almondicecream

Apply to lab manager positions in the meantime to ease your worries about what you might do if you don't get in. If anything, sometimes it might be more relaxing than the PhD itself because you don't need to worry about taking classes, or responding to hundreds of emails from the freshmen in the courses you will TA...

Does anyone know if Cornell's emailed people for its interview weekend/to notify people of their waitlist status?

I'm guessing it's like a couple other programs maybe that don't explicitly email people to let them know they're on the waitlist? Some just keep a list of people they don't reject, and if they end up not getting enough acceptances, then someone on the list would get an unexpected acceptance, probably in March or April.

well both program and advisor's past placement of students matters.

That seems like the average experience to me. You don't know what you don't know, right, so it's possible that other students happened to come across as much more well-read or it's possible that you came across that way. Most interviews don't grill the interviewees in a way that makes it obvious to the interviewee whether they "passed" or "failed" (e.g., do you know the various models for attitude change?).

Not sure if that's tongue in cheek, but I'm not sure if we've evolved the right cognitions to pick the best PhD program using heuristics. Mates and friends, sure, but..

Congrats on your multiple interviews (or multiple acceptances even?)! I'm extraordinarily torn between two of my options, and I feel like listing out all the variables I care about (research interest fit with primary advisor, research interest fit with potential secondary advisors, level of graduate student happiness, how easy it is to switch around advisors if something doesn't work out, placement of primary advisor's previous students), then assigning them weights, then "grading" the two programs, then calculating the "final grade" for each program has helped me out.

Yeah I've been letting myself go a little after getting my acceptances. But just a little, I swear.

My email verbatim. Quite honestly though, both schools are 2/3 of my dream schools so I suppose you could maybe tone down the excessive excitement. Hi ____, Thank you for this AMAZING news!!!! I feel honored that you and the other faculty would be interested in working with me, and I was so, so happily surprised by how easy it was to get along with the students and the prospective students. Would you potentially have time to talk later, perhaps between February 22nd and March 8th? I could email you to set up a date a few days before. I was invited to the __________ recruitment weekend and will need some time to think since both programs are dream schools for me. But I will try my best to figure out what opportunity is best for me by early March so I don't inconvenience people too much. Again, thank you so much!!

Yeah I interviewed for a social program last week and the grad students talked about some people who stood out in past interview weekends - people who were very cold and competitive (think Corinne on this season's Bachelor).

AHHHH I GOT ACCEPTED INTO TWO OF MY THREE DREAM PROGRAMS!! When I got my first acceptance a few weeks ago I just started bawling. And then I just got accepted to my other dream school, laughed because nothing this amazing happens to me ever, and then started crying again. I'm just bewildered and overwhelmed. Almost can't believe the programs I've gotten into with a 2.98 GPA, although I do feel like I've spent quite a bit of time trying make up for that. Been on this forum for four years and am glad to have finally be "graduating" from it.

I think it's way too variable to try to separate out some pattern.. some programs already mostly know who they want, but they just want to weed out any potential crazies, so it's mostly just to make sure your personality isn't impossible to work with. Some programs I've heard are really tough in interviews, grilling people on their study ideas, and those I'd assume put more stock in interview performance. You'd probably be better off directly asking their current grad students how they typically weight variables when making decisions.

Mm I've had 3 umich social area professors tell me that 90th percentile (the actual score kind of confuses me sometimes so I just use percentiles) or above is usually about the point where you get diminished marginal returns from an increase in your score. i.e., if you have 90th percentile for both and someone else has 99th percentile for both, it kind of doesn't matter. However, if you have 80th percentile for both and someone else has 90th percentile, then they may give some preference to the other person. Regarding it being a thing that gets you in the door rather than into the actual program, that's definitely true at umich and University of Southern California (I assume at others schools, too, but these are the only ones where professors directly told me this). Although, I know that umich's personality and social contexts area has admitted students that are around 50th percentile for GRE. How much professors care about GRE is really a mixed bag. It's a proxy for g-factor/intelligence and has been correlated with success in grad school, but at the same time, there's a lot of pushback against it also because it is also a reflection of your level of privilege (e.g., white males from high SES families tend to do better, even controlling for relevant variables). So you'll get some people who have a HARD, HARD line somewhere between 85th-95th percentile whereas others are more flexible. The same goes for GPA, although according to my profs here, some people see GPA as a proxy for work ethic whereas others see it as a proxy for both work ethic and intelligence.