fenderpete

Princeton people - is this the Political Science PhD or WWS? Still nothing at all from anyone for me including UPenn. Good to know Columbia is on the brink, hopefully I'll finally hear something other than complete radio silence.

Undergrad thesis... 'What went wrong in postconflict reconstruction in Iraq?'. I'm looking specifically at the Sadr Uprising and splitting it into political, military and civil and trying to get at elements of democratic consolidation and contemporary war fighting.

UPenn is done notifying, Stanford is done notifying, Chicago is done notifying... Columbia and Princeton aren't exactly safeties and having had zero success at the others (not even waitlisting) I'm guessing my apps just weren't strong enough and so I think I'm basically waiting for another couple of rejections at this point

I've kind of given up at this stage tbh.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE can someone please express an opinion on whether Stanford is done notifying?

Plisar, I think I'll be taking you up on the offer of admissions advice as I don't think my chances are looking too rosy . Do you reckon that's it from Stanford?

What do we think about Stanford, is it a small cohort and they're done accepting people or is there any hope of more acceptances?

Whammy... That's that then. In terms of getting feedback on why you didn't get in places, when do we start going about that, and is it alright to ask?

I'm assuming if we haven't heard by the end of today that's Penn out the window?

Looks like the UPenn floodgates just opened.

Congrats to the accepted guy. Let the stress commence for the rest of today. I'm yet to hear anything.

I'd say bogus because no other ones have gone up, unless the cohort is going to be tiny or none of the other people admitted know about GradCafe - which seems unlikely. I'd say wait and see if anything more turns up later this week, if not we're on for a mid-March UPenn deluge!

Can we get bgk to delete it and then just pretend it didn't happen?

Late-Feb/Early March last year... but whether that means anything this year is up to interpretation.

What I'd love to know is... do departments who send out notifications in dribs and drabs realise how much prospective grad students sit and overanalyse what's happening at their end? i.e. I'm now sat running through various scenarios for UPenn - is it one professor who spilled the beans before the grad school has started notifying, the adcomms doing one email before mid-morning coffee break and getting distracted by a tasty danish before returning to notifying, is it a hoax? ARRRRRGGGGHHHH....

TBH currently I heart anyone who'll pay me enough to live in the USA next year to do a PhD lol. I think you and me are possibly the only non-accepted people thus far and I'm sure you're the same, the security blanket of anything at this stage would be VERY welcome. Well, back to refreshing and waiting to see if any more UPenn crops up to confirm that's real... I didn't realise President's Day was a big enough deal for universities to close...

You're telling me about it... I think it's the only place I stand a reasonable chance of getting in, as one of my LORs had his PhD supervised by one of their big shots and knows their Grad Chair. I've also had favourable contact with a few people in the department in my area. Basically for me this could be the ball game.

Don't know... but I've been sat refreshing my email, the Grad Results and the ApplyYourself site since it went up...

Urgh, I'm just feeling very spent from the whole endeavour now - having heard nothing from anyone (but pretty much awaiting rejection from Stanford) I'm tired of worrying with no pay off. I'm trying to ignore it now and just get on with the rest of my life - easier said than done mind you lol. [edit] Although someone has just got into UPenn!

Thanks a lot That's the first time I've heard an actual description of what my marks mean in terms of GPA, I wasn't sure if it could be as low as 3.5 as in the USA they do the whole marking over 90% thing. Hopefully a good GPA will go some way to balance out my 610Q 690V GRE which had me fearing quantitative disaster (even though I'm a qualitative guy!).

What would a 3.9 be? I'm currently on 74.

I think it shakes out to 4.0 - kind of hard to transfer the UK marking system to GPA though.

Great job Having done that myself I don't envy you but hopefully everything will be a lot more stable for a while and we can get back to the minutiae of waiting

Probably a wave of Stanford rejections, other than that I don't expect to hear anything until the end of February now - Columbia have supposed only started looking, Princeton are rumoured to be late Feb/early March and UPenn are typically mid-March. I'll happily be proved wrong on all of those though. Regardless, it's time for me to stop messing about and get down to some serious undergrad work.

After reading a few of the procrastination posts it made me wonder if prospective grad students share any similarities in the way they approach work. I have always tended to be of the work hard/play hard approach in that when I'm working I work really hard and get my head down, but I'm not afraid to take a break for a lengthy period if I'm feeling burned out. I've never been one of the 9hrs straight in the library before exams - I'd much rather get up at 6am and work solidly through the day with adequate breaks. Most tellingly of all, I really can't work properly until I've got a high level of the good 'fear' of a deadline approaching. So basically I leave it a bit late, but when I get going it's all hands to the pump. What about everyone else?