amyvt98

It is mainly because you don't have any offer from Top 40(~39) schools. 
In reality, there is a significant gap within top 20~50 schools, in terms of placement, resources, admission chances, etc, 
No one puts Northwestern and CU Boulder, OR even,  PSU and UConn, in the same group. You should probably know better. 

In my view, it is possible that one of the essential components of your application was lacking GRE/GPA/LOR/SOP and therefore did not meet the minimum threshold for admission. For example, often the graduate school division, not the department, has minimum GRE scores for entry to the university. So if you fell short of this, or one of the others, maybe the admission committee just rejected your application outright without further consideration.

Impostor syndrome is a real thing for a lot of PhD and graduate students. Don't panic if you do not understand everything at first. It's absolutely normal. A lot of the things we learn at this stage implies years of reflection and understanding. Your understanding of concepts, realities, topics will mature and evolve with you. Don't panic if you do not get it at first, it has nothing to do with you being stupid or not deserving of being a grad student. 

Hi there - I am also married with children, and enrolling in a PhD program has been a career change for me. I briefly considered applying to a few CHYMPS schools that would require me to live away from home during the week. Eventually, I decided that the combination of the expense of maintaining two residences plus five years away from the family made that option impractical for me.  I wound up at my first choice (ranked in the 20-40 range), which is about an hour commute from where I live. As you know, getting hired out of school is iffy at best, but in the end, I decided to go the route that would provide minimal disruption for the family. So far, I don't regret it.  
Logistically, things aren't that different from commuting for any other job. I spend less time on campus compared to others in my cohort so that I can maximize time at home (usually that means sitting on the sofa reading for a class while my son sits next to me and watches Survivor). It really is just like another job - my coworkers are just a lot younger than I am
I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any specific questions - I'm happy to try and answer. 

As fun as all of this has been, folks, I should probably make this my last post here. I stepped down as DGS at Ohio State this past summer, and it's better for all of you to have input from different people who have more up-to-date perspectives on the application process. Thanks for the opportunity to offer whatever help I could, and best of luck to all of you in getting to the job of your dreams.
 

Yes, totally unfair. I hope there are better solutions out there, especially now that #metoo has started to change things. I just wanted to provide my experience so that you'll know that your'e not alone. I hope it all settles down for you!

Love the Legally Blonde advice!! I'm glad to hear about your experience and how it is actually an issue that can take a lot of energy, work, and extra caution. It is annoying, especially when you're arriving to a place and you want to make friends and feel supported, but I'm also sure it will become less of an issue as time goes by and I'm no longer the new girl in town. 
And yes, I should leave earlier, before things start getting awkward, though I still think this is truly unfair! 

I have some experience with this, albeit with a caveat. I'm an older student (I entered my program in my mid-40s after a career change) so I don't have the problem of getting hit on anymore. However, earlier in my career before I entered academia, I had this problem a lot. It sucked, and it did prevent me from forming close relationships with some people, especially men. I can't speak to how these types of things are handled in academia, but I can tell you what I did to cope since in my old profession, there weren't a lot of resources for this type of situation. First, I would limit my social time to a drink or two at happy hour before heading home. I found that the later things got, the more inappropriately people would act. Second, I would wait to get to know people pretty well in a workplace setting before letting my guard down and hanging out socially. I occasionally did become friends with some men at work, but only after getting to know them and their motivations. This didn't work 100% of the time - occasionally I would deem someone harmless and I'd be wrong. But it did work most of the time. 
If your experience is anything like mine, the longer you spend in the department, the more people will forget about surface appearance and start to see the person you are inside. Until then, I coped by watching a lot of Legally Blonde  

Just a quick message for everyone on this thread: This is my last year as DGS, so I won't have my finger on the pulse of admissions enough to answer your questions going forward. I'll tell my successor about this board and ask him or her to chime in as I have.
Thanks for being such a welcoming community, and best of luck to all of you, wherever you end up.
-Bear

I personally don't consider this as an issue as long as people do not post inappropriate comments on schools/departments. 

This article on how to read for grad school might be helpful.

This has been my experience as well. My department has an almost weekly happy hour frequented by grad students and faculty. Some people talk about random things (sports, news, etc.), others talk about teaching, others about research. I've found that in some of these small conversations I've gotten great ideas or insights into my research that I hadn't gotten otherwise. Sometimes just being asked to give the 30 second version of your research can force you into thinking about it in a different way or allow someone else to say something you hadn't thought of. Without those conversations, my work would definitely suffer.
 
And yea, I'm one of those people who can't work all the time. Back when I did my comprehensive exams (which were multiple questions over like 10 days), I remember people in my department (mostly those not yet at the exams stage) being surprised that I was still attending the class I was TAing (I was mostly grading but went to every single lecture), working out, and even watching an episode or two of a TV show online. But you know what? You can't work for 16 hours a day for the 10 days without a break. And really, since I was limited to like 25 pages double-spaced per answer, I would've ended up writing way more than I needed if I'd worked that long. Instead, I rode my bike to the gym, worked out with friends (including some who had PhDs and thus totally understood what comps were and why you might need a break), cooked myself real food, etc. It's about knowing what you need to work efficiently and be productive and taking the time to do whatever that is.
 
Back to the original question though:
- Be open and willing to learn.
- If you're in the humanities or social sciences, take the time to just browse the library shelves in your general field and in your intended research area to get an idea of what's been published and what research resources are available to you. (Even better, meet with a librarian early on to make sure you know what your school has and the support s/he can give you.)
- Skim through recent journal issues in your field to get a sense of what topics are current and which are becoming dated. Pay attention to book reviews if there are any and use those to help you find relevant books for your discipline and research area.
- Learn to use reference management software (EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, etc.) and start keeping track of your references that way.
- Figure out an easy to use system for staying abreast of current/new research in both books and journals that may be of interest.
- Read your graduate handbook (and TA handbook if needed) so you know what is expected of you. Ask questions if expectations are unclear.
- Start figuring out what, if any, courses outside the department you might want to take, how often they're offered, how difficult they are, etc.
- If you're going to need research methods training, figure out how to get that ASAP. In the social sciences, this often means taking courses in qualitative methods, statistics, and/or GIS and seats in those classes can fill because they're attracting students from an array of disciplines. Getting your methods coursework done means you can start collecting data sooner.
- Get to know whomever helps oversee grant apps (NIH, NSF, SSRC, Fulbright, IAF, etc.) at your institution and ask them what you can do beginning now to prepare to apply in the future, when you should be applying, what you'll need to be competitive, etc. And, while you're there, get them to help you set up some alerts for grant announcements.
 
There's probably more you could do, especially related to conferences and networking, but I don't want to overload anyone with suggestions.

Sure. I'll put my marriage on hold (so long husband, go find a gf for the next 7 years while I finish my PhD), give my pets away, etc., just so I can focus on research. That doesn't seem like a recipe for disaster. 
 
I am a pretty successful student, I think, and I work maybe 6-8 hours a day (I'm in the humanities, so no lab work, but I do have to work on independent research and I also have teaching duties). That leaves 8 hours of sleep, and the rest of the time to the other so-called distractions. You see, I found that after working more than 6 hours, I was no longer productive. I'd sit in front of the computer staring into space, or rereading paragraphs from a book over and over unable to concentrate.
 
If I didn't have a partner* at home willing to look at my drafts or bounce ideas with (not to mention the emotional support, the cooking when I'm not in the mood to, etc.), a cat to snuggle up to me when I'm having writer's block, or a dog to force me to go outside a couple of times a day so I can go and process ideas during a walk, I would not be successful. Productivity isn't about spending every waking hour "at work," but about making your working hours count.
 
* this could also be a friend/roommate. It just so happens to be my partner.
 
Going out to beer with friends isn't just a "social" activity. We talk about our research... we bounce ideas back and forth. It releases tension but it also allows us to "work" by developing our thoughts. I find inspiration in those moments.
 
The people I know who struggle the most are those who don't have any of those things and who focus exclusively on "work." They live by themselves because roommates are too distracting. They don't have pets. They don't go to anything "social." There's no balance. Their work suffers... they don't really exchange ideas with anyone else, and what they produce reflects that.

I’m coming back here for the first time in a long time to give you a different perspective on placement figures.
I don’t know of any departments that outright lie about placement, but departments have some deceptive techniques to make placement seem better than it really is. The most common technique is multiple counting. I had two one-year positions before getting offered a tenure-track and my program counts me each time. So if you don’t look carefully and critically at our placement page, I count as three placements. Most programs do some version of this little deceit.
A better way to look at placement is some version of a survival analysis, but it doesn’t need to be that complicated and I don’t have the data anyhow. What I do have is the outcomes of our cohort, so I’ll describe that here. My program was in the Big Ten, somewhere between 15 and 25 in USNWR rankings. We have a history of placing okay, but we aren’t putting people into prestigious R1 jobs with regularity. Based on stories I hear from friends who came out of similar programs, our cohort’s experience is fairly typical.
We started with a big cohort: there were 18 of us. The first big drop off happened after the third year, when we were down to 14. We would lose a couple more over the next two years. None of us finished until the end of year 6, when 2 defended their dissertations and took tenure-track jobs and 1 defended and took a visiting assistant professor position. The big wave of defenses happened after 7 years, but none of those finishing were going into tenure-tracks – mostly postdocs. It’s now coming to the end of the 8thyear for our cohort and of the 18 who started, this is the breakdown: 10 have PhDs, 4 are in tenure-track jobs, 4 are in postdocs, 1 is in a visiting assistant professorship, and 1 is in a non-academic job. Put into percentages, 56% of our cohort has a PhD after 8 years and 22% are in tenure-track jobs. Our program’s placement is considered fairly good.
Those in tenure-track jobs and those who didn’t finish were not always the ones faculty and cohortmates predicted in the beginning. You should take two things from that: one, if you have convinced yourself (even privately) that you are a star prospect, these odds still apply to you; and two, be nice to the ones who everyone says aren’t going anywhere and don’t take the egomaniacal “stars” of the program very seriously. It’s all pretty random.

It's her decision, not yours. If she's graduating from undergrad now, that means she's probably 21-22 and old enough to make that decision for herself (whether you agree or not). In all actuality, a degree from a top-name institution doesn't mean that much after you get a bachelor's. Work experience trumps a degree in many instances. Worldly experiences look good on a resume but do not determine your intellectual ability or how much you retain from such experiences. I'm currently a fourth year graduating senior at one of the most popular and largest institutions in the nation (also on a policy track). It's a hard school to get in to, the academic rigor is tough, all of that jazz. I can personally say that if she hates economics, she shouldn't be forced to do it. Micro is easy, macro is an awful crime against humanity. You should feel confident in your daughter's decision-making skills. The majority of students (myself included) will graduate with mountains of debt no matter what (even if we had fellowships from Hopkins). Let her go where SHE wants to go, not where you want her to go. She's lucky to have you to "underwrite the check", but that doesn't mean you get to decide where she goes to school (or even influence her one way or another).

PROFILE:
Type of Undergrad Institution: STEM focused R1
Major(s)/Minor(s):  Business Administration / Spanish, Latin American affairs certificate
Undergrad GPA: 4.0/4.0
Type of Grad: None
Grad GPA: None
GRE: 167 / 167 / 5.5
Any Special Courses: Took several polisci courses but as you can see I did not major in it
Letters of Recommendation: 2 PoliSci professors, 1 Spanish professor
Research Experience: None 
Teaching Experience: None
Subfield/Research Interests: IR / CP, Latin America
Other:¯ \_(ツ)_/¯

RESULTS: 
Acceptances($$ or no $$): UCSD, UChicago, Georgetown, GW, UT Austin (all $$) | American and NYU master's after being rejected by PhD (no $$)
Waitlists: none
Rejections: Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, Emory, American, NYU, Columbia, UCLA, Stanford, MIT
Pending: none
Going to: Between UCSD and UChicago
 
LESSONS LEARNED:
Overall, things I thought were strong about my application: GRE, GPA, letters were probably very positive, interesting/unique work experience, being from a rural town. Things that were not strong: research experience, teaching experience, limited relevant coursework, writing sample was probably meh (although I don't have a lot with which to compare it). If that profile describes you at least in part, take heart! I obviously was coming from a non-polisci background. I'm sure that hurt me at some places and helped at others. It probably depended on the rest of the cohort they were forming. That being said, I realized I wanted to do a PhD late in undergrad and forged strong relationships with PoliSci faculty at my school, so just remember it's never too late to do that if you're worried about it. I did a study abroad with 2 of my letter writers and took multiple classes from the other, so they knew me quite well, including in a non-academic environment for the former two. Apply widely, both in terms of number and profile of school. I applied to as many schools as I reasonably thought I could put my best effort into their applications, and where I could see myself living. I got rejected from schools in the 60s in the USWNR rankings, and accepted to a top 10. My acceptances were at quite a range, and I was shocked with how well things went. So apply to as many as you can because you never know where you might get in. A couple of my application advisors recommended applying to only 5-7 schools but I'm very glad I didn't follow that advice. I also started the applications themselves as soon as they opened. Review your SoP with honest feedback givers that understand what professors will be looking for. The structure of mine changed significantly throughout the process and I went through several drafts. The more time you can give yourself for tweaks, the better. I worked in a mostly unrelated job for what will be 2 years before starting my program. I didn't hide from that and played up the benefits and technical skills that I learned on the job that would be helpful on the SoP (given how quant heavy a lot of research is now, my being a data analyst probably helped). My writing sample was honestly pretty bad imo, especially in hindsight, but I translated it from my original text in Spanish which hopefully gave me brownie points? One of my letter writers offered to reach out to professors at other schools that they knew well to let them know to look for my application. I don't know if they actually did it or if it had any effect, but I can't imagine it hurt and probably would have asked them to do it even if they hadn't offered. Obviously depends on your relationship with the writer but if you're close I would encourage doing this. A lot of people on here talk about fit and I guess that's true, but I don't see that as being the biggest factor in my applications. I didn't get in to some schools where I had a very strong fit with the faculty, and did get in to some where it seemed more tenuous. I honestly don't see an obvious common thread between my acceptances. YMMV. I'll add to this if I think of anything else but hopefully some of those ramblings are helpful.
Editing to say if anyone is reading this in preparation for future application cycles, feel free to DM me with any specific questions. It's a hard process and Bill and Ted taught us to be excellent to each other.

I lived just outside Blacksburg for a few years!  Roanoke is pretty up and coming.  When we first moved to the area (5ish years ago) Roanoke was honestly ...kind of gross.  The downtown area had a super cool farmer market on the weekends and a couple cute local shops, but then the rest of the buildings were empty.  However,  in the past couple years there has been a lot of improvement! A lot of cool new breweries opened (if you like beer - Chaos Mountain Brewing is probably like 20 min outside of Roanoke and was our favorite!), some new shops were going in downtown, the mall area was improving, etc.  There is also FANTASTIC hiking nearby - if you like to hike definitely check out Tinker Falls and Dragons Tooth. It definitely has a small city vibe and is very easy to navigate. The area is very economically depressed and unemployment rates are very high, pretty conservative politically, and high crime in certain areas.  
The education you will get through Tech and Carilion is top notch!  I only ever heard good things from people receiving their education through both of those institutions. 

I would, and this is just my preference, not go for the visit at all and instead give up my spot such that those waitlisted might receive offers.

PROFILE:
Type of Undergrad Institution: R1 with an unremarkable political science department
Major(s)/Minor(s): Political science, Communications
Undergrad GPA: 3.66
Type of Grad: Applied Politics 
Grad GPA: 3.8
GRE: 170V, 161 Q
Any Special Courses: None
Letters of Recommendation: 3 professors from my grad school (I graduated over a decade ago, but currently teach there, so I have strong relationships with all of my recommenders)
Research Experience: None
Teaching Experience: Adjunct faculty at an R1 school for the past four years
Subfield/Research Interests: American/Behavior/Political Psychology
Other: I have 20 years of professional experience working in politics (on Capitol Hill and as a political consultant), and my work in the field directly relates to my research interests.

RESULTS:
Acceptances($$ or no $$): Maryland ($$), American University ($$)
Waitlists: GW, Georgetown
Rejections: None
Pending: None
Going to: Maryland
LESSONS LEARNED: Meeting faculty with similar research interests at each school helped me understand fit and write strong personal statements tailored to each program. It also gave me a good feel for the schools that would likely accept me. Demonstrating fit in the personal statement is crucial. 

PROFILE:
Type of Undergrad Institution: R1 with an unremarkable political science department
Major(s)/Minor(s): Political science, Communications
Undergrad GPA: 3.66
Type of Grad: Applied Politics 
Grad GPA: 3.8
GRE: 170V, 161 Q
Any Special Courses: None
Letters of Recommendation: 3 professors from my grad school (I graduated over a decade ago, but currently teach there, so I have strong relationships with all of my recommenders)
Research Experience: None
Teaching Experience: Adjunct faculty at an R1 school for the past four years
Subfield/Research Interests: American/Behavior/Political Psychology
Other: I have 20 years of professional experience working in politics (on Capitol Hill and as a political consultant), and my work in the field directly relates to my research interests.

RESULTS:
Acceptances($$ or no $$): Maryland ($$), American University ($$)
Waitlists: GW, Georgetown
Rejections: None
Pending: None
Going to: Maryland
LESSONS LEARNED: Meeting faculty with similar research interests at each school helped me understand fit and write strong personal statements tailored to each program. It also gave me a good feel for the schools that would likely accept me. Demonstrating fit in the personal statement is crucial. 

PROFILE:
Type of Undergrad Institution: R1 with an unremarkable political science department
Major(s)/Minor(s): Political science, Communications
Undergrad GPA: 3.66
Type of Grad: Applied Politics 
Grad GPA: 3.8
GRE: 170V, 161 Q
Any Special Courses: None
Letters of Recommendation: 3 professors from my grad school (I graduated over a decade ago, but currently teach there, so I have strong relationships with all of my recommenders)
Research Experience: None
Teaching Experience: Adjunct faculty at an R1 school for the past four years
Subfield/Research Interests: American/Behavior/Political Psychology
Other: I have 20 years of professional experience working in politics (on Capitol Hill and as a political consultant), and my work in the field directly relates to my research interests.

RESULTS:
Acceptances($$ or no $$): Maryland ($$), American University ($$)
Waitlists: GW, Georgetown
Rejections: None
Pending: None
Going to: Maryland
LESSONS LEARNED: Meeting faculty with similar research interests at each school helped me understand fit and write strong personal statements tailored to each program. It also gave me a good feel for the schools that would likely accept me. Demonstrating fit in the personal statement is crucial. 

Nothing like that - just a short letter that said they weren't able to accept me and that I was on the wait list. Good luck! Hope you get better news! I applied in the American subfield, BTW.

Just got a wait list notification from Georgetown.

I've worked with a lot of PhD's that did not go to academia (and even interviewed a few for jobs). If you are angling for an industry position, or just want to prepare for it as a plan B, I think there are two main tips:
1) Cultivate quantitative research skills (modeling; statistics; computer learning; using R, Python, SPSS, or Stata). Your hard skills matter much more than your pedigree in Industry jobs. Industry will take the person who can build them a model from Middle of Nowhere University over a Yale graduate who can't. 
2) Cultivate your teamwork skills and be able to talk about them in a compelling way. Academics (and by extension PhD students) can sometimes get a bad reputation in industry circles for being overly focused on their own goals and interests and being difficult to work with. 

I'm not a biology student (I'll be studying political science), but UVa's polisci program advertises itself as family-friendly. The university has a few options for on-campus housing for graduate students with families. https://housing.virginia.edu/graduate-students
I don't know much about the child care situation, but it may be worth investigating: http://www.virginia.edu/childdevelopmentcenter/about.html