fuzzylogician

I think asking for more time is fair. If he pushes you and forces you to make a decision before you have all your answers back from other schools, I think the next move is to say 'yes', and see what happens. If eventually you get a better (funded) offer, you'll just have to write and say that you're very sorry but you just received a funded offer, and given the cost of the degree, you can't afford to pass this opportunity up. You really appreciated the opportunity and hope you didn't cause too much trouble, and so on and so forth, but you have to accept this other offer. For right now, just reply and say thank you for sending along the papers, and you'll be in touch again soon.

Good luck!

If you're polite and professional about it, it shouldn't hurt you. You might mention that you're following the admin assistant's advice in writing the email.

From yesterday:

Dear [whoever], I recently had a paper accepted for publication with [journal], and wonder if it would be possible to pass this update along to the admissions committee. I attach here my updated CV, which shows the full details concerning this publication. Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you soon, -me. (In other words, no need to attach the paper, just tell them briefly that the paper has been accepted and send them an updated CV. If you didn't submit a CV, add instead the full details of the paper to the email.)

Congratulations, and yes, definitely update the adcoms.

You and me both. But I highly doubt that anyone can predict what is going to happen. Best we can do is hope and guess, then wait and see.

You have nothing to lose by trying, worst that could happen is they'll say it's too late to replace the CV with a new one. It's unclear how much it'll help, but you never know. I'd send the update, if I were you.

Following the advice above, here is what I would do: 1. Keep it short, these things tend to take longer than you think, especially if you might get interrupted with questions. 4-6 slides seems like a good target to aim for. 2. Spend maybe 30 seconds talking about yourself, but keep the title slide (that is, don't have a slide with your personal info, just talk through that part): your name, where you're from, what school you're attending now, your major and sub-specialization if there is anything non-obvious about it, any other fun fact you'd like to share. 3. I would recommend doing both a broad overview of your interests and details on a project. Specifically, I'd suggest first having a slide on your broad interests: the type of questions you're interested in, any projects you've been involved in, one-line each, with just a brief description of what questions you were asking and what you found. 4. Pick one, maybe it should be your thesis, and go into a bit more detail: what question(s) are you asking? what is your methodology? what are your findings? what conclusions did you draw? As always, slides should be easy to read, so bullet points, graphs, pictures, are all good choices. But because you might be nervous, if it helps you to have more text, I'd in this case ignore the (generally very correct) advice to keep it minimal, and do what you need to be comfortable. 5. Either as a slide or against this last slide from the previous batch, talk very briefly about what you hope to do in grad school, keeping in mind that broad and vague is good because it's very likely that you will change your mind once you're actually in school. 6. Practice! Run through your slides a couple of times to make sure you know what you want to say. The beginning is usually more difficult, and then you get into a rhythm; if that is true for you, think more carefully about the wording of your first couple of slides, and then things should start falling into place.

For what it's worth, one of my earliest projects in grad school went somewhat similarly. I was part of a lab doing a series of experiments for an NSF grant. My experiment worked, and was interesting. I came up with a theory to explain the facts that eventually turned into three papers and a number of presentations at leading conferences. Another group in the lab worked on another experiment that failed. They had nothing to do with my experiment or idea. I wrote the paper, I wrote the conference abstracts, I put together slides and did the presentations. But my PI wanted to have members of that group that worked on the other experiment as co-authors too. One of them did help with the analysis, but the other one did nothing at all, to the point where I had to do their work for them because they were unresponsive over a long period of time. At the time I was really upset that these people were given credit that I didn't think they deserved. It took me a long time to see that, in the end, it didn't matter. I was first author; I got good letters of support from my advisor that gave me credit for my part(s) in the project; I learned a lot and gained practical skills. They were 3rd and 4th on the paper and while it's on their CVs, it's hardly going to be what makes a difference in their careers. I also learned how to approach difficult conversations with my advisor, how to choose my collaborators carefully, and how to negotiate authorship clearly and early on. Overall, I choose to look at all the good that's come of that project and to forget how some decisions were made in ways I disagreed with. It's just not worth the emotional energy I was investing in it. But yeah, I absolutely understand where you're coming from; but I am telling you as someone who's made it to the other side -- you have to choose your battles, and this one doesn't sound like it's worth the fight. And if you choose not to fight the fight, you absolutely have to let it go, or it will consume you. This is a growth and learning opportunity, so when you're up for it, take the time to dissect what happened and draw some conclusions about whether there was anything you could have done differently/better.

Or maybe he's traveling this week and didn't think he needed to share that with a random prospective student. You never know. I wouldn't give up quite so fast, it's only been five days.

There is no one sweeping answer, unfortunately. In general: rejections go out (much) later than acceptances. Some waitlists are "silent", so you might not get accepted or rejected right away, but instead kept on the back burner until the school sees what its first batch of admitted applicants does. To my knowledge most of the time domestic and international students are considered at the same time, especially at private schools. There may be some differences at State schools, where funding for international students may be more limited. Whether that means that international students are reviewed later, I don't know (I don't think so, but I wouldn't bet too much money on that guess). As for interviews, again it depends if the interview is with the entire committee or some subpart (or just the POI). If it's with some subpart of the committee, it's entirely possible that not all requests will be sent out at the same time, but I think it's a safe bet that they probably wouldn't be spaced out too far apart. Eventually all the linguistics departments I know make their admissions decisions as a whole, after receiving some input from the admissions committee. So at the end of the day, there will be one or more faculty meetings where promising files will be discussed. Things will get moving (files read, interviews held) in preparation for this grand meeting. Those meetings tend to take place in January or early February, but beyond that, the best advice I can give you is that the Results search can give you some idea of when that happened in previous years, but no one can tell you anything more accurate than that.

FWIW, it's IAP (independent activities period) at MIT right now, so a lot of people are away and not as accessible as they would be during the semester. I realize that this sucks for you, but it may just be that the professor is traveling and isn't near his computer right now to handle email.

As others have said, it's important to know what your field's standards are with regard to authorship to know if and how much of a problem this is. If you know someone you can ask about this (discreetly! without complaining about your situation at all!), that would be great. Otherwise, you can probably get some idea by just looking at recent papers and trying to figure out who is the student and who is the professor. If you are first (in a field where first is what matters), I don't think you need to worry too much about how many other people are on the paper. Your contribution is still flagged as the most important. If you've been demoted in favor of people you don't even know, then you need to talk to your professor, and the sooner the better. This is delicate but it's important not to accuse anyone of anything but to come to the conversation open-minded and to simply ask how the decision was made. Also keep in mind that depending on your stage in your career, it's possible that the most important contribution this paper will make for your career is that it'll produce a strong and detailed letter from your professor (and potentially a writing sample, if you did the majority of the writing and can have your professor attest to that; with caveats that you should check with someone knowledgeable if submitting co-authored work would be viewed positively or negatively). If so, you should be very careful not to do anything to ruin the relationship by fighting about authorship from a place of missing (or mis-)information. Try to think of this paper as it fits into your career more broadly. Likewise, if you're early into your PhD, this again probably won't be the big thing you want to have shown by the end; it'll be a side project that will be nice, but not your main deliverable. So again, while I understand that it's upsetting when people are added to your paper when you don't think they deserve to be on it, don't give it more importance that it deserves.

It might.. but TAL (which is assume is what they meant by "administrative processing") is an American thing, not something that other countries to, to my knowledge.

No, the process should be completely independent.

I'm afraid it's very likely that you'll have to go through administrative processing again, and I doubt that going through a different embassy will lead to a different result. If anything, they may become suspicious and worry that you're trying to play some game on them by not applying in your home country. Either way, the only thing I can suggest is starting the process as soon as possible. Sorry I don't have a better answer for you.

Sure, you could reply to that email to follow up and ask when they expect to schedule the interview.

Congratulations! You might update the departments you've applied to if you have reason to believe that any of their funding is restricted to US citizens only (e.g. some US government grant money might be like that). Otherwise, I don't think there is a reason why they need to know right now. If you do contact them, I'd do so for everyone; you never know, it might not help but it shouldn't hurt.

I can't give you numbers, but I can tell you that linguistics programs aren't the richest, so if they're going to fly you out for an interview, chances are pretty good you'll get accepted. If it's a Skype interview it's harder to tell, but still keep in mind that these interviews take time out of everyone's day and they wouldn't talk to you if they weren't actually interested in accepting you. That said, I don't think anyone can give you odds; it probably varies to some degree by school.

Caveat: This is not my specialty, so I might not know some obvious people/universities. That said. People who come to mind (details about departments in PM if you wish): Michael Wagner, Lauren Clemens, Byron Ahn, Lisa Cheng. Places where the setup would be more syntax/semantics lab + someone on the phonology side: U of Maryland, UC Santa Cruz, UConn, UMich, Stanford, NYU, U of Delaware, UC Santa Barbara. Also, UMass: http://www.umass.edu/linguistics/prosody-lab. Can't really straight up tell you that this setup would work, so think of this more as suggestions for places you should look at more closely.

Announcement: New grading policy! [Instructor] has decided to institute a new grading policy. [specifics]. This applies starting with the next assignment. Notice that this means that the numerical grade you will get might change, but the equivalent letter grade will remain the same. Notice additionally that since we are not retro-actively changing the grades on your first assignment, this will lead to some bump in everyone's final grades. I have never in my life had a student complain about getting a higher grade than they deserved. For any other questions, you refer them to the new grading schema and you point out that the grade corresponds to the same letter grade, and is what they earned on the assignment. I think you're blowing this out of proportion (though again, I don't think changing grading policies mid-semester is ever wise).

You want to kill someone for doing something that confused and inconvenienced you? Can we just pause and note that that's not okay? Changing the grading scheme mid-way through the course shouldn't be ok. At most institutions I know, that wouldn't be allowed. More to the point, why don't you schedule a meeting with the professor to ask what prompted the change, and how he wants you do deal with precisely the questions you bring up here? What happens when someone doing as well as before gets lower grades on an assignment, and someone who has even improved still gets what looks like a lower grade? Maybe the solution is to have the professor explicitly discuss this change in his policies in class. Either way, it should be his responsibility to address this problem, and your job is to do what he tell you.

If you're truly excited, I don't think there is anything wrong with "cool!". It's a little hard to give generic advice on this kind of thing because it really depends on the content of the research, but if you don't have a particularly contentful question, you might think about asking questions about whether they expect this kind of research to continue after you're there, if they're submitting a grant and if so if there is a role for student assistants and more generally if this is something you might get a chance to get involved with, what they expect the outcomes of the project to be (as in, what do you think you'll find?), something about learning technique X or how technique Y could help, how they first came up with the idea, what made them think that X approach is the best -- things like that. But I think it's totally fine to just say "that's really cool!".

Yes. It happens to everyone. You need to recognize that your body and/or mind need a break, and you should do your best to let them have it. When this happens to me, if I can, I choose to take a break, however long I can afford to, to do whatever I want without feeling guilty. The worst thing about this situation is when you're not productive, but instead of recognizing that and doing something else, you try to work, waste time, then feel like a failure. You deserve guilt-free time off. If you can't really take time off (e.g. because the semester just started), you very deliberately decide what is the minimum that you have to do to stay in good standing, and you put off other things. Again, the idea is to allow yourself the time you need to recover. A PhD can be emotionally exhausting, and you have to be kind to yourself. It's also probably good to know that everyone has more productive and less productive times, and those times can be extended (I think I didn't do much of anything useful in the spring semester of my 3rd year! no classes, no teaching, no research, I just spent a bunch of time being confused about what I wanted to do for my dissertation and occasionally had meetings with various people to talk about my confusion and how to get out of it. I snapped out of it in my 4th year). You just have to get through the less productive times and remember that this won't last forever, and it happens to everyone. Take care of yourself, both physically and mentally.