hello! :)

IT'S SO FLUFFY!!

IT'S SO FLUFFY!!

My dad is not a famous professor, but he's done a lot of collaborative work with a guy who is one of the Founding Fathers of his subfield. My oldest sister, on the other hand, is pretty darn famous in her field.

And though I have to admit that my eventual admission to a top-10 university (which I later turned down) may have been partially based on name dropping (though the prof asked first! really!), the best thing I did was to ask both my dad and my sister: "What should I do to make myself more attractive to adcomms?"

Their answers were not what I expected. For example, I was pretty darn pleased about my 800Q score on the GRE. But Chrissy was relatively blasé about it. "90% of the applicants I get have a 800Q," she said. "But your verbal score? That makes me raise my eyebrows. I almost never see applicants with a verbal score like that." (She's in engineering.)

Anyway...what I recommend is to do what you said you are already doing, namely to ask your dad, AND his friends, what they think you should do to get into top schools. You might even want to show them drafts of your SoP for their input. This will have two effects:

(1) They will give you some amazing advice.
(2) Your dad's friends (maybe your dad too, but probably not) will gossip with their friends..."Did you hear that Dr. X's son is applying for grad school?" Never underestimate the power of academic gossip. You will not see direct results from this, but it will have more impact than you possibly know. *Especially* if you send them your SoP so they have a good idea of what your research focus is.

You do not want to conspicuously name drop. Ever. You have to at least *pretend* you're trying to get in on your own merits.

How can you you use that to your advantage? The answer is simple. Ask him how. He surely knows better about this process than the average applicants here.

I absolutely would waive your right.

It is matter of respect to your professors.

I might disagree a bit. If getting in is really about "fit" then you're undergraduate research, at least in part, should line up with what you want to do.
Four of the schools I applied to are perfect fits with research I have done in the past, which wasn't the most compelling work in the world. The other 4 I was in the ballpark. So far, in terms of interview invites, if I go with what was posted on the results page. A place where my past research lined up perfect wants to interview me and assured I am a really compelling candidate. Another institution for which I was in the same ballpark didn't extend an interview offer. A second where I was in the ball park interviewed me several times before I submitted an application.

Those of you who are offended by curt replies need to develop some thicker skin of you are going to be successful graduate students. Most faculty members are -extremely- busy people and they are dealing with a lot of these types of emails right now. If they sat down and wrote a well thought out reply to everyone that has emailed them wanting to work for them, that would probably be an entire day or more wasted on that process.

Plus, people who are emailing professors right now are indeed being a tad bit annoying. It's totally fine to email a professor to verify that they are a good research fit before applying to the school, but at this point you've already applied and if you are an appropriate fit your application will be reviewed. Emailing potential advisers right now is superfluous and irritating.

Yeah. My moodiness is reaching all time highs now. People from my program at school are starting to get acceptances. Granted, I didn't apply to any of the schools they have, but it's pissing me off. I have yet to hear a damn thing from anyone. I'd almost take a rejection just to hear something!

Plus, I'm getting sick of reading posts on the board that go something like, "Hi Everyone! I am perfect in every way! I have a perfect GPA and a perfect GRE and the perfect professor at the perfect uni is perfectly in love with me! And even though I'm so perfectly perfect, I'm apparently not smart enough to know my chances, so I'll ask you all, 'What are my chances?'"

Sod off! Those are your chances! Now stop reminding the rest of us how mediocre we are you perfect ass!

(That's why I posted this is the moody thread). I've gotten worse.

It's a bit of sticky situation (molasses pun intended), but if it is mentioned, I think you should definitely say something about it (no point in throwing away your research right). You could say something along the lines "It is in the works, but my PI is understandably quite busy right about now so we have had to push it back on our schedules." That's just the first thing to come to mind, you'd have to tell me whether or not such a statement is accurate enough to say and be truthful. Just my two cents.

Bring earplugs. Seriously.

I was introduced to the wonder of earplugs at a competition in high school. As the only girl on my team, I was stuck rooming with the girls from Rural Backwater High. The competition was two days long; after the first day, my team was in the finals, and their team was out. The other girls decided to hold a party that night, and told everyone to come to their room. I had just parked my exhausted butt in bed, 11:30pm, when they showed up with a herd of friends. And I explained the situation, politely shoved the friends out - but as quickly as I could get rid of them, more arrived. Around 1:30am, I gave up and went over to my teammates' room. Where I nearly kicked down the door, but nobody woke up to let me in. I curled up in the hallway lounge. Around 2:00am, the security guard found me, thought I was a bum, and tried to run me off. I came back at 2:30am, saw a bunch of people still in the room, and threw a full-on hissy fit. Crying, throwing things, you bet. It worked, and the room cleared. Except for my room-mates, who decided they needed to take showers and otherwise goof around. I got about two hours of sleep.

The next day, I complained to my team, who filled me with Diet Coke - and explained that they had all been wearing earplugs the night before. No wonder they didn't hear me banging on the door.

Since then, I have not traveled anywhere without earplugs. In fact, I wear them at home, too; my apartment is next to a fairly busy street.

And I did get revenge in the end. The next year, the girls from Rural Backwater were back. I was team captain, and so was the girl who had organized the party. And we got to play each other in the opening rounds. Normally, if my team was substantially better than our opponent, we would go easy and let the younger players get some experience - not this time. I was in, my best players were in, and I told them to show absolutely no mercy. The final score was something like 350-4.

Morals: the world is small, payback's a b*tch...and earplugs are awesome.

LoL this is somewhat funny, but it's not so bad. Either last year or 2 years ago, UC San Diego's undergraduate admissions administrator accidentally sent all(?) rejected applicants with an email of acceptance. So of course, they had to follow that up immediately with a letter of rejection.

It just occurred to me that watching YouTube videos of the Ph.D. hooding ceremony from my top choice school might qualify me as crazy.

God. I was not cut out for waiting. This is going to be a miserable few months at this pace.

You say nothing about the type of research you want to do. If you apply somewhere with no one doing research in that subtopic, it doesn't matter what ranking the school is, they won't accept you. At the same time, if you apply only where there are specific labs that mesh very well with your interests, rankings will also not matter too much. Basically, if a PI sees you as a perfect fit in their lab, they can likely help get you accepted, although not all schools/departments work that way. So you're looking at this completely backwards. Apply to the top labs in your area of interest. As to whether you're competitive for them or not, it depends very much on your interests, expertise, research experience, etc., more than your hard numbers. A 2.9 GPA isn't great, but postgrad coursework will certainly help minimize that, so don't focus too much on it.

I forgot to add one thing. Whether you end up in an economics or psychology program, doing research on how humans actually make decisions requires understanding of many areas of cognitive psychology. Attention, memory, and emotion are all very important, and you need to have a basic understanding of those types of psychological processes. Even if you decide you belong to the more mainstream economists who think psychology isn't very important, if you do research in decision making you will be working and competing with researchers who do make use of psychological concepts, so you can't just ignore them.

I started painting and revamping my old hobby of writing very short poems:

I just applied to grad school,
my applications now are done
But the waiting and the hoping
Are certainly no fun!

I hope your goals are a bit more focused than that.... Just getting a random psychology PhD from an Ivy League School is not very clear or practical.

Do you know what area of psychology you want to go into?

Also, a 3.22 GPA will be low for Ivy League Schools but you do have a very good GRE score.

my ultimate goal is to obtain PhD degree.
I got GRE score of V: 710, Q: 780.
Only thing that's concerning me is my low GPA. (3.22)
However, I really want to get into Ivys.
That's my dilemma.

Thanks guys for answering my question. The scores were on the phone today, so I forked over the $12 so I don't have to agonize for another week. (I had this irrational fear of misreading my scores and was paranoid that my actual score was lower than what I've been telling myself, I wasn't just agonizing over the stupid AW part). Anyways banana21, I hope you enjoy your Christmas. If it makes you feel any better, I personally thought the actual math was easier (yes, easier) than PowerPrep. The geometry required no where near as many calculations (the 1 geometry question I remember having required me to know what equilateral triangles are and how to take the perimeter of a rectangle and a triangle). However, do brush up on those basic statistics, I got several questions on things that I learned in stats 101 in the first several weeks of class (can't tell you what the question was, but hopefully that gives enough info for you to know what I'm talking about). The analytical writing part was meh, I just followed Kaplan's sample essay's format and pulled as many things out of the air as I can. The verbal part, if you know Barron's and you're not somehow especially inept at reading, you'll manage at least a 650. Don't worry about it, the test is definitely overrated and people make it sound a lot harder than it truly is.

I looked to my left. I immediately and fervently wished that I'd looked to my right. There was a large green tree. Its branches looked contorted from the wind, but there wasn't even a breeze. A single, luscious pear hung from the highest branch. Unfortunately for my starving stomach, the trunk of the tree was crawling with enormous spiders.

PERSONAL STATEMENT!
----

nooo!! I lose! I was playing this game to get my mind off of grad school applications...

It's not rude or anything, but it's not the right time. I would wait for the professor to ask you if you have any questions or after you get an offer of admission. <-- that is what I think "process is complete" means. I resonate with your eagerness to want to continue the conversation and talk more with the professor, but I would hold off so that you don't annoy them or come off as needy. You've done all that you could and I'm sure you've probably submitted one hell of an application. The ball is in their court now. Good luck!

Ok let me start by saying I am not an idiot lol, I promise. I have a great GPA, had awesome references, and a few impressive internships on my resume. However, the GRE murdered me. I got a 700Q and a 380V, yes, don't laugh, and no I'm not an international student, it was just a really bad day. On all my practice tests including powerprep I was scoring in the 600s in Verbal but that day something came over me and I just bombed it. When I saw my score for the first time I could not believe it and then I cried for a week. I thought my life was over, I would never get into a grad school. Well guess what?! Not only did I get into my safe school Florida State University but I also got into American University and NYU! I know that might not be impressive to those of you who are heading to Harvard or Yale but this just goes to show you can get into a good school without perfect GRE scores as long as you have other things going for you. I hope my story helps some of you out there



*I also want to add I'm not someone who has had a ton of work experience, I'm only 20, straight out of undergrad*

Those that cheated got a pretty good deal - fess up and just take a 4 hour ethics course and face no disciplinary proceedings and have no record of it on your transcript. I would not have been so generous at all had they cheated in my course

Ah really cheating should be punished. I assume it is the huge social stigma in the US that makes the universities tiptoe around the subject even in the most obvious cases. I cought copy cats before and nothing happened. I was so angry with the system.

Just declare that you are not a terrible person if you cheat BUT if you get caught it goes directly on your transcript, and employers, grad schools can decide whether a one time mistake can be forgiven. Now most cheaters go unpuished, add to the grade inflation but those who get punished suffer well beyond the scope of their deed.

Besides, who would announce that the questions are from a question bank and make the possibility of cheating obvious?

this happened in my univ as well (accounting major), last year.... since there are 2-3 days to take the midterms, and the midterms are held in the testing center and not in the class, one guy from the group would study like hell and go take the test. then he/she'd come back and regurgitate the test in front of classmates. and the remaining would go and take the test, get >95% all the time!

the people involved were identified, and 26 students were expelled from the department. of the 26, 4 were expelled from the university while remaining were allowed to stay. of those allowed to stay, 3-4 were ripped off of their 3-4 years they had invested in accounting and made to enroll in some other major, while remaining were forced to take a year worth of other general and ethical classes before re-enrolling in the major. that was a major blow to our accounting program which usually frequents the top 10 in national rankings.

and oh, 2 people who had already graduated and left had their diploma revoked. pretty awesome, eh?