deactivatedaccount

Thought I'd bring my gradcafe account temporarily out of retirement to contribute to the wealth of SSHRC knowledge this year. Got my results in the mail today on Vancouver Island, BC. I was waitlisted, which I had already found out from my department. I was on committee 5 (if that's where poli sci goes), and my score was 10.1/20, which, gathering from some of the other scores, is probably the lower borne of the waitlist (I think I've seen a 12.6 and a 12.9.) For those dedicated to the envelope theory, mine was a medium-sized brown envelope, which may add an interesting new level to the big envelope = SSHRC, small envelope = no SSHRC theory. Congratulations to all those successful so far, best of luck to those on the waitlist and waiting to hear, and to those unsuccessful, I'll see you at the pity party I'm throwing at my house this Friday. I'll be providing snacks, but please bring your favourite wine and the hottest list of tracks you like to cry to.

Hahaha, I wish it was the dramatically mean. The text I found funny in it was: "Admission decisions are made on a comparative basis and are the result of a careful evaluation of each candidate's application, taking into account academic achievement, preparation for advanced study, and other supporting materials. Most of the applicants to our graduate programs possess very strong qualifications indicating an ability to do advanced academic work. Our graduate programs also receive far more applications from applicants than they can accept at any one time. These programs must select the very best from their applicants pools. Unfortunately, you were not among those selected." So reading it, when they start to ramp up, I was expecting them to somehow try to spare my feelings (not to say this is what I wanted or feel entitled to somehow, it's just what I'm used to seeing in rejection notifications), but this letter basically just talks up all of their accepted applicants and then is like "but you were not one of those."

I also noticed how exceptionally harsh their letter was hahaha. Usually the wordier they are, the more they're trying to be gentle on people's feelings, but Brown's was wordy and still straight up mean.

Rejected as well, but congratulations to those admitted

I'm in the same boat. Mine had said awaiting decision up until this morning. It now says "Decision Made" though with no mention of the decision, and I have not yet received an email.

I suspect that Canadian acceptances generally go out a bit later than American acceptances, and so it may get more participation a bit later on. I may be generalizing though, the only Canadian school I applied to was Ottawa, and the deadline for domestic students was only a week ago, and so I won't expect to be hearing from them for a while.

There seems to be a website that shows similar information (perhaps with poorer success): http://www.phdstipends.com/results Northwestern is paying $31K--from what I understand this is equal among all of their incoming students.

Apparently when I said this Sunday, what I meant was that all of the other University of California schools except for Santa Cruz would be notifying people soon

Good points, I was confused because they were always posted late in the day here, so it seemed like schools were sending out late night acceptances, but I guess also taking into account international time zones it makes sense that students in further time zones would be sleeping when acceptances were sent out, and then wake up to them when it's late here.

I have a question about the time zone on the results page--a number of times I've noticed a significant number of people posting on what appears to be "tomorrow"--for example, I already see a lot of February 1st acceptances. This is not necessarily only in reference to the "Date Added," which makes sense, but mostly the "Decision Date," which from what I understand should reflect the date on which the acceptance occurred. I'm already in the Pacific time zone, so I'm used to adding three hours at times to convert to Eastern, but even then it doesn't make sense for example, it is still only 10:15 currently.) Moreover, why are people getting acceptances so early in the morning?

To anyone having applied to UC Santa Cruz, I was contacted yesterday by the director of graduate studies asking for a full copy of my writing sample (they require only an abstract in their applications.) His response today was that they will be in touch before long, and so I suspect they will be notifying people soon.

I thought I would post for the Northwestern applicants wanting more information. I did not post on the results board, but I did receive an email acceptance on the 25th, and I am also in the theory subfield, so the subfield theory may be correct. At first the email was my only notification, but they updated the applicant portal just yesterday to reflect the acceptance, so I'm not sure if they would have updated everyone's portal that day, or only those they had contacted, but it may be worth checking for a recent update within the past day. They have a prospective student weekend near the end of February, and mentioned that next Friday the 3rd was the last day to make arrangements with them to attend, and so I am thinking that they may have contacted everyone, because otherwise they wouldn't be giving very much notice to make plans.

Hi Volition, You're right, they do require a lot in their application. I also applied, but had already written a proposal for SSHRC and a number of other things and so I was able to copy and paste a lot, but it does require a certain degree of work that other schools don't seem to have. I'm not sure how developed they expect the research proposals to be--I had a colleague who applied and wrote very little for one of the sections, and they accepted him conditionally that he elaborate upon that section. It could work in your favour though--I think that a number of potential applicants may be thrown off by the research proposal aspect which narrows the applicant pool off the bat. If you have faculty members that you are interested in working with I would definitely say that the effort is worth it. and boruchan93 is also right, at the graduate level the department is French, meaning that students completing the program in English are required to take one course in French, and things like department meetings are held in French. I did my Bachelor's at uOttawa and I would say that a genuine grasp of French is definitely required, if your knowledge of French is distant I think it would be difficult, though certainly not impossible, to do well. The upside being that they do have very strong faculty if you do know French, particularly in Political Thought.