tacitus178

For those of you who are waiting to hear from one school but accepted at another: do you have a plan for tomorrow afternoon if you still haven't heard? I'm trying to trust in the cycle -- that things we'll be resolved today or early tomorrow -- but I can't help imagining a scenario where it's 4:30PM (i.e. 30 minutes before the end of regular business hours) and I still haven't heard about waitlist and I feel compelled accept the offer without having heard one way or another concerning the waitlist.

I would suggest looking at the acceptance letter(s) to determine this. In each of my letters it indicates that you must decide by April 15th. As far as I understand, it is a MLA "best practices" policy (and while not perfect, a pretty good one, I would say).

My only suggestion is to keep the lines of communication open with the dgs from your accepted school. I'm in the same boat as everyone here and made sure to tell the dgs I was still "actively considering" the school. It might be a bit of useless information, but it made me feel like I was being as forthright as possible about the delay making a decision.

I feel like I know the answer to this, but I'm in the midst of deciding between a few schools (as well as enjoying the suspense of being on a waitlist from a top choice), and one of the choices is giving me a bit of difficulty figuring out: a lower-ranked doctoral program whose ranking as a 'national university' (i.e. overall ranking) is very high (top-25). Should I factor the university's overall ranking into my consideration or take the lower ranking of its doctoral program at face value? While ranking is certainly not the only way I'm deciding things, I'm hard-pressed to ignore it altogether given its presumed relationship with getting a good teaching job afterwards.