fuzzylogician

I wouldn't worry either way. Either option is possible, but they wouldn't talk to you if they weren't interested, so take it as a good sign. Do your best and see how it goes.

As mentioned above: The EGG, the summer school in Crete, the one in St. Petersburg, ESSLLI. All happening in Europe at various times in the summer. ESSLLI is mid-August: http://esslli2018.folli.info/. I don't know what's up with EGG this year, but last year it was late July-mid August. The Crete summer school is in the second half of July: http://www.phl.uoc.gr/confs/cssl18/. The St Petersburg school last year was also in the second half of July. Have you looked into any of those?

Can't help you with numbers, but I would assume many, if not all, of these programs have a People page listing their graduate students, so you could do your own detective work to figure out student body sizes.

How is that a relevant question for this board?

Usually, yes. Friends too.

I would think a relevant piece of information to help in this decision would be where (=what country) you hope to get a job post-graduation and what kind of job. Do you know (or can you find out) what kind of degrees the people who currently hold these jobs have?

For the love of all that is holy, don't look at your materials after you've submitted them. It's only going to give you grief. For what it's worth, I know almost no one who is not mortified by their own old writing.

It seems to me that your advisor is thinking beyond the CV line to who you might meet at these conferences. Networking mostly happens outside of the lecture halls. It's correct (in most fields/cases) that a talk is valued more than a poster, but if we're frank, one talk/poster are probably not going to be what bumps your CV from one pile to the other, and the prestige of the conference also makes a difference, so it's not as simple as talk >> poster. You want to get some visibility and name recognition not only among your closest (potential) collaborators and colleagues but -- importantly -- also more widely within your (sub)field. I've occasionally had excellent interactions at posters and conversely small audiences at talks (e.g. you're scheduled on the morning of the last day, and the conference party is the night before; you're scheduled at the same time as a famous person and everyone is at that other session, etc). Some things you can't control. Large conferences is general bring more opportunities, but of course the small venues might too, just different ones.

Check the Results survey for when the programs you applied to made their decisions in previous years. There's no guarantee that this year's timeline will be the same, but it often is.

This may depend on field, but in my field, at least, most schools I know explicitly say that external funding does not affect admissions decisions. Those are made exclusively based on merit. I'm sure it won't hurt you, though.

It's entirely impossible to answer your question. It depends on so many unknowns. You can try and search the Results portion of the board for acceptances and interview invites to this program to see if/how many late invitations went out. Beyond that, it's possible that they'll hang onto their waitlisted pool for quite long, until they have a finalized list of admitted students, or not. It's possible that everyone will accept their invitation, or not. Not having a crystal ball, none of us can predict the future. My best advice is to write back, thank the school for the good news, and ask for some additional information: say you know they can't make any promises, but could they tell you, on average, how many students get admitted off the waitlist in the past several years, and when you could expect to get an update.

You still have over two weeks -- that's fairly last minute, but doable. If you have someone to ask, do it now. Explain the situation, apologize for any inconvenience, offer to send them anything they might need to write you a better letter, and thank them profusely. You don't have to give them any kind of gift after the fact, but you could if you want. A nice thank you is enough.

Asking someone during finals week isn't exactly the best time -- it's one of the busiest times of year. The semester might have been over for two weeks, but that means exams happened about a week or so ago, and grades were due less than a week ago. And even professors get to take time off during the holidays <gasp!>. That would be why a professor who you've otherwise had positive interactions with would be slow to respond to your email. This most likely has nothing to do with "being irresponsible." I would suggest writing again early in the new year, and in the future I would also suggest planning better (i.e., being more responsible).

I suppose it may depend on the field, then. In mine, people come from all over. You may get better answers if you share your intended field.

Well, wouldn't it depend on your application? How can we tell without knowing you?

Lots of students in strong PhD programs come from all over in terms of their BAs and MAs. Rank isn't necessarily a determining factor. It's more that strong programs will also have more/stronger faculty and often more resources, hence there's a correlation. No one can give you a number. But what you want in an MA program is strong training and opportunities. You will need three strong LORs, probably at least two from your MA program, if you can manage it. You want the opportunity to generate a strong writing sample. And you want to be able to establish some kind of research trajectory that you can discuss in your SOP. If you get to present some work, that's a plus. It's useful if you attend a school that has a history of placing students in good PhD programs. That's something you can ask about; and if you know what your potential PhD targets are, you can spend some time on the People pages of those programs to see where the current students there got their prior education. Past behavior is one of the best predictors of future behavior: an MA program that's done well placing their students in good programs in the past will probably continue to do so in the future.

In that case I don't think there's anything anyone here can do for you. You'll have to take your chances. Studying in Italy wouldn't be so bad, either. Good luck!

This is a question best addressed at the program officer(s) for each grant, for official answers you can trust. These aren't things to play around with. Just write a short and respectful email and ask, I'm sure they're used to fielding these kinds of questions.

These types of consequential immigration questions are best answered by experts. Take my answer with a grain of salt: I am not an expert. If I understand correctly, you applied and got into programs in both Italy and Germany; you have your Italian visa already, but you prefer to study in Germany and would like to get that visa, too? It's a bit hard to tell -- in principle, you should be able to have both visas in your passport. You cannot use them both at the same time, however. If you do this right, what will happen is that you'll have both visas but one will never be used. I don' think that breaks any rules. That said, immigration officers might have questions about why you have two student visas for the same time period in two different countries (and the German embassy issuing the visa might, too). If you can explain as you have here, at least as far as legalities are concerned, you should be okay. But again, people might be suspicious, and it might mean you get questions about it on a somewhat regular basis when crossing borders.

Depends. Schools do not send rejections at all more often than they should, and they may send them fairly late, if they do. At this point, though, it's very early and I wouldn't expect too much.

Not to stress you out or anything, but if you're an undergrad, most likely you'll get provisional acceptances, pending successful completion of your BA. In that case, you'll most likely be required to submit a final transcript at the end of the year. That might make your questions here moot. But in any event: 1. Possible, but highly unlikely. Bs aren't failing grades, after all. More likely, they just want to verify the information you submitted is correct. 2. I wouldn't submit anything that wasn't helpful unless I was explicitly asked to do so.

Déjà vu?

Hi there, please don't cross-post on multiple forums. Your other posts have been removed. I'm happy to move this one to another forum if you prefer.

It's fairly uncommon for a graduate program to admit a student mid-way through another program without requiring that they start over. Programs usually like students to receive their training in-house. Programs also don't usually like to take students who are too advanced in another program (for the same reason, actually). Some will waive some intro courses based on existing training, but then the student will be required to take additional courses to make up the missing credits. When someone follows their advisor to a new program that the advisor is hired at, most often their degree will still be granted by the original institution, even if the student is physically at the new one. Again, if a student wants a degree from the new program, they'll likely have to take extra classes (essentially, starting over), and they may need to officially reapply for funding purposes (otherwise they'll likely still receive a stipend from the old school, where they will also get their degree). Short answer: transferring is rare; usually you'll have to reapply and start over.

Is there a way to combine small conferences with larger ones? Part of networking is also meeting other students in other towns, and they can serve as a base of operations (=crash space) in some cities. I often share a room with colleagues from other universities rather than from my own university, depending on the situation, if I can't get crash space. (Some conferences can help with crash space if you write them, especially if the conference is organized by/near a university). In addition, sometimes conferences will waive registration fees or reduce them for students with limited resources, or they may allow you to volunteer to help with on-site organization in return for some reduction of costs. Then there are AirBnBs and similar for accommodations, etc. Overall, your advisor is correct that the large conferences are where the real action takes place and they are the places where it's worth going to and making connections, but their dismissal of your financial concerns is disheartening and not okay.