caffeinated applicant

@merry night wanderer, @killerbunny, @meghan_sparkle: Thanks for the kind messages. I'm slowly reverting back to the mean of "cautious optimism" (particularly in terms of reminding myself that a waitlist from UT Austin might be converted to a yes, even if there's also a chance that it'll become a no). February has never felt so long.

My optimism, it sure is waning. With Brown, Duke, Maryland, and Virginia acceptances on the board (two of those quite old acceptances at schools that typically notify rejected applicants weeks later), I'm counting those out, and while I know each school evaluates candidates independently, and the nature of the committee as a collection of individuals with their own research interests and agendas is a recipe for varying outcomes (i.e., each committee does not rate each candidate on shared "objective measures" but evaluates based on their own non-shared interests)... it just feels silly to take these presumed rejections and, rather than imagine a shutout, imagine going to Penn or Harvard. And if I'm shut out, what then? I would have to move for a terminal MA, and to move both myself and my partner for a two-year degree to then have to move a second time for graduate school, then take out all the loans that typically accompany a terminal MA--well, an academic career is such a risky proposition that it seems ill-advised to stake both my career and my partner's and our shared financial future on that. I could write a new work sample and apply for another cycle, but if I'm shut out a second time, I fear I'll seriously regret spinning my wheels in a job I don't love but can't change for another here, in a location that creates serious quality-of-life challenges for both me and my partner on a number of fronts. (Moving this year and next year would pose career and financial problems.) I'm in that spot where I feel like I've spent a thousand dollars to be told, "Well, sure, you're bright, but many people are bright, and we've assembled a group that gives us more confidence than you." Which... fair? But I'm hardly looking forward to giving my recommenders and coworkers that answer. I hate to be told that I'm "giving up on my dream," but folks, we all know that not everybody makes it.

Oh yeah I'm thinking exclusively in the bat-guano-wild upside-down-world of like, "Oh, this person has another option, and they were already in our second-tier waitlist pool, so we'll just knock them off the list now in case they were gonna reject us." Which like, is so outlandish that I can't seriously imagine a program would do it. But also, I'm aware that anecdotally (in a different field, I repeat, not in a humanities field) it's believed (not known for sure!!) to be the case that committees will reject candidates that they believe will attend other programs/turn down their program, which is also totally batshit to me, so I try not to rule anything out at this point.

Congratulations!! What a week!

It's been what, two and a half weeks since acceptances went out, a week since rejections? Seems fair to email. Something like "dear coordinator, as we near the end of february and my options become clearer, I hoping to inquire about the status of my application." Like "lmk what is happening, I have other options" but make it formal. Thrown in something about being "keenly interested in the graduate program at UC Davis," if that's true. Worst that could happen is they reject you (which... would be weird and petty, but that's academia for you!), but you already know you have a better option for you, so even if your email somehow gets you bumped from waitlist to reject pile, all that's really happened is that the next person on the list finds out sooner than if they waited until April for you to turn them down/to turn you down.

Out of reactions but congratulations!!!!!

Congratulations! Three great schools to choose from already, and hopefully even more to come soon!!

I am absolutely LIVING for this play by play. Congratulations!!

Virgiiiiiiinia, VirgIIIIIIInia.... please finish notifying! Last year there were only four round-one acceptances, all on one day, so three might be it... and they didn't release rejections for nearly a week.

Another Monday rolls around... I have the day off from work (presidents day) and was kind of hoping that it would be a slow start to the week with other folks taking the Monday off, but it doesn't look that way so far. Anyone want to claim the UVA acceptance on the board? Also, congrats to the folks reporting Oxford and other acceptances!

This is definitely a thing, aka invisible waitlist or unofficial waitlist. Not everywhere does this, but some programs/schools do, and it appears to be more common in some fields than others. As the saying goes, it's not a rejection until it's a rejection... Personally I find it extremely annoying since it seems like it would hold up the process for everyone more than just announcing the waitlist, especially if the program holds their rejections until they've created the full cohort (and thus can reject everyone on the invisible list). I suppose the utility is to prevent students from knowing that they've been accepted not in the first round, so that the school can look like they were interested in you from the start? This utility seems limited in the age of GradCafe, especially if the internal waitlist students miss a prospective students event, but that's my best guess.

I think it may be a situation where the phone call folks have decisions pushed through first and the rest take a bit longer. (The board seems to indicate that they call a small number of first-round admits and then email the rest of the cohort a few days later? Unclear. Small sample size, etc.) But I'm also going to keep refreshing every couple hours, naturally.

* logs into portal again even though I checked it when I got to work an hour ago * Still nothing here for me...

Senior year my roommate was accepted to 10 or 11 programs and went to 8 visits (biochemistry, not humanities). Most of these visits were cross-country, as in visiting the opposite coast. And since they were in a bench science and TA'd, it wasn't just missing class, it was missing teaching and lab time as well. Basically they went to their professors and supervisors before the semester got underway to let them know this would be a possibility, and then my roommate kept them in the loop as much as possible. Everybody, even the professors with "attendance grading policies," fully understood that missing class time wasn't something that my roommate could avoid. My roommate got in their work on time, got notes from classmates, and, when possible depending on visit schedules and time differences, would Skype into class to catch discussions. There's always the chance of an exception that proves the rule, but by and large, your professors will understand that these visits are more important in the long run than any individual class day. Also, for what it's worth, I missed two weeks of class my freshman year to have an emergency medical procedure (LONG story), and in the end, it was fine, and my professors worked with me to figure out deadlines and assignments. Of course, the three of us (you, me, my friend) are three different people with quite probably no shared professors between us, but I also went through undergrad missing hardly a day of class outside of that medical procedure, and without that experience and seeing my friend's experience, I would be a lot more concerned about missing class time; with this context, my attitude is a lot more "well, you have to do what you have to do." Additionally, I would say that visiting on the actual visit weekend is probably worth it, unless there is another pressing reason why you'd prefer a different date (for example, flying in internationally, or if you were working and only had a certain amount of PTO so you needed to stack visits to keep getting paid). Visiting on the actual weekend, you'll probably have more opportunity to speak with faculty and current students, because they will have blocked off the time for that; you can't guarantee that as many people will be around on the alternate date, and ideally you'd want to speak to a whole bunch of people, not just a one or two professors and two or three grad students with whom you arrange formal meetings. From what I know about visits in bench and social sciences, official visits also give you a lot of opportunity to speak with faculty and students in casual, mingle-y settings, which might allow you to ask more candid questions. In the end, for this friend, juggling the classes wasn't nearly as bad as the stress of the travel and making the decision. There isn't a wrong decision here, as long as you get out to the visit one way or another, and when it comes down to it, there isn't one very convenient answer, either.

excuse me, I have passed away ? tbh, does make me feel better about getting a straight reject from them/underscores for me how this is all a total crapshoot

You said above that Chicago has the highest budget and would definitely cover it, yeah? Bill them for the international leg and explain that because it is an international trip for you, you will be staying longer in the US, and it is more efficient for you to fly into NYC. You do not need to give more detail than that unless asked; they likely don't want to weigh whether your reason is "good enough" or whatever, because it is much easier to assume that people are making reasonable choices. If flying to NYC and then to Chicago is dramatically more expensive than flying directly to Chicago, you may want to offer to cover the difference, but like... idk, I don't expect that it would be a problem. They're giving you a big-ass budget and letting you pick your own flight because they have the money and do not care. This perspective based on my experience booking travel for university guests and requesting reimbursement for travel from other universities. Also, I am cackling at the idea of sitting down all the schools and telling them they're pretty, I love it!

I reached out to Maryland on Monday about timeline but didn't receive a response, which I take to mean "you'll find out when you find out." Other than them, I'm going to try to hold out until March 15th to email for info. If by March 1st I have at least one offer and I'm just waiting to hear back from one or two programs, though, I may email as a "I need to make decisions on this offer/these offers" deal.

This post is all great, and I want to highlight this point in particular--you'd be amazed how many hiring managers, particularly those who haven't done a lot of hiring recently, will be looking for you to say that you know how to use Microsoft Outlook or Word. It is not necessarily assumed that you have these skills, even though you just listed on your resume that you have a bachelor's degree. And yeah, the computer filtering system might spit you out before you even get to the hiring manager if you leave some of that simple stuff off, especially if it's one of those dumb drop-down menus where you have to click on like every single computer program you've ever opened. Also, keep in mind that you do not need to be the world's leading expert on Microsoft Word to list yourself as proficient. Basically what it comes down to is that just most people who graduated from a moderately well-known college with a four-year degree since 2015 can figure out their way around basic computer stuff with very minimal training by Googling for things they don't know, but hiring managers and candidate-screening programs don't necessarily assume this, so you have to point it out to them. A few skills you might want to pick up, especially if you're looking at admin-type jobs: - pivot tables and conditional formatting in Excel - mail merge in Outlook - basic social media/marketing tools like Hootsuite and MailChimp - basic Google Drive apps (Documents, Sheets, and whatever their knockoff PowerPoint is) (Not that any of us is gonna get shut out, since nobody is yet, but heck, this would be useful just for anyone who wants to do a temp job between undergrad and grad or current job and grad. Also, read the Ask a Manager advice blog to fact-check the advice you get from your college career center.)

No acceptance yet here, so I'm right with you in the "Am I going anywhere at all for grad school?" lifeboat in a grand ocean of anxiety. One waitlist that I'm clinging to for hope! Like, what would I even do if I don't get in anywhere? Stay at my job now that, while cushy in terms of compensation and time off, doesn't have growth opportunities and is located in an area where I'd rather not be living? Take a new job that would almost certainly mean a pay cut and a move to a higher COL city--besides the fact that I'd almost certainly need to lie about applying to grad school to start a new job this summer, and spend the entire first year with, mentally, a foot out the door? Do I apply for a second cycle, and if I do, is it better to spend a year in a limbo position or should I hedge my bets and try to move into that more career-leading position now? And I've got a partner with their own career to think about, too... There aren't any in-person terminal MA programs that I could attend from where I live currently, and I just can't stomach moving us for a one- or two-year MA and then moving a second time. But then I think, what if that's how I could have gotten in...? The whole process is real lesson in dealing with uncertainty. And priorities.

This seems to me like exactly the right approach for evaluating placement, particularly for schools that aren't posting placement statistics or full lists of placements. Current G4, G5, and G6 students can tell you a bit more about how seriously the department takes professionalization--are these workshops offered often? Do graduate students and/or the union have to fight to have them (riffing off what a friend in a different department had to do to get teacher-training for her cohort)? Do students feel that their mentors are helping them learn about opportunities? In some cases, it might also be possible to find recently-placed graduates, who can tell you about their experience and possibly the experiences of others in their cohorts. I'm also looking at how programs prep for alt-ac careers, on the rationale that if I can't get into a TT job, I'd much rather go into academic publishing than take a job outside the field entirely, and I could have a better shot at that if the program actively supports alt-ac careers. As a relatively knowledgeable outsider, it strikes me as irresponsible for PhD programs to fail to professionalize students for multiple types of jobs. There just aren't enough TT jobs to train your 6- or 12-person cohort for one thing. But anecdotally I've heard that some schools really make no effort on this front, even if that means that they're graduating two or three new PhDs per subfield into a job market that has only one job in that subfield every year.

Congratulations! Now the decision process begins!

Out of reactions for the day, but congratulations!

This is giving me flashbacks to my job search in the nonprofit industry lmao Sometimes I think I should've sold out and done finance...

There goes the rest of my work day--y'all know I'm just gonna be sitting by the phone instead of getting actual work done at my actual job. This is why I shouldn't go on Gradcafe during the day!! (I compromise and try to only go on Gradcafe during business hours.)

Looking at the past results for Purdue, it looks like they might be one of those that either doesn't notify rejections until very late (like...April) or operates an invisible waitlist. Since they're your only school left, if it were me, I think I would email them as soon as the end of the week and lay it on the table. Like, a polite version of "You're the last program I'm waiting to hear from, and I need an answer or at least a timeline for an answer so that I can start responding to my offers." The likely worst-case scenario is that they just don't respond to your email or respond with a generic "thanks for your patience while we figure out what we're doing." Best case scenario, they let you know that you're on the waitlist. Not sure if there are risks I'm not accounting for in this strategy, but I can't imagine asking would change the committee decision on your application. We're all professional adults here, etc etc.