uncle_socks

Unless there are larger, strange structural problems with the school, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. I wouldn't reneg on another school without the official letter, but that's totally out of an abundance of caution and because it's cost free to do so. I know it's much easier said than done, but try to relax, you're in.

It could be either. If the school is a big upgrade, there's no shame in reneging on another school and taking the apr 16 offer.

Yeah even if you're at HYPM, your chances of transferring into Berkeley or Stanford are...not fantastic. If you're anywhere else, you'll basically have to prove that you're currently "underplaced" and that going to S/B is a beneficial move for you academically. S/B don't want to take you just because you're "good enough" and your spouse is there. Even if you do get in, you'll likely not actually be able to transfer much and would have to take coursework again. Slim chances aside, my next concern is what are you going to do after you graduate and your wife still loves her dream job. The chances of graduating from Stanford or Berkeley and getting a TT job in the bay area are very bad. You could work in tech? But you could also just master out from your current program and work in tech without wasting your life on finishing the PhD. If you're on a more personal level with your advisor, I'd definitely try to like, scope out his advice. I wouldn't frame it as "would you support me if I tried to transfer out," but rather a "my spouse has this dream job offer, and I'm struggling to understand and evaluate what my options are" situation. There are obvious reasons, beyond his own ego, why trying to transfer is a bad idea, and if he's a genuine good guy, he can probably help you think things through much better than us anonymous nobodies can. IMO, I think the best thing you can do, if you're at a school that doesn't require you to TA every semester, is to get your TA'ing debt out of the way and then dissertate in the bay area with your spouse.

I think you misunderstand. Some people being waitlisted doesn't negate the fact that others were simultaneously not notified and dragged along for another couple of weeks. That was the problem. I'm in grad school already man. It's nothing personal against NYU, I don't go there, but I know the faculty is top notch and I wouldn't not be proud to go there if I did. I just hate seeing institutions being needlessly rude to people, and I want to call it out because it both is possibly indicative of how the department treats you once you're in it, or at least it establishes trends in how a department does admissions. Certain departments show certain behavior every year during the admissions process that causes a lot of false hope and grief for prospectives. These are times where they simultaneously have admits and possibly waitlists and rejections put, but hold everyone else on for a ride for weeks or months with no communication. I think it's important to outline this behavior clearly (as clearly two people upthread misread an extended no contact period as waitlisting) so that future prospectives who read these threads know what to expect. More personally, I love admissions, I love seeing people get into schools they want to be in, and I'm annoyed when institutions provide false hope to very vulnerable people. I read past threads religiously when I was applying and I know others do too. Anyway there's a lot of "institutions being needlessly rude and unhelpful" in this profession. Waiting half a year to hear back on paper reviews. Reviewer #2. Getting rejected from grants with no opportunity to see what you "did wrong." Unfortunately it's a matter of life. It's still annoying, though.

@modesteffect if you're online anytime soon could you please clear up what the situation is with respect to NYU? My presumption is that "likely waitlist" in your sig = not being told officially that you're on a waitlist, but obviously not accept or reject.

Can you please guide me to any one instance in which the people complaining about NYU are talking about waitlisted as opposed to ghosted? Seriously, I read this forum on mobile so maybe I'm missing something, but I don't recall a single instance in which people are complaining about needing to wait til April 15 because they're on a long waitlist or something. They're annoyed, and I'm calling it somewhat abusive, because as far as I can tell, NYU is withholding information way beyond normal, in a way that no peer schools do. Most schools waitlist and tell you that you're waitlisted and will probably hear back around April 15. In fact NYU has done that for some people. That's normal. My read of the situation is that this is different. To be completely clear, my read of the situation is the following: Admits have gone out a long time ago. Rejections went out earlier this month. So have PhD rejects + MA offers. Some people got an explicit waitlist a couple weeks ago. Some people still have heard nothing, and this is not an unsubstantial amount of there are multiple people on this forum posting about it. If they reach out to NYU, NYU says "we'll let you know by April 15," with no explicit message about there being a waitlist. I don't see any reason why NYU can't at least say "you're on the waitlist" to people who reach out. They've obviously told others that they're on a waitlist, and did this before people complained on this forum about waiting forever on NYU. Again, I'm happy to be wrong here. I'd love to be shown that I'm wrong. My perception of NYU would certainly increase. I'll skip on commenting on the personal attack. This is an anonymous internet forum. We should be allowed to call out institutions here even if it's ultimately useless.

For example nothing within this posters' history suggests any useful communication from the school. No one is complaining about being waitlisted at NYU, they're complaining about not hearing anything whatsoever.

Unless I'm illiterate and reading things totally wrong, it seems like posters in the previous page have heard absolutely nothing from NYU. They reached out and got "generic responses."

They could simply tell people who they currently haven't contacted "you're waitlisted, it's a long waitlist, and you might have to wait until around 4/15 to hear back" or "you're rejected"...not very hard to do. No other top school strings so many people along to the 4/15 deadline without at least saying "you're on an unofficial waitlist" when a prospective student reaches out, and there's absolutely no reason NYU has to be like this.

I have no skin in this game but this is super freaking rude and abusive. There's no reason to keep someone in long waitlist-or-rejected purgatory when they literally have this information.

idk if they're doing it this year, but the following is definitely true of prior years. everyone who gets rejected gets thrown back into the MA admissions pool, so what's taking them so long is doing MA admissions.

yeah it's very departmental-dependent. Some have no real problem with you deferring if you have a half-legitimate excuse (even though they say something like deferrals are rare on their website), but others refuse to guarantee funding if you defer, and others won't let you defer at all and would make you fully reapply the next year.

To #6, this is a great question to ask the current grad students! I wouldn't ask this to professors outright unless you know already that they're supportive of non-academic careers, but if you are aware of someone in the department who is supportive of it already, or if some grad students tell you that a particular professor is really supportive of these types of career moves, they can be pretty insightful as well as to what kind of opportunities are out there for graduates of their program. I can't stress enough how awful the academic political science job market is. It is so important to go to a program where you know you'll be happy where you end up even if you don't manage to get an academic job.

Gradcafe gets less and less popular every year.

People are absolutely not graduating in an average of 5 years anywhere, let alone somewhere with what is one of the more qualitative departments out of top schools. Not to mention, the modal school this year, relative previous years, has budget constraints where they can't actually admit a full of class as they usually do. As I've said before, Northwestern does this every year, where they admit people, they hold events, but they still won't release rejections to everyone. I know you guys like to stay optimistic, but this is systematic shitty behavior on Northwestern's part.