congrats to those who have heard back! No answer for me yet, so probably a rejection. Such is life- I will reapply next cycle!
also, just so y’all know, a JSP faculty member passed away last week. Prof. Edelman. Her work upended DEI in the workplace, and it’s a major loss to our field. It seems she had the rare quality of being both a brilliant scholar and a very good person. I’d have very much liked to have met her, as she and I shared subspecialties and quite a few viewpoints.
I highly recommend you all read her book “working law”. If you’re going to work in the US, it’s very important to our workplace culture, and is the story of a career well spent
https://jsp-ls.berkeley.edu/news/memoriam-lauren-edelman
Hi all.
I remember how tough on the nerves January and February can be, so I thought it might help to lay out a detailed timeline as to what happens after you hit submit with an illustration from my program. I know there have been other similar posts like this, but probably doesn't hurt to add another one. Not every program does it the same way, but this might shed some light on one way it is done and how long it takes. The dates are not the same every year, so I just chose dates *around* when we do this.
Context: My program is a mid-ranked R1 in our field with some top-ranked faculty. I'm in Education, but we have a lot of faculty who come from other social sciences: psychology, sociology, economics...
Dec. 15 Deadline for our apps (like many places)
Dec. 16 As grad director, I check all the applications, download them for the faculty who can't (or won't) access the online system, organize them into specializations, and create spreadsheets for faculty to review the applicants.
This is when I also have to note who has missing materials or a missing fee. Some people enter a fee code that isn't valid and think they are done (not sure why the system allows that and shows us fee is missing), others have entered a valid fee code, but slightly wrong, and these have to be hand-processed by the grad college. Similarly, some applicants who should get TOEFL waivers didn't exactly follow instructions, so these also have to be hand-processed. Others are missing reference letters...
So, I advise my faculty to review any of the applicants in these categories anyway while we work on getting things worked out, but not everybody does this. New (now complete) applicants trickle in for a few weeks.
Dec. 17-Jan. 16 Faculty are supposed to review applications in their small specialization groups. Some groups do this asynchronously, some set a meeting in January. Either before or after this meeting, faculty are supposed to informally interview (or at least have a conversation) with anyone they want to admit. Some groups leave it completely up to individual faculty to say yes or no on an applicant, other groups have more formal rating systems and rank and then try to match the top candidates with faculty. In all this, faculty are supposed to keep in mind our target cohort size (12-15), our typical rate of return on acceptances, and what funding we have (faculty with grants often get priority).
Keep in mind that this is happening during the holidays, so this month-long period really only is a couple weeks that people are working.
Jan. 17 Specialization coordinators meet to check their lists and discuss potential funding, etc. Final ranked lists of students for each specialization are due at this point.
Jan. 18 Admissions committee meets to make final decisions re: admits, ranking, and who will be submitted for university awards. The university award decision may consider things like how likely the student is to actually accept their offer (because we can only submit a few students and if one gets the award and doesn't come, we lose that money).
Jan. 19 Final decisions are sent to the College admin and also to the grad college for processing. Soon after this, faculty will be able to informally tell the students they are admitting that they have been "recommended for admission." These recommendations still need to be processed by the grad college and that can take a few weeks (at this stage, the grad college can also flag applicants that they don't want to admit, but this is rare). Meanwhile, the grad team is making sure that all students (current and new) have funding for the following year. This is a BIG puzzle!
Sometime in Feb Letters go out offering admission and funding packages (but may not have specific funding assignment)
Feb-July Specific funding assignments are still being sorted (faculty are still finding out about grants this late, etc.). Individual students will receive letters with their specific assignments. For some, this will be after they have to decide on admission (but everyone is guaranteed funding regardless of their specific assignment).
Hope this helps to demystify the process a bit. Happy to take questions
Is anyone else applying to Global Studies / International Studies programs this cycle? I thought I'd start a thread.
I applied to 2 Global Studies PhD at UCI and UCSB, just received invitation from the admission event / interview at UCI, haven't heard anything from UCSB yet although I do see people posting interviews already on the result board here so I probably did not made the cut.
I'm also thinking about applying to the International Studies Program at Simon Fraser University, at least according to their website they seems to fully fund MA student (at least the tuition) and I do have a professor in the department I'm familiar with.
