LFRT

Best of luck to you! The waiting is awful.

Hey there, I was one of the unofficial acceptances. It was from the POI, and there was no indication of how many have been accepted this year. It sounded like I’ll likely receive the official offer next week. Hope this helps.

By no means an expert here, but it seems to me reaching out to your POI (or whomever you have had the most contact with) would be a good idea to reaffirm your interest. My guess is that in the event their offer is turned down by one student, they probably want to avoid having another offer turned down. The professor might also be able to shed some light on the length of the waitlist/the odds you’ll get off of it. I think this is a reasonable thing to ask about—especially if you have an offer elsewhere that you’re considering, though I wouldn’t necessarily say you have another offer..In my case, I didn’t have to ask about an indication of the length/if they think someone might not accept an offer because my POI kindly sent me an email explaining the situation, so I took the opportunity in my reply to reiterate that I would like to stay on the waitlist because I thought their department was a strong fit for me. Hope this helps!

There are articles out there from the fall when it initially happened, but I’m also linking two recent relevant analyses from an interesting series about this admin by the student paper you could check out. The first is about the professor response to the cuts, and the second touches on how certain master’s programs (like MAPSS) are being used to increase funding while PhD numbers decrease. I wonder what you guys think this could mean practically for PhD students (beyond making it more difficult to get an offer). On the one hand, there is a guaranteed amount of funding regardless of teaching duties. On the other hand, I wonder if having so much conflict between the faculty and administration about PhD students could be a red flag as a study/work environment.

I’m also wondering about this..it seems like an answer should come this week since it’s pretty late now. Have you seen the news from last semester that the university admin is cutting down the number of PhD students at the Div school (along with some departments)? I wonder if determining the number of students they can even admit is contributing to the delay.

There seems to be a rejection listed on the results page for Columbia, but I haven't received any update yet. I suppose they send out rejections in waves?

Haha well, at least I’m not alone in that.

I had an interview with Columbia, and my POI estimated that decisions would be made this week. I can’t speak to how soon notifications should follow.

@duckie0817, I would recommend asking your interviewers this question--especially if it's in the interview thank you email. I did this for two of my interviews because I totally forgot to do so during the interview itself. Both provided fairly precise dates of when they expected final decisions to be made (one said a 1.5 week wait, the other 3 weeks). It definitely helped my nerves to have a sense of when I would find out! However, if it has been more than a couple of days since the interview, I don't think I would reach out about it.