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I think that there is some great discussion in this thread. Ultimately I think it boils down to a few points: Graduate school is not designed with fairness in mind, thus it is not surprising that many aspects of the admission process are not fair, especially for international applicants. Can the process be more fair? Yes it can be, but it is often a slow process that advocates for change, e.g. Brown v Board of Education, Higher Education Act, & Individuals with Disabilities Education Act all took time and the will of the disadvantaged to push for change in the face of adversity. In the meantime, given what the current application process entails, you're only option is to try your best to follow the excellent advice of @TakeruK, @Eigen, and @rising_star. The financial realities of the world are down right abysmal. Whether discussing poverty in the US leading to difficulty with upward mobility, or global economic disparities that lead to great harm to large portions of the world population, it is clear that graduate school admissions are only a small part of an enormous system of inequity. While grants, scholarships, and fee waivers can help some lucky few, these tools cannot level the playing field. That is even more apparent when considering international applicants from disadvantaged countries. That said, @nushi I understand the difficulties involved with advocating for yourself with professors in Egypt. Unfortunately, the only reasonable response you will receive on these forums are concrete steps you can take given the current processes in place at North American institutions. Hopefully that is something that will change for the better in the future, but for now the advice given is the only wisdom that is available. Who knows, if you get into one of these universities, it could be you helping to advocate for reforms. Best of luck with the application process!

*fingers crossed* Hope we both get great PhD acceptances that we are happy with!

I'm also in the 35 yr old bucket and planning on a PhD. I've always had an interest in my particular field, but I tried to pursue it a different way in industry. Rather it feels like I just veered off track. Sometimes life happens and you loose track of the goals and desires that led you to your current juncture. I realized that I was no longer pursuing my interests and took a hard look around to realize I needed to go for a PhD. I also don't relish the thought of being a broke grad student, especially since my wife and I are hoping to start a family. Comparing my job prospects to that of grad school, it's pretty clear I'm giving up a tremendous amount of money (at least in the short term), since I am likely to be making less than 1/4 the amount that I would otherwise make in industry... Of course, I've never really cared about the money and have focused more on having a fulfilling job. Though I know how lucky I am to have such a luxury.

Ditto

Well at least it looks like campus visits are planned for March 5 - 9. Great find @PlsAdmitMePls!

It's very kind of you to say that I'm a decently competitive candidate, but to be honest I'm really starting to doubt that. Especially since the schools I applied to are highly ranked schools in the disciplines I care about (when looking at csrankings.org). My concern is that the field is overly competitive now, so I stand little chance, especially since I have been out of school for over a decade and struggled to find a professor to conduct research with to help boost my application.

@eighty8keysGoogle AI Residency Program

I just got the worst feeling. My backup plan just fell through... just got the rejection email. I wasn't sure I would be accepted to my backup program, but they didn't even require a LOR until further in the process. I was cut before even getting to that point. That really hurts. Now I'm super worried about my application to the various PhD programs. I'm starting to feel I'm much less competitive than I thought I was. Ugh!

@skhann You are potentially missing the fact that even if you choose a letter writer who will write a good letter (which is expected!), what they say is more important than the fact that they think you are amazing. People reading those letters care about your specific interactions with that letter writer. If you conducted research with the individual, what roles did you play in the research? Were you independent or did you need constant guidance? Did you take a leadership role, or were you simply following the instructions of others? Etc. Those are the most important details in the LOR, rather than simply "do you like this person"?

I came across a really salient NYT opinion piece regarding probabilities and how people seem to interpret them. "But I’ve come to realize that I was wrong about a major aspect of probabilities. They are inherently hard to grasp. That’s especially true for an individual event, like a war or election (*or GRE test). People understand that if they roll a die 100 times, they will get some 1’s. But when they see a probability for one event, they tend to think: Is this going to happen or not? They then effectively round to 0 or to 100 percent." * I thought of this thread when reading the article.

There is a really great NLP researcher at UMD. He was actually the advisor for another professor I'm interested in who's at UMass.

UC Berkeley

Gah! I didn't even think of the cost of applying again. I spent over $1500 on applications this year... I really do not relish the idea of spending that much again.

Same. I would love to get into CMU!

I've seen a number of interviews for UC Berkeley in the results the last few days. Has anyone gotten an interview?

I'm super anxious as well. I'm pretty sure most of the programs I've applied to only conduct interviews for borderline cases, but one university seems to conduct interviews for most (if not all) of the applicants they are interested in. At least, from previous years they have a large streak of interviews before sending out acceptances and rejections, which I didn't see from any of the other schools. So far this year, they've already started sending out interview invitations! It's a fairly good school, so it makes sense that my application may not be a strong enough, but I'm anxiously waiting for an email... Thing is, if I got an interview invite from the program, I would feel 1000x times better about my application. I could rest easily knowing that my application is fairly strong, such that I would be less worried about the rest of the schools that I've applied to. My situation is much different than others, in that I have been out of school for over a decade. I do not have nearly as much guidance regarding how competitive my application actually is. I vacillate between feeling I am a strong applicant, to thinking there are likely much stronger applicants. This is especially true since the field I am trying to enter is cutthroat at the moment. Everyone is clamoring to get in, so I'm potentially competing against stronger traditional candidates who are from undergrad programs that have been conducting research with well-known professors... At least that's what I keep telling myself. I just want to hear some good news so that I can stop feeling so worried!

@Rajashik I do not see any acceptances/rejections for MIT Physics or Astrophysics for Fall 2018. I see two results that state they received interviews. Where do you see these acceptances/rejections?

I believe in order to get a more nuanced assessment of individuals' abilities the standardized tests that ETS administers have been changed to be adaptive. There is a very large variability in the test taking populace: some individuals have little to no college level math, while others are in extremely math intensive subjects. In order to be able to differentiate people's abilities they need to provide more test questions. One way to effectively provide a large number of test questions while not making the test longer is to base it on an adaptive measure. Questions that are either too difficult or too easy for a given test taker, based on some baseline, can simply be skipped. This is most demonstrable on the quantitative section of the new "revised GRE". This link contains a table comparing the old GRE with the new GRE in terms of scores. In the old GRE the highest quantitative score was 800, which was the 91st percentile, i.e. people who received this score did better than 91% of all test takers. That is only equivalent to a 166 in the new GRE. By making the test adaptive they were better able to differentiate people, despite the fact that the new scoring has 41 possible scores, while the old scoring system had 61 possible scores. Here's a table breaking down test takers' scores for the new GRE. It's hard to know and depends highly on the school and program. Some schools value the GRE very highly, others care for it less so. Considering that I've never been on an admissions committee, feel free to take that with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said, a counter-example of expecting sky-high GRE scores is MIT. In fact they do not require the GRE for admissions (at least not in my program EECS). There is no place to provide that information in their application. I would have LOVED the opportunity to provide that information, because I graduated from undergrad over a decade ago, and was not very mature at the time, so my GPA is lower than what I am capable of. Having the GRE being able to "make-up" for my low GPA would have been a nice addition to my application.

I also applied through the EECS portal, so it is likely different than what you see. When I log into the EECS portal https://gradapply.mit.edu/eecs I see this: This is the MIT EECS application web site for Graduate Admissions. ... You have submitted your application. ... You can log into this web site in early March to see our admissions decision. ... Looking at the Grad Cafe Results for MIT for your particular field, I do not see results indicating acceptances and rejections for Fall 2018. I wonder if the wording on your portal is just unintentionally vague. It may just mean to login to the portal to see your results (whenever they are finally posted), rather than expecting a result to come in the mail. Not that you should literally expect to see the results online right now.

The experimental sections are needed so future test questions are based on the results of a representative sample of test takers. That's how they gauge how difficult the questions are in order to give an adaptive test. Remember your first two sections (one verbal, one quant) are middle of the road in terms of difficulty, then they decide whether you should get a more/less difficult second section. They have to base that on real test metrics, which is what the data from the experimental sections provide. I have a feeling that it's actually more accurate to include the experimental section in an actual test than it would be to pay individuals to take tests. I have a strong suspicion that there would be selection bias with the approach you propose.

My wife just pointed out troubling sexual harassment allegations in academia. A number specifically highlight harassment in CS departments: https://www.wsj.com/articles/allegations-of-groping-lewd-comments-and-rape-academias-metoo-moment-1515672001

Comparing against last year’s CS results, this year’s number of results so far seems nearly identical. Using that as a rubric, I would expect to begin seeing many more results posted starting next week. Of course, it seems CS is in considerable demand, so it is conceivable it may take longer to evaluate the ever growing avalanche of applicants.

@Eigen, thanks for the word of caution!

In case anyone is wondering, I found out what CS interviews are like on the gradadmissions subreddit. A CS professor posted regarding their selection process, timelines for being contacted, and expectations for the interview. It definitely helps clear some things up and makes me feel a bit more confident. Now I just have to patiently wait for the month of January to slowly wind down as I wait for grad schools to hopefully contact me. Much easier said than done.

I know the feeling. I probably check the Results page at least 20-30 times a day... it's ludicrous how fretful I am. I really wish the filtered RSS feed for Results worked. I could just sit back and wait for a notification of new Results, just like I do for emails.