Lizzla

I'll be there, too

I'm weighing a couple of offers and holding off on the decision until I've done my visits, but I am leaning U of M. Ann Arbor is absolutely beautiful. I think last summer was unusual..I live a couple of hours from A2, and we had more tornado warnings last summer than any other year I've lived here. As long as you've got a basement or an interior room without windows, it's no biggie.

Thanks Here are my stats (with the HUGE caveat that they don't capture the SOP, fit, etc.): I just graduated from a mid-tier state school (the sociology department is ranked higher than the university as a whole--some pretty well-known faculty) with a 3.9 overall, 4.0 in my soc. major. Two semesters as an undergrad research assistant, which turned into a temporary job until I start grad school. My GRE scores were V:800, Q: 730, AW: 3.5. That AW was pretty much a train wreck (26th percentile), but I did have a strong writing sample to counteract that (I hope!!) I hope this helps...really, though, there are so many X factors that could affect how your application is received: state budgets, how many students your POI already has, who's leaving, who's on sabbatical, what your adcomm had for lunch...etc. Good luck to everyone and deep breaths...at the very least, the uncertainty will be over soon.

^ this. Although I have to say, I'm more in the "I'm going to round up all of our pictures and scribble on your face with marker" phase of the breakup...

Rejected from Brown. As other posters have noted, an email to check the website is rarely a good sign... Ah, well. This is the character-building funny part?

The year I studied abroad in France during my undergrad, I made a pilgrimage to the grave of Emile Durkheim. He's a good listener.

Hahahaha So what you're saying is...the sorcerer's stone is hidden somewhere in Madison?

I haven't heard anything, other than what they said in the email: fewer students than usual because they're guaranteeing funding to more incoming students, instead of going year-by-year. But I don't know how many people they accepted per year before.

Accepted to Michigan

Congratulations! I imagine we might see each other at PSU's visiting weekend? I agree, having an acceptance or two in your pocket makes it much less scary to wait on programs that take a bit longer to notify (*cough* I'm looking at you, Brown). Good luck with the rest of your applications

I'm accepted to UNC and my application status still says the same thing, so I wouldn't read too much into that. I'm not sure whether UNC has notified waitlist candidates yet, so if you haven't been outright rejected, you might be waitlisted. I do know that they were planning to accept 24 people initially.

For those of us that don't want to be a downer in the Acceptances thread, and don't want to seem like jerks in the Rejections thread... Let us celebrate/mourn/commiserate/obsess. Waitlisted at Wisconsin today!

It's at the end of February--as of last week they hadn't officially set the date, but it's going to be around February 26.

Yeah, that's the same thing they told me beforehand, so that's probably an acceptance! Congratulations If you look at Penn in the results forum from last year, that's pretty much their MO. Or at least that's what I kept mentally repeating to myself in the 15 minutes before my phone was supposed to ring...LOL.

I got into Penn State this morning Apparently they got an avalanche of applications because of the new NRC rankings and whatnot, and they're still sifting through them all...so for those of you waiting to hear back from Penn, don't assume the worst. It's probably going to take awhile for them to notify everyone.

V:800 Q: 730 AW: 3.5 GPA overall: 3.91 GPA in soc: 4.0 I have two semesters' experience as a research assistant, plus I had to write an honors thesis (though it ended up not being in the area of soc. I'm actually going into.) Decent rec's, one from an alumni. For what it's worth, I went to a state school--decent but not top-tier. Some departments are nationally ranked, some aren't so great. The soc. department is strong and we've got some well-known faculty. Congrats again to everyone posting acceptances

I'm accepted to UNC-Chapel Hill too! I also applied for a traineeship in their population center, but those won't be decided for a few weeks yet. Waiting to hear from 5 other programs, but not quite so anxiously now! Congratulations to everyone

Congrats! Going to the UNC recruitment weekend? I might see you there! I am still compulsively checking the results site...and I have a job that allows/requires me to check my email a lot, which only fuels the insanity

3.91 GPA, 4.0 in sociology I was recognized by my department as the "Outstanding Graduating Senior" in my cohort. Good GRE scores: 730 Q, 800 V (in keeping with the spirit of this thread, we're not going to talk about the AW ) AW notwithstanding, I'm VERY proud of my writing sample. I had a second major in French and a minor in international studies--maybe someone on an adcomm has a grant pending in a francophone country? By the time I start grad school, I'll have 15 months' experience as a research assistant at a federally funded research center, and 7 months' experience working on a longitudinal study, under well-known professors. 3 strong letters of recommendation--two written by alumni of a program that I'm applying to, one by the director of graduate studies at my UG institution I wrote an independent honors thesis (a Marxist analysis of French family policy between the World Wars and during Occupation) When I was studying abroad in France, I gave a guest presentation in French about American politics to an English class at a local high school (this was at the beginning of the 2008 primary season)..applying to grad school is mildly frightening, but there is NOTHING as terrifying as the prospect of teaching two dozen 16-year-olds in a foreign language! I agree with an earlier poster--this is good practice for interviews. It's so hard to talk yourself up, even when you know you're supposed to! It feels impolite. Anyway, fingers crossed!

All six applications done! I did them in October since I had to turn in an honors thesis in early December. It worked out pretty well because by that point I was hyperventilating about my thesis enough to take my mind off grad school. Until a week ago, that is--I graduated and now I have the time to agonize properly. I won't even have work to distract me for another couple of weeks yet. Ah, well. I've been reading a lot of novels. For those of you still working on applications, good luck! For everyone like me who is having a slow nervous breakdown, hang in there.

For what it's worth, there's a lot of this going around...I've seen a number of threads about unexpectedly low AWA scores this season, and the general consensus seems to be that as long as you've got a solid SOP and writing sample, a poor AWA won't torpedo your application. As my advisor told me, "If a program is foolish enough to jettison an otherwise strong application because of a WRITING test, when they have examples of your REAL writing, you certainly don't belong in that program anyway!" Which is pretty nerve-wracking when it's your future up in the air, but it did make me feel better about my 3.5. With your scores and GPA, I think you're going to do just fine.

If you're just starting grad school, you are eligible this year. Good luck!

If you're just starting grad school, you are eligible. Good luck!

The Javits website has been updated, probably because we all read the bit about the DUNS number and panicked: So no worries

Thank you, everyone! I feel MUCH better. I'll put a lot of time into my SOP and stop worrying so much about the AW.