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Chances are you're already aware of this, but I've heard from people who have applied to various graduate departments across different schools that your GRE scores can be used to "weed out" students in the initial screening rounds. I can see this point making sense for departments that have received a (unexpectedly) large number of applications for a given year. As others have already said before: as long as your GRE score is within an "acceptable" range (obviously this varies between each department/school), they won't matter that much. A close friend of mine did much better than me in the GRE (169V/165Q/5.5W - I had a lower V score) but he got rejected from several top schools. One exception I can think of is University-wide fellowships. I was told that my GRE scores had to be within a certain range - POI however didn't specify exactly what this range was - in order to be eligible for a University-wide 5 year fellowship package (I did receive said fellowship package, starting this August). I did an extremely crazy/stupid thing and only applied to one American graduate program - I had about 5 schools in mind once I sifted through all the information I gathered, but 2 of them couldn't offer funding for the 2017-18 admissions cycle and the other 2 turned out to be not so good research fits. Granted, I didn't panic as much as I should have because I had a fully funded PhD offer lined up here in Australia, but I really wanted to change disciplines from socio-cultural/medical anthro to a more clinical field and thought anthropology wasn't a good fit for my research interests. In any case, I've been wanting to attend an American university for about 10 years (since I was in high school) and I'm excited to have finally achieved this goal. Keep your head up!

Thanks for the tips! For me, living in a country where individual firearms possession is commonplace is daunting in itself (Australia essentially "banned" personal firearm possession after a massacre in 1996, although exceptions exist), but it seems most non-Americans get over it somewhat quickly. I'll have to get onto the housing search quickly, it seems

For those of you not in the area/overseas: where/how have you been searching for housing? I've searched for a few apartments but with conflicting reviews and whatnot on various websites, it's been tricky finding somewhere that seems decent enough (functioning management, not too far from campus). If I can deal directly with the management I'm willing to transfer any deposits/fees from Australia, but I'm not so keen to send money to a stranger on a listing who could simply run away with the money.

I'm planning to get to Chapel Hill by the first/second week of August - there are some mandatory events to attend for international students (mostly to do with visa paperwork) around the 16th. Got my I-20 a few days ago, all I need to do now is wait until early/mid May to file in the application with the Consulate in Sydney and get the visa issued. I'm a big NBA fan, so I'm pretty excited to go to some games at the Dean Dome (I managed to watch the NCAA title game against Gonzaga last week - ugly game, but a victory nonetheless)!

Hello from Sydney, Australia! Very excited to head over in autumn (I know you Americans refer to it as "fall"...). Won't disclose publicly which program to which I've been admitted since it's a small department and there's a good chance I will be identified immediately, but I'll be sticking around for the next 4-5 years to get a PhD.