I'm freaking out!! I applied for both theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics in Fall 2011.
Theoretical Linguistics: MIT, Yale, Harvard
Applied Linguistics: Stanford, Penn, Columbia, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Boston U, CMU (SLA), NYU
GRE:670V+800Q+5AWA
TOEFL:116
Undergraduate (Top 5 in China), Major: English (Business), GPA 3.5 Major GPA 3.8
Graduate (Ivy school in the U.S), Major: TESOL, GPA 3.98
four letters of recommendation (two linguistics professor, one stats professor, one supervisor from internship)
no publications
four smallish regional conference presentations (pertaining to language acquisition, heritage language acquisition, language assessment)
two-year research experience with two professors in the U.S (one is doing second language acquisition, the other one is doing sociolinguistics)
one-year internship, research on cross-lingual syntax-semantics interface at one prestigious research-oriented linguistics center
two writing samples (final papers of two graduate courses), but both are about applied linguistics.
As an international student, I am pretty nervous about getting in nowhere.....I am in China for winter holiday and I'll be back on 10th to finish up my master's thesis and WAIT for the results of my application .
Anyway, good luck, linguists.