philipjames11

I applied to a bunch of schools, and I've seen many of them appear to have sent out admits based off of the grad cafe admin results page. To help alleviate my anxiety, I'm wondering if anyone has heard back at all from any grad schools. I even made a poll for us. If anyone knows what the outlook is at this point feel free to share. Ie no responses or interviews by now being normal or being a bad omen.

For what it's worth I also interned at Amazon, however I avoided a recommendation from my manager as I did not work on a related field to my PhD applications. I would only recommend a recommendation from someone at Amazon if you do related research/something in your field of interest that you can almost directly relate to what you would like to do in graduate school. At the end of the day it's up to you, but I believe for PhD applications it is generally better to get recommendations from professors.

Sorry but this is a really bad question that shows nearly no research on your part. Courses don't matter nearly as much as research.

Sounds like you have a very good chance. However, many of the top programs are essentially lotteries as there are so many qualified candidates. I would say it is very possible that you will be accepted to 1 program, however it will be largely up to chance. If you don't get in focus on improving your tofel. I believe in your case the GRE writing portion may be important as well if you are an international applicant.

I'm a CS undergrad and applied solely to PhD programs (16 of them). No idea of my chances, but I'd be happy to trade stats.

So for some reason almost all University of California schools require Personal Statements on top of Statements of Purpose. Will anyone actually read this seriously, or is this a formality for UC schools? Any tips on writing it outside from the generic prompts?

Seeing as this LOR writer is imperative to your application, I will not suggest to find a different one. Instead, praise yourself more than you may even deem worthy. Go overboard in a reasonable way, and if your recommender does not agree they should change it. If you feel statistics are helpful, throw them in. Make up x percent and make up superlatives that you think are worthy of you, and when you send the draft over make sure to say that statistics and anecdotes are merely placeholders for the writers own views. Don't forget an introduction in an LOR is important. Teacher for x years, founder of this lab, etc.

@civitas I'd probably say best not to talk about the symptoms based off of what I read. In regards to @aMuzik I think the story is pretty good to include as a nice hook to show how you got interested in your field initially, or maybe even just further down in a body paragraph. Since everyone else felt comfortable sharing, I was kinda dumb and didn't sleep/eat/drink for a couple days and I fainted and hit my head on a desk on the way down lol. Woke up in the hospital and the next few months were pretty hard. Lots of new anxiety and learning difficulties. It got better, but GPA damage was done. I'm going to not mention any symptoms, but rather just say I had an injury and my grades dropped. Personally, I think this is the best way to go, but what to include and what to omit are largely up to individual circumstance.

So I ended up getting a 158-V (80th percentile), 165-Q (88th percentile), and 4.5-AWA (82nd percentile). I'm applying to a couple top 10 schools and some top 50 schools. My issue isn't really with the scores, per say, but their percentiles, especially Quant.

So I've seen countless advice to not include any information about mental health issues, and I agree that it can cause admissions to cast doubt on you. However, would injury also fall into this category? My GPA fell quite drastically when I had an accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury which in turn hindered my learning/recollection abilities for a semester or so. It was in fact this injury that ultimately, by coincidence, got me into the field that I'm currently applying for PhD studies in. The latter I don't see as relevant to my application, but the former does seem potentially worthy of being included. With this context, would it be reasonable to have a couple sentences explaining my weak GPA during said semesters, or would it be viewed as an overall negative for my application?