history?

Ha-ha. True. We ladies come out better on the pattern-baldness end of things.

Damn, I was away for a few days, so hope this isn't...erm...old news. Most of my trajectory has been trying to find things I'm not bored with, which is no small part of why it's taken me so long to settle back down to academia -- it took me longer than some to discern the red thread that connects all my other seemingly disparate interests, and I wasn't about to go back in an area that I would get bored with after two years. (On a not unrelated note, I discovered the origin of 'red thread' as I was reading Goethe the other day -- God, I love history of political thought. High-falutin' philosophy aside, it's really just about people and how they act, which turns out to be the red thread in question. Fortunately, it is also impossible to get bored with that subject, since, no matter how hard one tries, one will never actually understand people.) I did tech support. I was homeless. I worked as an armed security guard at an intelligence agency. I was a technical administrator of a distance learning program. I got certified as an Underwater Criminal Investigator at some point. That was a highlight. And for those who made cracks about the grey hair...I've actually been going grey since I was 19, a genetic thing. So, yes, I probably have more than anyone else in the classroom, including most of the profs! But any sort of existential crisis about getting old doesn't tend to happen when it hits you that young, you just accept it as a thing and that's that. On the other hand, it can be used to hilariously uncomfortable effect on the 22 year-olds now and then.

Hey, now, some of us greyhairs are clocking in at 33. It's never too late.

Chicago funds all of their PhD students with a standard package, unless things have changed dramatically from previous years.

I guess I would offer advice if the question made sense on a fundamental level. Namely, how is it even possible that one could know how to play the game well enough to get those kinds and combinations of offers and yet not understand how to go about choosing between them? As for those who chastised you for bragging, I think they were misguided: is it really bragging to flaunt that kind of basic inability to make a decision? I call troll.

There are several notable differences between undergrad and graduate acceptances, particularly including 1) funding and 2) the decision committee. Decisions for undergrad are often made by, not by faculty who have no time, but by admins whose schedules are structured around this time of year. In terms of finances, blowing an estimation of an undergrad cohort by a few percentage points is not that big a deal, unless you happen to be at a weensy liberal arts college without a lot of money. Graduate departments, like that weensy liberal arts college, are small and do not have a lot of money. So if 3 more people agree to come than they were anticipating, they are SCREWED. Especially considering the current economy and the impact it has had on most universities, this means that departments really, really cannot afford to overshoot their estimation of incoming students, which is most likely why they admit a handful of people, wait to hear back, and then admit a few more if some of that initial bunch declined. This means that sending out all decisions at one time is simply not feasible logistically.

Normally I pop into these things to offer the occasional rational yet ultimately consoling word, but here I simply have to say: we are adults now. We do not need the admissions committee holding our hands and looking out for our delicate feelings. The fact that these forums are anonymous allow us to spew our nervousness on to a lot of strangers without fear of embarrassment, but (I certainly hope) none of us would do this in front of a real, live stranger, and certainly not one whom we are trying to convince that we have the chops to make it in an ass kicking environment like graduate school. We will have to spend the rest of our careers waiting. Waiting to find out if we got the grant. Waiting to find out if our journal article was accepted. Waiting on job applications. We will realize that we are not nearly as smart as we think we are, we are not the smartest person in the room anymore. Sometimes, it will make us doubt ourselves. But we will do it anyway, because we love our research, students, or lives. We have to, because that love is the only thing that will make up for the otherwise unpleasant things we must endure. As awful as this process is, if you cannot ultimately stomach it, if not knowing it is worse than your love for the work, then please do yourself a favor and do not try to brave grad school, because it will eat you. Cold. Ninth circle of hell cold. And eating.

Without meaning to get people's hopes up unnecessarily, the wait between acceptances and rejections is often based on the department maintaining a short list or pool of applicants in case a substantial number of the admits decline their offer. My understanding is that it is rare to pull deeply from this land of limbo, but if you have not yet been notified by a place it means that there is a slim, slim chance that you could receive a very late acceptance. The fact that applicants are not required to submit their decisions until April 15 means that you might not hear until then, or sometimes even a hair after. One implication of this to my mind is that those who are accepted do everyone else a favor if they make their decisions as soon as it makes sense, rather than stringing departments, and those on the unspoken waitlist, along. Of course, if you are waiting to hear from your top choice, or you only have one funding offer and hope to hold out for another to use as leverage, then it makes sense to wait. But if you've been accepted to your top choice with an offer, who cares if you haven't heard from your safety? Just tell them yes and politely withdraw your name from consideration everywhere else.

Indiana puts a solid emphasis on teaching, and they also have an extremely enviable placement rate. More generically, one tip would be to look for programs that offer competitive teaching awards to TAs (awards as in trophies, not as in funding). It not only telegraphs that the dept is interested in teaching, but it looks good on your CV when you're on the market.

I'm in roughly the same boat -- I did do a one year Master's last year in Political Theory in order to make the transition more smoothly, but I still feel like I'm catching up to a lot of my cohort who majored as undergrads. I have found it very useful to search the net for department comp exam lists. I believe Yale, Princeton, and...(crap, one other...Michigan?) have theirs online. It allowed me to build my own little mini-canonincal list. There's a fair bit of overlap between them, but also differences (Yale and Princeton clearly ripped one another's lists, for instance, even down to the formatting, but they've also included their own works under each section to make them unique). If you're already in, you could ask the department you're planning on entering whether they have the comp lists from previous years.

I'll probably call the grad administrator and explain what I am hoping to do/learn and ask for their opinion on whether anyone on the committee would be willing to oblige and, if so, who would be the right person to approach. Although I haven't initiated this particular request before, in other similar such scenarios (asking for advice, who to contact, etc.) the person usually has a suggestion on who to talk to and even initiates the conversation by forwarding an email or providing a formal introduction. Faculty are often busy and it's not a given they will have time to do this, which is why I would approach the admin staff first to find out whether to proceed.

I'd call his comment less "false" than "misleading but with an underlying and unspoken truth." The advice to seriously reconsider whether this is something one really, really, really wants to do is solid. Academia can be fickle, sometimes cruel and sometimes a delight. For all the great moments we have in it, it will also ask very, very unacceptable things from all of us at one time or another. Given that, one has to truly love it to go in and remain intact. Asking whether this is absolutely, positively what you want to do, and whether you might not be happy elsewhere is a wise move. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the OP knows this and the advice given is with that in mind. All that said, I agree with you that the surface statement that the application has to change dramatically is a gross generalization (true in some cases, not in others). Thankfully, I've got at least one acceptance under my belt this time around, so I don't have to worry about it. Even so, I'm considering dropping a line to some of the committees that rejected me to find out whether there was a particular weakness with the application or whether it was a matter of a great application and just not the right time. I figure knowing that will help me with future grant or fellowship proposals. Seems like anyone who strikes out might benefit from doing the same, give themselves a specific plan of attack for the next go-round.