paraent

Yeah, 3.3 isn't a deal-breaker at all, even at the most selective places.

probably still business casual, im afraid

two higher ranked schools i've encountered in large cities have both enumerated $31k; i honestly doubt it gets much better than that anywhere, at least in my field (neuropsych)

there's a pretty good city guide subforum with a boston thread here; i've been peeking it a lot lately:

A lot of people are still waiting for decisions from other schools and even still doing interviews. So from here at least it makes sense that people on waiting lists aren't getting many updates atm. As April edges nearer though...

I only emailed labs whose websites advertised a job somewhere. Saves a lot of trouble. There are quite a lot every year!

at least am 100% sure offers haven’t been sent out for penn yet (in case someone searches for this info a year from now like i did this year, wanna note that around 30+ people were interviewed across two dates, 16-20 offers are likely to be sent out, and 8-10 are considered likely to matriculate; clinical and non-clinical peeps are interviewed in the same “group”)

Oh no I forgot about obsessing over the admissions portal

got an email from my top school was about travel reimbursements stomach did a flip anyway!

if you interviewed at upenn, pm me! maybe we can trade notes

right now is painful not mainly because of fear but because of dread whatever decision i get, i just want it quickly

u gotta be more creative if ur gonna stick ur neck out like that!

numbers from last year suggest that post-interview decisions don't come out until early-to-mid march at the best so here i am feeling anxious every day again

A group interview, how strange. No idea what the norms are there. All mine so far have been 1 on 1 with different professors in the department.

Having questions makes interviews a lot easier and helps keep quality conversation flowing, which should be the main goal of an interview (adcoms have already seen your CV). Maybe clinical is a different culture even on this, though.

If you’re not really considering the school anymore then it’s more gracious not to waste the PIs’ (or your) time, whether it’s too late for them to put someone else in your spot or not. Especially if going will pose a financial burden. Would be absurd for the school or PIs to hold such a decision against you, especially if they aren’t reimbursing you for the travel; they were in your same shoes not too long ago, after all. The only regret I’d have in your shoes from such a decision is a lost opportunity to network, and that seems pretty small in the big picture of things given how many of the same opportunities you’ll have going forward.

Yah, postdocs carry a lot of weight in at least our particular field. But then again, you're gonna have an edge getting that postdoc you want if you've gone to a top uni!

I dunno. I have siblings who’ve went to lower tier schools and to me it seems super obvious that they’re really not equivalent in rigor to the higher ranked school I went to and it’s much easier to get higher class ranks/GPAs there. Maybe other lower tier schools are different; I know for a fact that other schools in my tier have substantially higher grade inflation. But I think people are wrong to suggest that the only difference between the top and lower tier schools is how hard they are to get into. Not even going to get into how hard they are to pay for (I was able to go to college because the top ranked schools are so rich and generous). At the same time, the phd students at my current institution come from all around the country, from well-known and lesser-known programs. They are all super intimidatingly smart and that comes through no matter where they went for college; I think that even the ones who went to Ivies would’ve made it here if they’d gone somewhere else. I think much of the overrepresentation of ivy league students in grad programs might reflect the bare fact that ivy league schools are very good at recruiting the kind of students likely to go and succeed in graduate school. The other thing though is that while undergrad programs may be mostly identical, it seems almost certain from recent published research that top ranked research departments are orders of magnitude more influential than even slightly lower ranked ones. This probably impacts undergraduates’ futures, too, since the admissions process is so much about who you know and who they know — working in a well-known PI’s lab is widely known to be the best way to improve one’s career prospects in this domain. Because of the network/reputational system that currently organizes science and hiring processes, on reflection I suspect that success here is way more contingent on going to a series of brand name schools and labs and so on than success in relatively adjacent domains like medicine or engineering. Only by segueing into an approach that’s more numbers-focused and less concerned about departmental “fit” can these inequities really be addressed. And honestly, there would be a lot of downsides to that kind of shift too. Egh.

Couple of cogneuro labs I applied to when anxious about GS apps: UVA’s Nicole Long, Bonner/Isik at JHU, Shenhav at Brown. They all seem to be recruiting still! Oh I misread OP. Would recommend taking the lab manager position tbh. If it’s at a good enough location, research oriented, and you work hard, you’ll be very well positioned for GS apps. Sure helped me a lot. I don’t know that the programs you mentioned would necessarily give you that much of an extra leg-up to justify the risk, and one in the barrel is worth two in the bush anyway. But I don’t know your full situation. Otoh, would certainly encourage exploring all the opportunities you can if you can make the room to.

ugh who would willfully put someone through that

Got my admit offer a few days ago. Interviews were last week. Non-clinical.

I had this issue with one of my interviews. I ended up just giving up on the school. Will be curious to see what you end up doing!

No one place has all the jobs. Check all the popular jobs sites, look at the employment boards of all the schools you can think of, and apply extremely widely. With every job application, also send an email to the relevant PIs introducing yourself. Getting an RAship and doing a good job there will do loads for your odds of getting into a good program (if you're looking for a research phd).

I'd feel fine asking if anyone else was "likely to join the lab soon" and even explicitly saying it'd be cool if there were people around in the lab. Also, this is totally a question you can ask the PI who recommended you ask in the first place.

oof