E-P

Got waitlisted at Iowa for rhetoric, went to the visit back in February, two rhetoric admittances turned down their offers of admission and they yesterday I got an email I was rejected— I don’t get why they didn’t just send it after the visit, I’ve been putting off looking for a job-job until I knew and that’s two whole months where they knew they were going to reject me but didn’t. Not a good experience, especially because I had to email to get a response and everyone kept insisting being waitlisted didn’t mean I was still interviewing. Can’t help but feel really embarrassed and also pretty angry about the whole thing. The visit wasn’t great— I could tell most of the faculty didn’t want me there and I already have pretty bad social anxiety— but dang. 

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

First off, congratulations on your admission!  You totally won the waitlist game.  Long distance high-5.
 
I'll be coming out with my PhD when I'm either 39 or 40.  38 if I'm very, very lucky/speedy. This is clearly my second career.  I agree with lemma - graduating at 30 is not "old."  You can reasonably expect to live until you're 80.  You spent the first 20 years of your life being a child with little-to-know ability to affect your life.  So of the 60 remaining years, you're spending 10 getting a higher education.  That sounds pretty good to me.

So, you deal with it by living life.  Your PhD is not your entire life - you also will have friends, families, relationships, goals, ambitions, and so forth that have NOTHING to do with your PhD.  Your goal during your program (besides, you know, finishing) is to figure out what it takes to get a job.  You have 5 years to do that.  I think I could do pretty much anything if I put my mind to it for 5 years.  Learn Chinese? Sure.  Figure out a Senate run?  No problem.  Become a professional violinist?  With enough dedication, sure.  All you have to do is figure out how to get a job...and you'll be literally surrounded by people who have already been there, knows what it takes, and it is their job to help you achieve that goal.
You got this!  Use the resources you'll have at your university, make connections at other universities (especially in your home country, if that's where you want to end up), and - most importantly - remember to live your life.
The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.

I officially accepted the offer to attend Northwestern! We should have a Chicagoland meetup

You might as well write to the program director and ask, especially since you haven't much to lose. At the same time, I would try to find a way to keep current with scholarship in your field, read work by key theorists, and pay attention to the job market and CFPs so you get a sense of what people are looking for.

@janaca, if they didn't think you should continue in your program, they wouldn't have passed you. Your job for the rest of your time in the program is to prove the naysayers in your program wrong. That's it. You can quit if you want but that's not what anyone here or on your committee is telling you to do.

Really try not to be disheartened about being a waitlist, it's a stigma that shouldn't exist and once you're in the program, honestly no one cares who was first pick or not. You will not be judged differently. There's also no way for anyone to know you were waitlisted. Just look at the program for the aspects that drew you to apply to it, and see if you'll be comfortable there for quite a few years. Also, request for skype interviews, just remind them that you were not at the Welcome Week and would like to meet some people to have a more informed decision. Immediately reach out to the professor that showed interests, they probably were a strong ally to you on the admissions committee.

Are you set on researching protein NMR? Did the advisor at school 1 suggest other projects that you are interested in working on?
Also, what are you planning on doing over summers? If you're looking to do internships off campus, then maybe where you live for 9 months doesn't matter so much. Or maybe you make so much during your internship that you can live comfortably at school 2.
If all else fails, you can flip a coin, and when the coin is in the air you will know which way you want it to land and that's where you go. 
 

@GreenEyedTrombonist Badger badger badger badger badget badger badger
 

MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
 
(Hopefully I'm not reaching too far back into the history of the Internet on that one!)

You absolutely should! I'm a Latino in the US who majored in French, and the number of times I've been told that I should've majored in Spanish instead is irritating. It's necessary and good to know one's community, but it also broadens one's mind to study other cultures, communities and languages. The background of a researcher should not matter as long as they are acquainted with a subject or field.
It's also sort of a microaggression that you are expected to represent just your community. Other people are never questioned when they decide to study communities other than their own, yet for some, minority students are supposed to just study their own communities? It makes no sense! We all have a right to express our intellectual curiosity in any way we like.
That specific 'criticism' is shallow, and you should not pay much attention to it.

@E-P My MA research was on Twitch and I conducted some interviews at TwitchCon last year that led to some interesting information I'd like to present. The theme is just super close to my interests and past research.

Seconded.  When I did my master's thesis, my original idea was entirely new research on a population that people didn't even realize existed.  However, it ended up being a proof of concept re-analysis of existing literature as applied to that community, along with a chapter on "future opportunities."

Why?  A few reasons.  First off, the master's program (mine, and I imagine most others) is more about teaching you to understand research rather than create your own.  So even though we had a "research methods" course, very little of that was about "The steps to follow to conduct research yourself," and none of it was pairing with a professor to learn through apprenticeship.
Secondly, from the day that I submitted my thesis proposal to the day I submitted the thesis was 11 months.  And there was a lot of time in there where I wasn't working on it.  So, really, by the time I had an idea of what I wanted to do, had a population I could study, access-wise, and had something that could get approved by the IRB...I had 3 months to get the IRB approval, do all the interviews, write it up, and turn it in.  So I made the executive decision to forgo that and to focus on that for a dissertation instead.

So, it was totally annoying and frustrating for me, but if the goal is to finish the MA and go onto PhD, you gotta do what you gotta do.
 
 
As a piece of advice, I found that whenever my advisor ripped me apart, I had to take 2-3 days away from the paper (and his feedback) to process and deal wtih it.  Otherwise, my response would've been...unprofessional. :-)  My Spouse has a negative opinion of the advisor as a result of hearing my vent, but I think it helped me work with it and be a better researcher/scholar.  So, if you can, maybe set it aside and do something you love until Sunday before you go back to it?

Hello,
so I may have another idea as a project, but still linked to this idea of sexual violence. I've taken a quick look to see if what I want to study has been done before and what are some of the gaps, and I saw one master's thesis in the departement of political science in my province. and a lot of stuff from the states from different social sciences and humanities departements in the States.
So, I've got two questions. (I'm gonna address those with my supervisor as well).
1) Does it matter if I am conducting my master's thesis on that topic even if it seems to have been somewhat studied before (but in another field, from another perspective)? 
2) If I decide to go down that path eventually, should I email the congress organizers about the change in my topic for the conference in August? 

Yes, I think it's good to receive criticism. In my life so far, (I am only 25), the times in which I have failed or received criticism have helped me a lot. It makes you grow as an individual and as a professionnal, and as a researcher. And I just want to get better at this. I'm a tough skin, I know I'll get through this, but I have to admit that I am destabilized because I literally don't know what I should do about my project now. It was a tough meeting now that I look back at it. I was good to just sit back and hear the criticism without responding immediately because I needed to process it. I know it had nothing to do with me personnality or my ability to do a project, I know the criticism was aimed at the actual project.

*AAHH* I accepted a school! I emailed my PIs at other schools to tell them such and now I never want to open my email again. 

Your school may have a standard signature they want you to use.  Mine does.   My signature is dictated by the style guide.

My instructor gave me an A for the lecture I gave to my seminar class! SO RELIEVED. Wow. I did a good job, I did not think so at first!

I got my official university email address!!! It's getting real!

Hi.  This message is for everyone who has the sinking feeling that they won't be getting accepted this season.
I don't know you.  I wouldn't be able to pick you out of a crowd, and we've never met.  But by the fact that you're here, I know that you're driven, and you're not afraid of change and sacrifice in your life.  So know this: It will be okay.  You will get through this.  Your value as a scholar, student, or just a human being has nothing to do with you not getting an acceptance.  Maybe it wasn't the right program, or the right year, or a good fit, or something else entirely.  That's okay!  There's next year, if you want.  Or, if you're out, you will have an awesome career and life, simply because you are driven, and you aren't afraid of change. 
I heard a fable (if you're a historian, maybe you know the truth of this?) there was once a king who was prone to high-highs, and low-lows.  It made his kingdom erratic  He sent for his advisors and said, "I need something to even me out.  I can't rule like this; either extreme is bad.  Help."
The advisors went away and deliberated for weeks.  Finally, they returned to the king and presented him with a metal ring, unadorned, that simply said, "This too shall pass."  And from that day, whenever he was too up or too down, he'd look down at his ring and remember...this moment is fleeting.
 
You're a pretty awesome human.  If you want to comment and tell me how you're feeling down, I will be happy to tell you all the reasons that I, a stranger, think you're awesome.  I imagine others will tell you too!
 
This too shall pass.

Was browsing internet in search of MSW program info and somehow got here. Registered just to say thank you for your words, so needed today! And thank you for sharing your experience.