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hahaha, thank you for this! Totally brightened my day. I'd honestly achieved this state of total peacefulness because I was so sure it wasn't happening. My wallet disagrees since like... you know, hundreds of dollars in app fees is not chill at all, but I was just calmly going about my backup plans. I'm kind of bewildered still. But happy!!

Thanks! DGS called me Sat. morning too. I've been getting a lot of spam calls, so hearing a real friendly human being on the line freaked me out. Glad I wasn't sleeping in when the call came! She said the official notices and funding info can take some time to be sent out, and she wanted to let people know quickly instead of waiting for that. They have a visit weekend in a few weeks, so they probably want people to know the dates as early in advance as possible.

I DIDN'T GET SHUT OUT LOL University of Kansas--teaching assistantship for the whole time.

A whole slew of UT Austin acceptances on the board, congrats!!! I applied, but I'm not even going to be a little bit surprised if I'm rejected, so I don't feel too bad about it. Although there might be some tears out of sheer exhaustion when I get the official rejection. I would love to go there for my PhD though since they have faculty that combine some of my specific interests, so I'll definitely apply again.

The extra cynical part of me thinks schools intentionally keep info like GRE cutoffs on the dl so they don't scare away applicants that they can reject to lower their acceptance rates. It's a lot harder to say stuff like "We receive hundreds of applications every year but can only enroll 5" if you don't get a hundred applications that you can just immediately throw on the "no" pile because they didn't get a 169/169/5.5.

I took it twice too and the people at the first center were also a lot scarier. The lady there who metal-detector-wanded me with no expression whatsoever on her face is who I was thinking of when I said "prison warden". At the second place, they were no-nonsense about the regulations, but they treated me like a normal person and smiled sometimes so it was overall not bad. I got 162Q/170V/4.5AW the second time, after putting in some considerable effort to bump up the math score. Too bad it probably won't do me much, if any, good. Ripoff!

I understand application fees, to some extent. They are nuts at some schools, like Stanford's $100+, but I understand $40, $50. I do not understand transcript fees, or schools that force you to send (and therefore pay for) an official transcript with your application. It's an electronic PDF emailed from what I'm sure is an automated service! Are you joking? It costs me ten dollars to send a copy of grades that I already paid tuition for and worked my butt off to get? Letters of recommendation should be centralized and sent from one place so I only need to ask my recommenders once and still have the freedom to add or remove programs from my list throughout the application process without bothering them with updates. I know my professors didn't personalize the LORs to any great extent for most of the schools, so who cares? School websites have to get better, and information has to be collected more cleanly. We have to crawl through hundreds if not thousands of webpages looking up professors and the poor design just makes it twice as bad. Broken links, links that direct to a link that directs back to the first link, slow animations, mailing addresses and email addresses scattered across five different locations, and on and on. I think that depends on the testing center. I was allowed to be pretty relaxed when I took the GRE. Had my shoes off, put my feet on the crossbar under the desk, crossed my legs, had my feet up on the chair, was hanging halfway out of the chair at one point. Certainly some testing centers are staffed by prison wardens though. I'm an otherwise horrible applicant with a fantastic GRE score (even did pretty well in the math part, but strangely not especially great in the essay part) so this actually cheered me up a little... Thank you for the link to look into. With that said, even I agree the GRE is stupid and terrible and a detestable ripoff and should be axed. I don't know how ETS execs sleep at night. But holy shit: "Chinese applicants appear especially challenging to many American professors, who report that they “seem alike” and hard to distinguish, when the admissions process is designed to do just that. One humanities professor told Posselt, “How do you compare six students from China, who all have the same last name?”" WOW.

I got some great pants recently that shrank in the wash. They were perfect before but now they're not only shorter than my preferred length but just a bit shorter than fashionable short. Why do bad things happen to good people?

The horse will fill in as TA, of course!

This thread is giving me heart palpitations. But like happy palpitations. Congrats everybody!!!

I'm fully prepared for a shutout so I'm occupying my time with applying to master's programs! I think I'm just not a good PhD candidate right now. Probably should've arrived at that conclusion hundreds of dollars in app fees ago, but as awful as the app process was, I learned a lot about both applying and my own goals so maybe it was a good investment that I needed to make.

Have your cake and eat it too! Southern Spice and Minnesota Nice: A Southern Girl in the North Country.

Loved the info from Minnesota folks. I'm from California, so of course winter is just a scary myth to me, but from your comments, it sounds like a really nice place to live. My only experience with genuine cold is a semester abroad. But I kind of liked it once I had the right clothes!

ahh haha like I said I feel embarrassed about it because now that I look back, the fit doesn't really make sense at some of these places, or they're insane reaches. I applied to a few UCs (I'm also in California), UT Austin, University of Kansas, Northeastern, and Ball State (MA).

University of Memphis, George Mason University, and Georgia State University were places I looked up for rhet/comp PhD. They all have Feb. 15 or later deadlines. Maybe similar deadlines for lit?

Me! I applied to a kind of embarrassingly odd set of schools for R/C PhD (some bad fits) because I had no idea what I was doing until WELL into the app process, but my interests are composition pedagogy, health narratives, comp teaching in K-12, and WPA. I also screwed up and applied to one PhD that requires an MA, soooo as of this morning I'm now applying for the MA there instead. Coincidentally my wallet is $20 lighter.

Thanks! I'm just starting to look into it but I will do this once I have questions! Can I ask what kind of funding you had? Was it partial or full?

I'm also a first-time applicant for PhDs and I'm preparing my body for a shutout. I arrived at the "oh shit I want to teach, I have to go get a PhD" realization really late in the cycle so I think my applications sucked. I did improve over the process - it still wasn't great or anything at the end, but my last application was less bad than the first. I have to apply again. But if I fail across the board, I would probably think about trying to get a master's or an MBA while I make my SOP more specific and put together a new writing sample. Mainly the interests part for the SOP, and I would dedicate more time to looking carefully over my POIs' past work. My writing sample was just... not good. idk, I know I can do better, which kind of makes the waiting both worse and better at the same time.

Totally. I've looked over a couple of strangers' statements because they were asking for second opinions, and I saw one a couple weeks ago who wrote almost word for word the phrase that person tweeted about. They didn't actually use the word "curious", but the second sentence was "Since I was young, I have always..." and then it went on to talk about how they had always been inquisitive about science. I've read another one that expressed the same exact sentiment in different words, also in the first couple sentences of the statement. Heck, my first (and second, and third...) draft did too. I'm certain MANY more people than just the person who was quoted do exactly the same thing. It's so tempting! I agree with that professor that these openings are lame and should generally be avoided, but I also agree that vague prompts make the experience worse for everybody. Princeton University Music Composition, PhD (F17) Rejected via Website on 17 Feb 2017 A 17 Feb 2017 my work is gendered, interdisciplinary, and confrontational, and i anticipated not being a good fit for some schools because of this. good luck to everyone else! UC Berkeley Music Composition, PhD (F17) Rejected via E-mail on 13 Feb 2017 ♦ A 13 Feb 2017 report spam Oh well, among my last choices... I write music for an audience, not an academic circle jerk. And here's my entry into the "I'm telling my FATHER about this!" subcategory: Rice Ｕniversity Music Composition, DMA, PhD (F18) Rejected via E-mail on 20 Dec 2017 ♦ A 20 Dec 2017 Was supposed to hear by Dec. 18. I emailed today and they said notifications had been sent out on Dec. 14 but of course I didn't receive it. They rejected me as an undergrad too, despite my father going there as well. Good riddance!

Here's a bad one: I counted wrong and sent 13 pages of writing sample to a school that required 15-25. I don't know how it happened, but it makes me feel nauseous. About half my schools required fewer than 13, so I didn't notice until I was applying for another school with a 15-page minimum and opened up the sample to check it. I'm just going to hope that enough applicants include the citations pages in their page counts that adcoms are flexible on the exact number of pages. My writing sample just makes me feel ill as a whole though, so nothing new there.

Yeah, I want to teach, so I need me a PhD unfortunately. If I fail across the board, which I really feel like is going to be the case, I'm going to go teach overseas for a year, write a whole new writing sample because mine sucks, and reapply. And my SOP got much stronger over the app process, so that means the early applications must have been terrible. Room to improve there too. The part I DREAD about reapplying is asking for LORs again. I already don't have the world's strongest relationship with my professors (okay, but not a close working relationship on research/a project or anything like that) and I do not want to go through that again.

I really liked the Princeton Review book. For one, it was cheap! Second, I felt like it gave me a good enough overview of things covered, which was crucial because my literature background is lacking, and even more importantly, gave very valuable tips on test/guessing strategy. It is outdated on some key things like test format though and I don't think it gives a perfectly representative picture of topics and time periods. I had a lot of nasty surprises on the real test. But I only had one week to study, and I think reading the whole PR book through once, then borrowing the Norton anthologies from the library and skimming as much of the "recommended reading" as possible was probably the best preparation I could have gotten in that short a time. The funny thing is that I found myself really enjoying the selected texts, so the studying wasn't that bad. I think, more than any other standardized test I've taken, this one came down to testing skills. The broad range of really superficial knowledge from PR/Norton was enough for me to guess my way through the test and the score came out decent. It's not a low-stress method though - I started off the test fine but, because of the guessing, I had to read every answer, fell behind on time, and felt sick the whole time I was scrambling to catch up.