Andromeda3921

has anyone been invited off the waitlist @ CUNY? 

I've officially received all my rejections from American and Canadian schools. If anyone is considering throwing their hat into next year's ring, you might want to consider doing your PhD abroad and applying to a couple schools outside of North America. In some cases, while the rigor is the same, the competition to gain admission is not as fierce, and it could be the difference between getting to do a PhD or not at all, as was my case. 
In any case, good job everyone! You are all smart and capable people, regardless of how your applications turned out. Whether you decide to try again next year or pursue other areas, I wish you all the best of luck and success. ?

Current CUNY student here. It is not unusual to get off the waitlist (I did) but it is rare to get the GCF. My advice is not to email the chair of the adcomm because he will not give you your ranking on the wait list (everyone in my year and the year ahead of me received the same line "I think there is a good chance that you will get admitted with a GCF"or something like that--literally word for word, copy and pasted--and none of us did. There doesn't seem to be variation based on international/US based--they actually have a really complicated ranking system. I do have one friend who is in their fourth year who did get a GCF off the waitlist, though--so it does happen. What's more, the adcomm receives a lot of those emails and it annoys them. If you do interact with anyone at CUNY, be positive, say you are thankful to be considered and above all, be honest with yourself and them regarding your ability to handle a tuition-only admission. Tuition only is ROUGH.
You can message me privately here if you have specific questions.  I know how tough your situation is and really only found support here in the form of a current CUNY student I met on gradcafe. I'm trying to pay it forward this year  

Looks like NYU sent out acceptances and rejections yesterday. I have yet to hear about the status of my application. Wondering if there are others in a similar situation? And does this mean wait-listing! 

Ugh, I feel you! It is my top choice as well! Hope we both get in! 
And I'm sorry, I 'm not sure. I'd hazard a guess of maybe 20-25? (This is only a guess, pliss not to panic anybody - I know I would if I saw this!) 
P.S: Anyone waiting on NYU should hear over this week as well, I mailed the adcomm head. Though I was rejected, best of luck to you guys out here! Also, don't panic if they haven't reached out yet, I don't think that's necessarily the case for NYU to do interviews/early acceptances. 

@adamanthro Oh damn, I hate the really vague "early, mid, late" shit. JUST TELL US ALREADY! They have all the power, they could at least just let us know when they are going to release their decisions. Hopefully they'll let us know by the beginning of next week. Thanks for the information!

@perpetualalligator, I believe GC might be sending out the first set of decisions the coming week. Apparently, they follow a rolling process, so if a student turns down the admit/funding, it gets offered to the next in line - which means that their decisions could go on till even April, according to a former student member of the adcomm. 

Hey! I completely sympathize with you with the whole time-zone issues. Worldtimebuddy has been my best friend this whole time, honestly. I've applied to Socio-cultural track and it's been a long roller-coaster, with some places wanting to focus on S. Asia and others already having too many South-Asian-ists. 

I got these from a friend who's deep into grad school already, along with some of my own concerns:
for grad students or professors: How much is health insurance and is it any good? (Does it meet the new Affordable Care Act standards? Does it include dental? If someone has had a child, even better.)
online or grad students: Is funding guaranteed 'if shit hits the fan'?  (Is funding based solely on GPA, and/or research progress, and/or on groveling to the department?) [Obviously you would want to find this answer online or from a grad student, not a PI, since that could reflect poorly on you. When I was looking for info on my home school, I read in the Math Department Grad Handbook that anyone receiving ANY funding must complete "ANY ASSIGNED SUPPLEMENTAL TASKS" at risk of losing funding, which sounds fairly crappy and arbitrary, like "Come in 7-10 on a random Friday when the professor doesn't feel like proctoring the exam".
online or grad students: Is there an off-ramp with a degree? (If you don't pass the entrance exam, can you at least graduate with a Masters?)
online: Is there a TA requirement? (I think 1 semester of TA is a reasonable requirement, but it does suck if a department expects students to TA for multiple semesters just because the stipend is low.)
for grad students, administrators, professors, or online :Are the grad students unionized?
for grad students or administrators: Housing: is there like, subsidized graduate housing? Are there accommodations for significant others or spouses or families in housing? (Or pets or handicaps, if those apply to you.)
for grad students: How livable is the stipend: Cost of housing in the area or on-campus, distance to grocery stores, etc.
for grad students, professors: "What's the town like?" can be important if it's not just "Big city life", imo.
for administrators/professors/online: Since I applied to the GRFP as a Senior in Undergrad, I also want to know what the school's policy is with external fellowships. Do students get a one-time bonus or increased stipend? If the stipend increases, will the university match it after the duration of the fellowship? (Most useful search terms to find the answer online: "external, fellowships, policy, graduate, stipend")
^^It can range wildly. Princeton's policy: you get the Princeton stipend, or the fellowship stipend, whichever is greater, plus $4,000 per year. UPenn's policy: One-time $3,000 bonus (which seems like kind of a rip-off compared to Princeton's, but I think Upenn is more of a direct-admit, so it's important in that it gives you access to basically whoever you want to work with). University of Maryland's policy didn't seem that great on paper but I may have to do the math: 50% off your health insurance and 10 credits of tuition remission, max. I can only assume the stipend part goes to the student. Meanwhile, University of Delaware had no particular policy posted. I emailed Financial Services about it.
 
That was a long post and it doesn't have too many questions for professors, so I'll post again when I have more for y'all.

So, here's my advice from my experience 2 years ago when I was in your shoes and applying to Clinical Psych Ph.D. programs. I applied to 10 sites, got 6 interviews, and got into my top choice. This advice isn't a "hard-and-fast" guide for everyone, even in clinical, but I think these tips are helpful (even if they've been stated before).
 
For phone interviews:
Honestly, I dressed pretty casually for these because I personally wanted to feel comfortable. Some will say dress for success. You do you, honestly.  Be in an area, like a bedroom, where there is minimal background noise. I also advice to use a good pair of headphones with a mic, if possible.  Have a note pad and pen to take notes from the conversation. At the top of the note pad, write down before the interview at least 2-3 questions that you have, as well as anything else you think is relevant.  Speak calmly, and take a breath before you answer the phone.   
Skype interviews:
Wear at least business casual. I actually usually wore a suit (I am a male, so that's a wide difference honestly).  Again, I'd advise to skype in your room or somewhere that is quiet. If your room doesn't work, I advise finding a quiet place at work or a library in a private room.  Again, wearing headphones can help with quality of your speech/hearing your interviewer.  Same rules of notepad and pen apply as before.  Look at the camera lens, not at yourself or the PI on the screen. Looking at the camera feels weird, but it means you are making eye contact.   
In-person interviews
The agendas for campus interviews vary WIDELY. Some places will be a short day of interviews with a handful of people; other sites will have 2-3 day extravaganzas with parties, interviews, campus tours, etc. Plan your wardrobe accordingly. Unless stated otherwise, you should be in business formal for all of the interviews, and business casual for all of the dinners/parties.  At the parties/socials, DO NOT (and I mean this) get drunk or out of control. That's pretty much an immediate ax from the committee. Generally speaking, just have a few drinks if you'd like (or don't... nobody cares), and socialize with current students, other applicants, PIs, etc. BE NICE!!! It often helps, especially with other applicants, to talk about pleasantries and stuff going on, as well as shared interests OUTSIDE of psychology. Nobody wants to get into a metaphorical d*ck waving contest with you, and the grad students interviewing you, especially, will not look favorably on that.  This goes with the above, but if you are staying with a host or really whenever you are interacting with grad students, you should be on your best behavior. You should be polite and respectful of your host student's home, and it is often nice to bring a small gift from where you are (less than $5) and a thank you card. While you should and can ask candid questions about life as a grad student, the culture of the city/university, faculty-student dynamics, etc., you should probably think at least a little bit before you ask questions or say things because they can, and do, get back to the PIs. For example, a student I hosted my first year as a PhD student who was interviewing for a lab that was not my own told me about how he had "6 interviews" and my school was his "4th choice." As it was pompous and completely unprompted from me, I relayed that information back to the PI because ultimately PIs want to make offers to students who actually want to come to this university.  Same rules apply for skype/in-person interviews. Try to have 2-3 questions per person you are scheduled to interview with during your visit. These help if you get stuck on questions to ask. You can often ask the same question to multiple grad students if you are, for example, having conversations with every lab member.  Bring a book or something fun, non-academic to do during down time. Depending on the agenda, you can often have hours of down time during the actual interview day, and if you are an introvert like me it can be relieving to just read a book or do something that does not involve talking to people.  It is always good to bring deodorant, gum, and mouthwash in your purse or backpack/satchel to the interview day. If you are like me and sweat bullets when you are anxious (e.g., in interviews), it can be helpful to have these handy.    
This list is by no means comprehensive, but just some thoughts that I have from my experience on both ends of the interview table. Feel free to comment and ask questions or PM if you have something specific you'd like to know about. 
 
Most importantly, YOU DESERVE THIS D*MN INTERVIEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The PI reached out to YOU, meaning that s/he thinks you'd be a good potential fit for your lab. Keep that in mind and just be yourself. 

I'm sick of this. I'm sick of checking Grad Cafe and scanning my email or missed calls. Even checking my spam folder daily. 
I only have two rejections (one implied) and one interview so far but, after a good chat with a POI today (at a program I withdrew my app from), I just sort of know my own worth. And know my own weaknesses. 
And I sort of give up, a bit, on caring too much one way or another about where I do or don't get in. I certainly hope I get in somewhere (!!!) with funding but at the same time, the point here is to figure out how to keep going on my own path and keep doing my research, developing my writing, etc. 
So, I give up on one thing and totally recommit to another. 
Here's to good luck and happiness for all of us!

While I'm not one to enjoy the misery of others, sometimes people do such a good job of combining heartbreak, disdain, and criticism, they create an epic rejection result post. Here's my personal favorite, someone rejected from Stanford GSE:
 
 
That pretty much sums up how I'd feel too. When I'm obsessively checking the results page, I often see this post and it makes me chuckle. It passes the time, and at least their loss will not have been in vain. 

@civitas, @Bschaefer  and @AP, thanks for your inputs! It's extremely helpful. 
Let me also clarify that when I say undergrad, I refer to my Masters GPA . Since it was an integrated course, I only had one cumulative GPA at the end of five years, and thus was concerned, especially given that I'm shifting disciplines into Anthro. 

I agree with what @civitas and @Bschaefer said: they'll use you MA GPA and do not depict your defects. I would add, just to be clear: by no means, absolutely not make excuses for you grades in your SOP. 
Phrases like: "I had to take...[and my grades came down]", "These courses brought my grades down..." etc don't look good because your are placing the "blame" somewhere else. (I am not saying you are, I'm talking in general). (I certainly did this stuff in my first draft of my SOP)
However, phrases like: "I bring to X University a strong background in interdisciplinary approaches to [you theme] with an additional expertise in qualitative methods" sounds REALLY good. ?

Depict your achievements, not your defects. Many people here taught me this.

Took the GRE today and thanks to the Manhattan 5lb book my quant score jumped an insane 8 (!!!) points from my diagnostic score to test day. If anyone is feeling underprepared for their quants, get this book. It's only $20 and while you can't necessarily learn how to do advanced combinatorics or the like from it alone, I don't think I would have scored anywhere near as well as I did without it. 

You might want to check out Northwestern,  NYU (amazing work on stratification and urban poverty) & Wisconsin Madison (fantastic environment socio department). While I cannot comment on your suitability, I'm sure that given your current stats (I'm assuming you're an American student) and hopefully a good GRE, you will be pretty safe. 

Wow! This is fantastic! I did something similar, but without the ranking system. Thanks for this, really! 

Ah, makes sense.  Yes, you're totally right.
 
Here's what I did when I was investigating my programs.  I knew I wanted to go to an R1 institution (basically, institutions that offer Phds and do a lot of research).  So I wrote down all R1 institutions that also PhDs in my field. Then, I went website-by-website to see if they had concentrations in what I was interested in.  If they didn't, I deleted the school.  Then, I looked to see what professors at those schools were doing that interested me, and made note of those.  Finally, I made note of other factors (location, coursework required, etc.).  I plugged it all into a spreadsheet and came up with a ranking, then I finally skimmed those for places I would live and wouldn't live.

Here's a blank copy of the spreadsheet you can copy if it would help: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EBayVkXRcYS4ECviOkApehEO_oEedMKM5P7K9UNmYhM/edit#gid=746719307

Thanks for this! I have posed the same question in both the forums as well. Given the lack of responses, I figured there might be no harm in posting here as well. 

From past experience narrated by friend, consultancies do not really help much. They basically key in information that you give them. As for the essays, they mostly follow templates that they have - most universities would be able to recognize the exact consultancy each candidate comes from. 
Instead, it really helps to begin early and write out multiple iterations of your essays. Get your friends and professors to read through and give you comments! 

I have some friends in McGill soc. and the funding is poor for all students there, period. Montreal is a cheap and fun city to live in, however. Toronto soc. is well-funded and has a large department. York soc. is quite a good department, but does struggle to fund international students and has the least global portability in terms of job prospects afterwards. If you do decide to apply to Toronto or York, you could look into Ontario Trillium Fellowship for International Students and ask the departments if they would be willing to nominate you. The application process in Canada can be viewed as more of a negotiation than the US ones, in my experience.
UMass Boston has a good applied sociology program. My friend got his MA there and that work landed him in UCB soc. And you can't beat Boston in terms of location because there are so many excellent schools in the surrounding area and they have so many South Asianists.

@Andromeda3921 As a fellow international student, I have to say that public universities have a lot of trouble paying for international students. Berkeley especially struggles in this regard. My Berkeley soc. advisor told me from the beginning to apply to a mix of public and private schools for this reason. Another option is to win doctoral fellowships and emphasize it in your SOP, and then the university doesn't have to worry about paying for you.
The low grad GPA (I'm a fellow sufferer in this respect) thing would be a red flag, so please contextualize it. In my SOP, I explicitly mentioned that McGill is famous for not inflating grades and cited Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council GPA cutoffs as proof. I also mentioned that I went from an uber-leftist undergrad school to the liberal-conservative mecca of McGill for grad school and it was a systems shock. At least one professor remembered this during my visit and we had a fantastic chat about these schools' different cultures. I called McGill "staid" in my SOP and didn't mention that I was harrassed by the professor who sank my grad GPA. So be strategic about how candid you want to be, but definitely definitely provide reasons for low grad GPA.
I also think Brown should perhaps be higher on your list because it and surrounding schools are hard to beat in terms of the number of South Asianists. Brown also has a dedicated institute on spatiality called Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4), which was begun and is run by the soc. department. Patrick Heller considers himself a comparativist and told me that Brown soc. has a long tradition of housing comparativists, so you have an advantage there. Cornell Development Sociology, though a niche program, could be a good fit. I can answer some questions about both departments, if you'd like. Stanford is quite quant-heavy and it's hard-but-not-impossible to survive as a qual person there according to one of my profs.

We have a lot of the same interests (spatiality, qual methodology, comparative sociology, sociology of development, and South Asia namely). So feel free to ask specific questions related to those things or more general questions here or through PM.

Outside of the USA many universities do not require GRE results.

I went through the hugely popular  'Am I competitive'? Thread in Government Affairs and was wondering if it made sense to create an overall thread in this forum as well. I only noticed three very specific threads on here (linking the one I found to be slightly more general). Hopefully, I get answers and others who are asking themselves the same/similar questions get on here and find answers as well! 
Program: PhD in Sociology
Schools Applying To: Columbia University, University of Chicago, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, National University of Singapore, University of California - Berkeley, London School of Economics, Sciences Po
Long-listed Schools: Harvard University, University of California - Los Angeles, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Wisconsin - Madison, University of Amsterdam, New York University, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of North Carolina, University of Texas -Austin, Brown University, Duke University, Boston University, John's Hopkins University, Northwestern University, University of California - Irvine, University of California - San Diego, University of Maryland
Interests: Urban sociology - Qualitative Transportation, Identities, Spatiality, Heritage ; Comparative Sociology; Applied Sociology;  International Development; South Asia; Public Policy
Expectations from Programmes: 
Program: Interdisciplinary, Allowing students to choose courses across departments, emphasis/known for applied approach
Resources: Ongoing projects with vibrant research space, Access to funding, Encouraging collaborations, Good enough brand to ensure employment on completion of programme, preferably located in an urban area to aid fieldwork. 
Graduate Institution: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
Graduate Major/Degree: MA in Development Studies (Integrated Course, no undergraduate degree granted separately) 
Graduate GPA: 7.99/10
Undergraduate Minor: Operations Research
GRE:  V 168/ Q 156 / AW 4.5
TOEFL: 113 (iBT)
Age: 25
Languages: English & Tamil - Fluent ;  German - A2 completed, B1 in progress ; Hindi - Working Knowledge
Work Experience: (2 years research experience currently, 3 years professional experience by Fall 2019)
> 1.4 years at Indian Center of International policy think-tank : Spearheaded research project on on-going urban policy scheme in India
> Currently freelancing as urban research consultant for local organization apart from volunteering with organizations dealing in gender and mental health advocacy
> Multiple research internships as student
> Policy report & newspaper OpEds published
> Presented in multiple International conferences since undergraduate days
SoP: Not begun yet, but will focus on specific research I hope to do (along lines of a proposal) 
LORs: 1 from Masters supervisor (senior Indian Urbanist and extremely well known internationally for seminal work on Urban informality) ; 1 from Professor during Masters degree (rising Anthropologist in India, knows me well personally) 
Can obtain 1 from previous boss (Head of Research at International policy think-tank, Member of PM's Economic Advisory Council in India) - however, would be one year since I quit the job. 
Concerns: 
1. Low Graduate GPA
2. No academic/journal publications yet
3. Applied to Northwestern, NYU, U.Penn & U.Minnesota for Sociology PhD for Fall 2018 and got rejected by 3. U.Minn placed me on the Waitlist, but did not convert to an admit
Would really love feedback if I am competitive for the range of schools I plan to apply to. I am posting early only to gain an understanding of what I can fix for the next round of applications.