warbrain

So apparently my host found out that I got it for the Netherlands, but I'm not supposed to know. And I haven't received any official word from NSF.

I e-mailed Rick a while back, he said we'd hear back mid-May.

Got the award, even though I didn't even get honorable mention the last two times! 2nd year computer science, my reviews were E/E, VG/VG, E/E. For those of you confused about your scores, I think there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the raw scores the reviewers give are a bit more fine-grained than what we see, and are on a scale of 1-50 where E corresponds to 40-50 and VG is 30-39 or something like that. So the average of two E's might actually be less than the average of an E and a VG, depending on where in those ranges the E and VG are. And then scores are normalized for each reviewer, that way you don't get penalized for having a harsh reviewer. Though something's definitely wrong when someone with all E's only gets honorable mention.

Uhh, I like only just now sent my GRE scores, am I screwed?

Not sure if this has been discussed already, but is it helpful to put preliminary results in our proposal, especially if we're second-year graduate students? I think for other grant applications that's actually not helpful because it makes it seem like you have less work to do, and don't need the money as much, but I've heard the opposite for the NSG GRFP.

I didn't get it for Computer Science, my reviews were VG/G E/VG VG/VG I'm actually surprisingly okay with this, my reviews were a lot more positive than last year (when I got VG/VG and F/F) even though I hadn't really done anything in the past year cuz of senioritis and stuff. I also anticipated the negative comments I got this year, which made them easier to read. Can someone explain the process in greater depth? I assumed that those who got three reviews made it past the first cut, but it seems like that's not the case since some people with two reviewers got Honorable Mention. And after the first cut, are all your reviews considered equally, or would more weight be placed on your third review, since the first two got you past the first cut anyways?

Yea, I don't have an advisor yet, and even if I did, I doubt he would be able to say much about me after only two months.

As a first year grad student, should I ask someone at my graduate school for a recommendation? I've heard that it looks bad to not have a recommendation from your advisor or someone from your school, but considering that no one even knows me yet (school starts tomorrow) I feel like the recommendation won't be that great.

Are people considering doing the MacCracken housing? And does anyone know if smoking is permitted there? I've tried searching online but couldn't find anything.

Of course, this pales in comparison to my friend who got an e-mail looking for hosts for the visit weekend before she even got a rejection letter. And before anyone asks, this department does accept its undergraduates for grad school - I can think of at least 5 current grad students who went here for undergrad, and 5 more who got accepted this year.

I guess this is over, but did most people get an e-mail after they called for their status?

I looked up where a lot of the awardees in my area who hadn't started attending graduate school yet are going now, and it seems like a lot of people are not going the school they stated. Also, does anyone have any stories about people who got rejected from a lot of grad schools, but still ended up getting the fellowship? I'm not sure if it's still worth it to be hopeful now that I've been getting so many rejections.

Did anyone not accepted to Georgia Tech have a "Note from Admissions" in their activity page?

I have a feeling that he's a non native English speaker who just means he's going to be so awesome later on that Washington is going to look dumb for having rejected him.

That analogy makes no sense. If applying to graduate school is like swimming in a shark tank to you, you shouldn't be applying to graduate school in the first place,

The reality is that the top graduate programs are really competitive, and that the vast majority of people that apply to programs like MIT CS are going to be rejected. This is true regardless of whether acceptances have been sent out or not. I don't think it's helpful to just go around telling everyone they're probably going to be rejected, even though that's true. You can't base this off grad cafe posts because first of all, some of them are fake, and second of all it is absolutely true that some schools accept people in multiple rounds. Unless you have specific information about MIT CS, or even MIT as a whole, you saying that people are probably rejected isn't helpful even though it's true.

One of my recommenders had his secretary send out my recs, so for a while when I hadn't heard back from anywhere I thought she might have sent something else instead - maybe her own bad recommendation, or an inappropriate picture. I got a call from a professor at one of the schools I applied to saying that my application is strong, so I guess that's not the case.

If it helps, I'm in a similar position - I go to a top-4 CS school with a high GPA and have what should be good recs, but still haven't heard anywhere. It especially sucks because all my peers are getting into top-4 schools (some only applied to top-4 schools so if you were being arrogant, I'm not sure what they were...) and I'm surrounded by grad students that I now know are significantly better than me. You're lucky that because you went to such a good school, that your recommenders know what exactly it takes to get accepted to top schools, and even if they don't they can refer you to someone on the head of the admissions committee at your school. They should be able to advise you well on where you went wrong, and where to go from here. I have heard of one or two cases where someone got shut out of graduate schools completely was able to use one of their recommeder's influence to get them accepted into a school after the deadline. This might be a possibility, but it might be very unlikely, especially in computer science (these cases are in math where the student got a low score on the subject GRE so the school did not even consider the application.) And of course, considering that you haven't actually gotten rejected anywhere, there's still a good chance you will have a grad school to go to at the end of the year.

I'm exactly the same way! I know that when I get my first acceptance (if I get it), instead of spending all my time on gradcafe and my e-mail looking for a decision, I'm going to be spending all my time on craigslist looking at housing.

My experience from noticing the admissions results of my friends is mostly for math, but it might apply for other fields also. There seem to be two large factors that differentiate REU admissions with PhD admissions - First, REUs are actively looking for women, minorities, and those who attend schools with limited research opportunities, while PhD programs don't care so much about them, if at all. Second, many of the students who went to top math schools for their undergraduate degrees did not apply to REUs at all, preferring to do summer research at their own institution. Those that did attend REUs either attended the most prestigious REUs, or attended less prestigious REUs only as underclassmen, mostly after their freshman year. However, everyone I know that did some REU was able to get into some top-50 PhD program in math.

It turns out that I didn't submit the departmental application for UT-Austin, just the university wide one (why am I so dumb?). I'm kind of paranoid now that I somehow missed applications for other schools, so I just wanted to make sure - Berkeley, Chicago, CMU, Columbia, Cornell, Georgia Tech, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Stanford, and Washington-Seattle all had just one application to fill out, right?

I wouldn't worry too much about this. A few of my friends took a class with him and had trouble with him getting back to e-mails then.

Today is Martin Luther King Day so many schools have the day off.

Does anyone know if for CS, Berkeley accepts people that don't get interviewed? And do most CS schools interview? I had no idea that interviews were a thing until I cam on gradcafe. None of the websites seem to mention them.