess work, etc.) Speaking of Canada, I really appreciated U of Toronto's Geography Department's approach, for example - http://geography.utoronto.ca/graduate-geography/application-admissions/supervision/. A tab titled very clearly 'Finding a Supervisor' and listing, in a single place, in well ordered paragraphs, what all faculty who are interested in taking on students are working on and who they're looking for. It's the only page of its kind in existence that I am aware of, and should be treasured as a glowing jewel. Mind, I don't know how accurate or for real it is. Maybe they never update it. Maybe its a wishlist. Who knows. But it gives a better sense of what the hell 'departmental fit' is than anything else I've seen. On that note, I think the process of contacting POI's before application needs to be either officially formalized or utterly deformalized, though I don't know that erasing the value of personal contact is ever truly possible in any field. But it would help if departments at least had genuinely open guidelines about what is acceptable, what the protocol is, etc. (The way UK universities do.) Even on the level of individual professors - stick it up on their profiles on something. This person prefers not to be contacted in advance but only to read your application/this person finds it acceptable to be contacted, please attach your CV and write no more than 100 words about what you intend to pursue in you PhD when you email them (...and please get in touch with such-and-such administrative person who is not maybe doing field work on a sheep farm in Kyrgyzstan all summer if you have not heard back after three emails or three months...) etc. For example, I recieved an offer to be deferred to next years application from one university in the US where I messed up getting some stuff in by the deadline, and the very nice admin person sent me an email saying I now have 11 months to improve my application and 'build relationships with the faculty'. Wait what? Was I supposed to be building up relationships with the faculty? Is this a very important factor in my application? It does not SAY anywhere that this is a program that requires contact with faculty before hand. What are the channels via which it is acceptable to build up relationships? Etc. So anyway, put that out there if this is actually a huge criteria in how you select your students. Its never going to be perfect, but make it more straightforward/encouraging, because otherwise there's this huge advantage to people who are, well, plucky, and possibly who have the close inner advice that really, this is how it works. The UK system requires just as much finesse and chasing people down and sending nail-bitingly worded emails, which i'm fine with because its a skill we all have to learn sometime, but it says pretty clearly on most applications guidelines that you have to. With the US system yo have no idea if emailing a POI is actually helping your cause, or basically essential, or shooting yourself in the foot, because maybe they hate that or its just irrelevant and you're wasting time and energy.

So here's kind of a broad general issue i've been thinking about while waiting around and procrastinating on my actual work. This applying thing is tedious, exhausting, expensive, time consuming, seemingly arbitrary at times and strongly opaque - this coming from the perspective of applicants. Obviously programs set it up in ways that they feel work for them, which might be frustrating for us, but probably have their (pretty good) reasons - but some reasearch on things like the GRE or genuinely diverse admissions shows mixed results on the university side as well. (Just saw an article about a study that found that only some tiny percentage of MBA programs, for example, met what they considered their own criteria for admissions processes.) Other systems seem to be more diverse - in the UK there's more formal space for contact with POIs and research proposals as part of the application. In Europe PhD applications are typically more like job offers, stepping into a role in an existing project. In Israel it's highly informal, mostly at the level of developing a strong personal contact with a specific professor who agrees to supervise and/or has funding and a lab, etc, and the applying to the university bit is somewhat more of a formality. I don't know how it works anywhere else. I'm curious how people think this whole rigamarole can be improved? What are you finding annoying but acceptable? (For example, I get that admissions criteria can be vague. That's just how it is. I believe departments when they say they have no single portrait of an ideal candidate. (Maybe I'm naive)) Compared to what's annoying but seemingly has no good reason? (The GRE mysteries, for example, seem pointless to me - if there are internal cutoffs, they should be advertised. If it's genuinely barely looked at - and studies appear to show there's hardly any correlation between the GRE and, say, likeliness to complete a PhD - stop requiring it. If it's used in as a factor against a poor GPA, say exactly that and mean it.) Contrarily, what works just fine, as far as you're concerned?

It didn't deter me per se because by the time the election rolled around I had already finalized the list of where to apply for the most part so c'est la vie, but I know Brexit, alongside stories from friends about how difficult the student visa process in the UK was, the increasing limitation on the ability to work while studying, the potential breakdown of academic ties with the EU, etc, did deter me somewhat from considering more schools in the UK more seriously. I mean, in my case I have pretty good options at home in terms of doing a PhD on a purely academic level, and a big part of the motivation for going abroad is to gain more exposure and experience in a small field especially since I'm interested in very international topics. If the US/UK are becoming more xenophobic and parochial and drawing back from being migrant-absorbing countries, involvement in global processes, etc, (which will be reflected academically in funding for international projects in my general area of interest, I assume, and thats the geographical part...the technical side of what I'm interested in is public transport, which apparently is going to lose all federal funding as far as anyone can make out the administrations policy. And thats for actual, you know, getting the trains to run on time. I assume research is going to be deader than the dodo) that makes studying there at the moment less attractive academically/profesionally as well as on a personal level of realizing that being in Trump's America on a student visa will probably just be unpleasant (and expensive) in a lot of small (and big, depending on where you're from) ways. Taking into account Brexit wasn't a 100% conscious decision and I have academic reasons to favour the US style of PhD in general, but I imagine if the order of events had been reversed I might have found myself applying to just a few top US programs, and casting a wider net in terms of UK schools. (And I now regret not making more of an effort with Canada, but, yeah, small field so only about 3 programs there to consider none of which are an obviously good fit.)

Much simpler - it's intended to mean there will be no postdocs on H1-B.

I don't know your field, but with that string of rejections (for which I'm sorry...it must sting) it seems like more than the dry stats of GPA and GRE, neither of which seem that bad. How confident are you about your letters or recommendation and/or statement? At a guess, you might need to have a very awkward and honest check in with your letter writers (were they the same ones as last year?) if you feel you're up to that. Not saying to barge into their office demanding to know what they wrote, but sort of approach admitting that you had a terrible application round and asking if they have any advice, if they think this is feasible for you, etc. Or alternatively, and perhaps more practically, find different letter writers and make sure to ask them up front if they believe they can write a strong letter for you. And have someone who knows the field and will be nastily honest look over your SoP as well. It sounds like there's something that's making a bad impression - could be a single throwaway line - buried somewhere in your application, and I figure those are the most likely candidates.

Yeah...but it feels oddly inbetween. I'm turning 30 (eek, in three weeks) and feel like that's just about fine (I'm in urban planning, and most phD programs either require or strongly recommend applicants have an MA and a few years work experience) but still expect to be on the higher end of the cohort if I get in, and then the thought of reapplying next year, a year older, starts to make me nervous. Not so much the intrinsic difference between 30 and 31 in and of itself, but the sense of opportunity cost and uncertainty at this moment in life feeling like a burden in a way - I imagine, I may be wrong - it wouldn't have felt when I was 26 or something. My plan B is to look for interesting work, do some internships, maybe a volunteering stint, etc, that will strengthen next years applications. But that also sounds too wishy-washy for this career stage (and personal life stage) for me. I've already done all that, I should be looking for a real, long-term job...except that the PhD is the direction I want to take (among other things, because I don't find myself terribly excited about any of the career possibilities available to me at the moment without one) and if it requires another year, so be it...but there's a certain sense of frustration at facing a gap-year like situation at this point that I think is a little age-related.

Oh lol, this would never have occured to me, but I did now randomly check the analytics of my academia.edu page (which I only set up a few weeks ago because I needed access to an article, and has nothing on it except a few bookmarks and interests) and, lo and behold, a lone 'view' from one of the college towns I applied to. Now I don't know whether to feel heartened by it, stressed out by it, assume its a coincidence, or stressed that I don't have views from anywhere else! Linkedin, on the other hand, shows nothing.

I think I took it when I was studying. It was fairly closely in-line with the other tests (Manhattan, Kaplan, ETS) and reasonably predictive in my case. (Rather, I had a pretty consistent trajectory of small improvements from test to test and jumped between test-makers over that time, and CruchPrep fit the curve when I took it.)

But you don't really know how they're in play. Even the easily quantifiable parts - GPA, GRE - are relative to the entire pool. Maybe a score you think is good is actually middle of the road. Maybe one you think is poor is actually pretty good. Maybe this particular committee decides to only use GREs as an intial strainer and genuinely throws them out afterwards, making that part of the application partiallyh moot. And the qualitative parts - work, statements, letters - you really have no way to assess at all, since they need to fit with the entirely idiosyncratic preferences of each particular program and comittee. So you know what factors are in play, but the best you can do in asessing them is to roughly assume some weaker stuff balances out some stronger stuff, feel reasonably confident that a high GPA is better than a low GPA, take the value of the GRE with a grain of salt, and assume your attractiveness basically averages out across programs given that you meet the minimal criteria.

Well, you said it yourself - there are a lot of confounding variables which make 'the stronger applicant' an almost nonexistant entity. Maybe you get a commitee member with a particular disdain for GREs. Maybe the person who would have been the ideal supervisor just decided to quit academia and move to Madagascar to run a beach bar. Maybe your SoP is a grating mess and you can't tell because you've been over it so many times. Maybe people really don't apply if they don't feel ready. Maybe no one is actually 'vanilla'. You don't know. Why assume oneself to be advantaged in some way for the purpose of dry odds? (For example, my more-or-less top choice program actually has one of the higher-middle admission rates in my field, mostly, I would guess, due to unusually large admitted cohort sizes (relatively). So I can be optimistic, right? I've applied to technically more selective programs where I feel I'm a strong candidate. But it also has an official GRE cutoff of 5.0 on the AWA. That's the 93%. Are they for real? Is no one with a 4.5 applying? Do they actually throw out those 4.5s? When they report 100 or whatever applications, are they getting those 100 entirely from the 7% of the would-be-grad-student population getting past their crazy cutoff? And...who the hell knows, therefore, how I measure up in a crowd of people who all have 93% GREs. So, all I know is that they have a roughly 8/100 admission rate, and that's what I work with in the long, dark compulsive unstructured snacktime of the soul over here while procrastinating by playing the odds game.)

oops double. messed up the quote.

Right, but you don't know any of that, or how to assess it, or how to position yourself on the list of applicants. All you know is the X of Y are admitted, which makes it essentially a lottery as far as you're concerned.

Oh good to hear, it's been on my kindle a few weeks after I read Arlie Hochschilds Strangers in their Own Land. (Also good.) Finished Narconomics, which is about the economics of the drug trade. Pretty light - some surprising information and logic, and was actually a fun way to refresh some introductory econ concepts I haven't had to recall in a while. Started Infomocracy, which actual fiction, which I haven't managed to get into in a while. I have as many as 10-20 books going in parallell sometimes. Obviously, some of them are long, slow intermittend reads I might not pick up for months, etc, and I suppose it has an impact on recollection and internalization of the material, but I don't feel guilty about it anymore. Mood and interest changes, something else catches my eye, etc. I try not to feel guilty anymore about starting books when I'm in the middle of a few - I know I will finish most of them...eventually.

Yay! I'm glad youu liked it. I read it in a day as well. It helped me work up the nerve to do a round of reminders for my letter-writers. (It took only two more rounds of that to get (almost) all the letters, even! (just 2 out of 23 to go!)) I just started that as well...I think his approach is great but the wirting is just a little thin (and more academic than I expected)3 Like could have used a strong edit, just for language's sake. It does make it a little frustrating to read as an 'entertainment' book.

Lol, yes, could go either way! I thought it was hilarious, and even rather cathartic. Seemed like a fairly honest insight (The writer is an American university professor who presumably has had to do a few of these) into that sort of absurdity these systems arrive at. But I'm still submitting and asking for recommendation letters (and, naturally, I found it while I was googling advice on how to write one, as one recommender inevitably asked me to write a draft myself.)