qbtacoma

road hog

eternal sunshine

This is an excellent question. I am curious as well.

top gun

utter bunk

Wow. I am so sorry to hear this. No, this isn't your fault; objectively, this advisor is not working in the best interests of his students, since so many of them (not just you!) have trouble graduating. Other than suggesting going to your chair, I don't really have any other concrete suggestions. My sympathies, however, and best of luck to get through this with something at all to show for it.

back down

When I was talking with my grandmother about the school locations, she said, "Well, honey, I'm going to pray that you don't get into the schools on the East Coast, because I don't like the weather out there and I wouldn't like visiting." Uh, thanks, I guess. Fortunately I was more amused than anything because the schools I really want to go to are, in fact, not on the East Coast. And hey - God listened! I was rejected! I had no idea she had such rapport with the big man.

I think if you spoke with them in person and they introduced themselves by first name, that's totally fine. You are in warm acquaintance mode, and the campus probably has a casual culture regarding this. However, if you wanted to write "Dear Dr. X," I'm sure no one would be offended.

come away

Well I imagine that this is going to be laid out in the contracts, right? So if they promise funding for a second year, and anticipated sources dry up, they'll help scramble for more because that's what they promised you. However, I admit that I don't have a very strong sense of student rights or legal repercussions, but this is my impression from other threads on the forum. I think the best thing is to ask in the negotiation period what contingency plans they have, and straight up say that you can't afford to go if the money dries up. That's what I'll be doing.

This would make a particularly weird Garfield minus Garfield strip.

PhD comic

Gosh darn it, you're right! Deep breath. Also, they make decisions in waves. Waves. I'm okay now.

Yeah, the thing with Wisconsin is not so much the budget shortfall as the implications for labor history. If the governor and the Republican-controlled legislature win this round and defang the unions, it is likely that the strategy they use to do it (an amendment to the budget dictating the unions' legal status and stripping rights, rather than negotiation) will spread to other states. Also, it is quite a dramatic situation: tens of thousands of people protesting, camping at the capitol building in the cold, schools closing, fleeing Democratic leaders, etc. and so forth.

expensive degree

unisex restroom

I got notice in the mail that I was rejected from Michigan's American Culture program (they accepted only 8 out of 97 applicants). Plus I haven't heard anything from their history program, so I assume I'm out of that pool too. I am quite sad - these are the first rejections for a school I really wanted to go to.

Just because it's more stuff. The CV, SOP, writing sample, and all that have limits, but a web page can't. So seeing extra stuff that someone does (look at aaaaaaall my volunteer jobs!) gets around that.

I can't address the fundamental problem you worry about, that of being rejected from everywhere else because this other school is so good for you AND being rejected by the perfect fit. That is rough, and I sympathize. From what I understand, though, you thought this school was good for you in the first place as far back as three years ago. So the other folks are verifying your assessment of the field and your place in it. That's good! Their strong opinions about where you fit aren't replacing your own opinion on the matter, just confirming your good judgment. Yay! I do hope that you get into this program, because I can definitely see why other schools would reject you preemptively. That would be so, so frustrating. I'm rooting for you!

Yeah, I wasn't too savvy about the funding realities this time around. If I have to apply next year, I'll definitely seek out external scholarships and such beforehand.

I agree. The only thing that would hinder this is if an applicant displayed some wildly inappropriate behavior on the forum, like trolling or other things. More darkly, if someone admitted to, say, struggling with depression at some point in their lives then the stigma against mental illness might kick in. Overall, though, i do hope that people remember we're going through some typical human anxiety here.

By including more information on a website, you get around not only the word count restrictions, but also the document restrictions that other applicants have. Many schools allow applicants to submit supplementary information, so if you really had something new or different from what was in the application it should have gone there. My guess is the adcomms won't like either the extra work required to go visit the website (it's not a little thing when you have so many applications to go through), or the fact that you will have an advantage over other applicants by submitting a website when they don't. So they don't visit.

One thing you can assume is that they won't be complacent about helping you get a job afterward.

It seems to me that this is the worst case scenario (well, of all the acceptance dilemmas): getting waitlisted at your number one choice while getting accepted elsewhere. If that happens to me (ha!) I think I'd chicken out and go for the certain acceptance.