fangsout

As much as I hate the Gators, (FSU and UT alumnus ;o)) I would say ditto to the advice above. I have a hard time believing the director would not be able to get you in if he/she was familiar with your qualifications when they told you to apply.

If his employer is willing to pay, then I would start by taking some classes at the school as a non-degree seeking student while he figures out where he would most likely get in. After getting to know his professors, perhaps he would be admitted to a coursework only program on a probationary basis... I had a 2.9 undergrad gpa with a 3.7 in CS and I was accepted to large public schools in the southeast like Florida, Auburn, Tennessee, Clemson, etc. None of Those Schools are top-50, but I've been very successful with internships(HP, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Intel) "despite" going to Tennessee. This may be too much info, but I just wanted to illustrate the point that if you're getting your MSCS for industry, work performance matters much more than the ranking of the school name on your degree. I would look for internet Master's programs at legitimate universities if there is not a local school he can get into. By "legitimate", I mean schools with physical campuses that are "heard of" in the US.

This is exactly the kind of note I thought we were talking about sending. I would definitely not send another e-mail with the intention of starting up another conversation. Just a quick thanks and letting them know you did apply...

Just to give an update. I e-mailed the grad admissions office and they replied saying that they had received all of my materials and the online status will be updated by Wednesday! To their credit, they have been very good about answering my e-mails.

I would encourage you to do that. I haven't been very active contributing to these boards, but I have definitely used the old threads as a resource.

Count: If only more people knew this and used this fact to their advantage...

Alissa, I don't have an answer for you about possible substitute programs or going through this issue. I can tell you that from my experience with applications all being different and mail being slow, and professors being late submitting recs, I have made it a rule to submit my applications as soon as possible after they are made available. That way, you have time to deal with issues, like you are experiencing, before the deadline passes. I know this doesn't help your situation, but it might be helpful to someone reading this thread for future admissions cycles. That being said. If I was in your shoes, I would spend every waking moment for the next few days exploring possible schools and getting those applications submitted, even if you won't have the supporting materials in time. maybe usnews rankings can be a starting point for finding possible schools.

For better or for worse, I sent e-mails to all of the professors with whom I had some sort of interaction during the application process. I don't think it did any harm, because all of the professors I e-mailed had encouraged me to apply to their programs. However, I would not send a long e-mail. I made sure I replied to the last e-mail I had received from each professor, so that they could scroll down and be able to put everything into context when they see what our previous emails were about.

I have dates and statuses of everything organized in google docs and religiously go through the links to all of the status pages a couple times a day to see if my status has changed! I even sift through my spam folder to make sure an e-mail from a grad school isn't filtered away!

lol, I just had a laugh picturing the work-study student answering the phone and someone being like, "Hello, my name is Joe Schmoe. WTF is wrong with you people?".

I'm experiencing the same thing. It says my grad transcript and one of my letters of recommendation are "Initiated", so I had my letter writer submit the letter again. She sent me the receipt that she got from OSU confirming they received her letter, yet 2 weeks later it still shows as only "Initiated". Also, I got an e-mail back from the grad admissions office saying that they were working on processing the materials they received on Nov 29, and this was like a week ago.

Ok well I don't think I even have an avatar, but my username is a US military aviation term for when you are carrying live missiles or bombs. The idea is that your "fangs", live ordinance, are "out", aka ready to deploy. My father was a fighter pilot and growing up we kinda adapted the term to mean that you've done all the preparation and now you're anxious to get started.

I haven't seen Harvard mentioned yet. Asking me to enter in all of my courses, and then enter in all of my mathematics courses, unless of course I already listed them in the first section. They didn't have enough text boxes for my undergrad courses, so I went back and had to replace all of the meaningless courses from 1st and second year with my junior/senior classes.

I am a US citizen finishing up my M.S. in Computer Science at a third tier CS School. GRE: Q: 760 V: 550 Aw: 5.5 M.S.C.S. gpa: 3.7 cumulative B.S.C.S. gpa: 2.9 cumulative w/ 3.7 in computer science Research: no research papers in grad school, but I have been active in research at a highly-respected lab in our department for the last few months. 1 research papers in undergrad to low-tier publication, and 1 technical report that was not published. Letters of Recommendation: 2 letters from faculty that would be considered "average" recommendations, and 1 letter from a very distinguished researcher in their field. My interests are in High Performance Computing and Distributed Systems. My question is simple. What range of schools does my profile line up with? Please give either names of Universities or by USNews rankings(e.g. 20-30, 40's,...) I tend to do very well when it comes to interviews, if that even factors in. Thanks A Lot for any help you all can give.

My two cents, I applied to a university for the masters program, but they said that they could not give me financial assistance for a masters, and they asked me about my interest in pursuing a phd. I told them that I was interested but not sure. I ended up applying to the Ph.D. program and getting funding. I have spent 1.5 yrs as a ph.d. student, and have come to realize that I want to ultimately do research at a top 50 academic institution. The placement of phd's from my university is not very high in the top 50 schools, so I switched to the Master's program in what is now my 4th semester. I fully intend on applying to ph.d. programs in the top 20 for 2011, and I have been very straightforward about my intentions with all faculty and my advisor. I believe that this is the best way to go about this. Do not lie or mislead anyone, but there is nothing wrong with saying that you "aren't positive" or you are "interested" in getting a ph.d. if that is the truth. Now, I must say, with top schools, this will probably not get you admitted because they have the luxury of being highly sought after by students whose life-long dream it is to get their Ph.D.