UGStudent

For you social science folks, you aren't the only ones waiting. Im biochem and still have heard nothing. This system sucks. Just say you are going to let everyone know May sometime and do it then. At least that way people can plan. I know some people have big decisions to make based on the outcome of this and I don't think it is fair to them t say they might find out early April, only to have to wait a month. It's not as big a deal for me as my funding is covered, but for others this can be a deal-breaker on grad school.

Im still waiting too. This stinks.

In my department are similar. Every student has a combination of research assistantship and TA-ing That is true unless they are receiving funding from an outside source, such as OGS or NSERC funding. Research assistantships come directly from the prof's budget and so awards really really help you in the sense of making more money available for your lab. This is a bigger deal in some labs than others depending on how well they are funded (science is expensive, good science is very expensive). The lack of TAing is a HUGE deal. Right now I TA two days a week for 5 hours each day. This means if I am in my lab running experiments, I can't do anything that overlaps the days I TA which means I have to come in on the weekends way more often as pretty much everything I do takes more than a couple days (proteins are bastards). Finally, money aside awards are great fodder for the CV, regardless of how prestigious (obviously the more the better). This is the latest update from my school: I am sure that you have all been hearing from students regarding OGS as some students have gone into their OGS accounts and seen that they have been awarded an OGS for 2010-11. I just received some information from the Ministry Friday afternoon about this situation. OGS staff are in the midst of entering the results for the 2010-11 competition but do not expect to have them all entered until the end of April. The data is live as soon as it is entered so students who do not see anything about the result of the competition on their account should keep checking. Official letters will be mailed out by OGS to all applicants letting them know whether or not they were successful in early May. It will be mid-May when I receive the report of the OGS results from the Ministry and I will post the results to the secure site as soon as I get the information. I hope that his information will assist you in responding to students' questions and if there are any further updates from OGS, I will pass them along to you immediately. That is from our awards officer for the university. So people SHOULD be getting updates, but it is taking a LONG time to get done. Some won't know for quite some time yet. The school most definitely will know about OGS after the students.

Through what was likely a mistake.. the rest of us will have to wait until next month most likely.

I agree about the second part. I doubt they would post incorrect results and not notify as soon as they were aware a mistake has been made. I suspect they planned to release all results at one time, and instead started releasing them as they were inputted, thus some people got results while the rest of us didn't. I think this is why we haven't found out yet, they are waiting until all the results are in the system to release them. This is also why it will take until the end of the month. This is of course just speculation.

OGS must have made up their minds at least in part as so many people have had status updates. No idea about SSHRC though.

The decisions have all been made. They just need to enter them in. The issue is likely a matter of personnel. As they have had several months to make the decisions. Entering them all by the day they say they will (the 14th or 16th depending on where you look) should not be that hard, if you have the right personnel and system.

Doubt we'll hear anything until Monday at the earliest.

Good to hear (unfortunate for them though) that there are rejections out there. On the NSERC board there were a few of us who posted that we had been rejected (self included) so I thought we'd see at least one or two if they were out there. No idea if they update over night or on the weekend. If you read above we have heard sort of conflicting information on what is going on. If they are updating through the day we aren't seeing people comment on that here.

What I don't understand is that we haven't heard of ANY rejections. Only wait-lists and successful applicants. It seems kind of fishy. I should anticipate that the government would be this bad at something. I should be ok with it, but really I'm not.

Nothing. Night folks.

Anyone hear anything today?

Got this today from my grad-secretary: "I'm sending this message to students who have inquired about OGS. I've talked to Lois Bamsey of GPS. She explained that there are probably about 13,000 OGS applications, and that they are being entered into the system according to the review panels. As soon as a result has been entered, the student can see it. She didn't know how long it would take for all of the results to be entered, but if your status remains "unchanged" (I think that's the word!), there is still hope. I guess you will have to just keeping checking. Apparently GPS will not get the list of successful applicants until mid May. Hope this helps!" So there's that.

I have mostly resigned myself to the fact that I am a reject. But that's ok. What is not ok is waiting around like an idiot for someone to tell me. So, unless they tell us during the day I'll see you folks tomorrow night around 11:45. Good luck

I don't know about Comp Sci folks hearing back, but I know others from my subject area (though not at my school as far as I know) have found out. So I don't think subject area is a factor in when you find out. Now to be fair, they were MSc folks and Im Phd, so maybe that is the difference.