fenderpete

I'm just thinking it'll possibly be mid-late Feb before I hear from anyone I applied to - Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, Columbia and Chicago. I know Chicago use postal notification as well so that may be even longer for me in the UK. TBH though, since applying my feelings are a bit lukewarm towards Chicago.

Single, looking for program with GSOH and own source of income. East Coast preferable, but will compromise for Top-5 Californian programs. Nice to see that other prospective grads haven't all been snapped up too!

Congrats Jim Hopefully you can send some good vibes our way now

Well I'm currently working my way through the Oscar nominated films... I'd highly recommend Frost/Nixon and Milk - both awesome political movies and very engaging. I saw Valkyrie last night as well, which is very entertaining and gripping. Under no circumstances whatsoever should anyone watch Revolutionary Road. I've never wanted two hours of my life back so badly... I've got Waltz with Bashir and Persepolis to watch at some stage... So that's been my evenings. During the day undergrad is kicking off again finally, so by next week I'll be juggling Terrorism, Middle Eastern Politics and Arabic. I need to hammer out a couple of essays in the next few weeks to get to grips with my dissertation for three months solid. This is going to be pretty painful until 5th May. Like others have said, finding any level of concentration these days is a real challenge, I've got my iPhone connected to WiFi and checking for email any time I'm home, and doing the same via 3G at all other times. That combined with GradCafe and checking online status (I'm not even sure what an update on ApplyYourself or Embark will look like) doesn't leave grad school far from my mind.

Sadly my stress doesn't end until 10pm GMT so basically I'm on edge from getting up, until 2pm when I could conceivably hear from the East Coast then a lot later when the West Coast shuts down...

Wow... this talk of small classes is really making me hungry to study in the US! My undergrad cohort was 250, with average lectures at about 80-100 and seminars usually no smaller than 15-20... You guys really have it good

Out of interest, what do people think of UPenn, and what is their reputation like in the USA? Obviously they're an Ivy, but over here they're not as well ranked and I see they're ranked #28 which isn't great, but they have some great people in their department... What are your thoughts?

To take this one step further... If someone signs their email with initials i.e. TC, do you think this mean they endorse first name terms or not? This is from a professor in a prospective department who is also grad chair, so don't want to get this wrong lol.

I think this is probably 90% of the use my iPhone gets put to lol. I think it does help a lot having access to other prospective grad students because I don't know anyone else on my course/uni who is applying to the USA for anything, let alone grad school! It's a great common denominator, knowing we've all had to jump through the same hoops of GRE, LORs, getting transcripts from angry admin people - all while holding down whatever else it is we're currently trying to finish off. Thanks very much for the encouragement Tonights - I think being a UK applicant who's not from Oxbridge has me feeling a bit on my own. If I got into a program it'd be absolutely huge and something that AFAIK hasn't happened in years at my uni. We're a good university (top ten, Russell Group) but there seems to be a distinct lack of drive amongst the current crop of students. The only other person I know even considering it is going to get her way paid through Columbia for an MA by mom and dad. I also feel a real weight of expectation - from my referees, friends and family... So if it's as anticlamactic as I fear it might be, I'm not looking forward to it.

I'm a mixed bag there. One internationally renowned who I did research work with, one who is my dissertation tutor (and very well known in his area) but doesn't know me that well and hasn't marked my work, and the ex-head of my department who knows everything I did in terms of mediating students with the department and in terms of extracurriculars. So basically only one of my LORs can really speak to my working ability. Not so good either me thinks :S The fact that all my people are well known here might also mean nothing in the USA. So I'm not overly optimistic, after having a dreaming of Princeton day yesterday...

I think that 'bricking it' pretty accurately sums up how I'm feeling about the next 3 weeks :S

Does the ApplyYourself website get updated before they email you or is there no way to tell which will get done first?

Is that with an 'ApplyYourself' type website or Embark?

Awesome news ruth!! That's brilliant. Where is your offer from?

The long, long, long weekend beckons . Now I hate waiting more than ever

Well I didn't get the Thouron scholarship, so looks like it's now down to getting acceptance and funding directly from the departments I applied to. I really really hope I end up somewhere now :cry:

Can I weigh in at this point as a Briton? I'd like to think that for anyone, regardless of culture, the one thing that doesn't change is a respect for authorship and an abhorrence of plagiarism. It's completely unethical to use the name of a regarded professor, with a body of work they have spent their entire career building up, to shore up your own application and propose you as an ideal graduate student without their knowledge. It smacks of deception, a lack of integrity and the inability to play by the rules. If the person who did this is socially awkward, unable to forge relationships with professors etc. that's a great shame - however, it doesn't change the fact that she has forged academic documents in support of receiving a large stipend at a respected university. For those saying 'no big deal' how would you guys feel if your professor got their wife or a McDonald's burger flipper to mark your final exams, then just signed their name at the bottom? In terms of what to do, try and resolve it personally with the person, but if they've already sent off the recommendations and refuse to come clean themselves, you have no option but to go to the chair of your department. I had to do a similar thing when a professor sent me a swearing email denigrating students last year. I went through all the options (leaving it alone, publishing it front page in the school paper, talking to a professor I knew well and trusted) and after a lot of agonising the only thing you can do is hand it off to the highest authority and trust that they know how to deal with it. They should be able to investigate it with the least fuss and find the speediest and hopefully least messy resolution. [edit] Congrats to the OP for reporting said person.

Do you guys think it's going to hurt my chances as an international applicant?

East coast is ideal to be near DC and NYC, but at this stage I'm not really thinking about turning down Stanford due to its non-beltway location :mrgreen:

Thanks Boz I think it just worries me a bit that I'll be hitting the job market at 30 with no real experience other than academic work! I hope things work out for you too, it'd be great to end up grabbing coffee somewhere and laughing about how paranoid we were being lol. I'm pleased this thread is letting people vent some of their deepest darkest fears - and also pleased that there's such an atmosphere of mutual support. I think the hardest thing in all of this is that everyone is fairly used to being good at what they do relative to their peers/cohort and now for the first time in 3-4 years (or longer if you've been out of academia for a while) we're all on our own, judged against people we don't know, using criteria we don't fully understand. I'm hoping that some tiny detail on my CV or personal statement will end up mattering to a prospective supervisor than my quantitative GRE or date of birth... To fill up my time I've started writing a really negative autobiography of my experiences with the education system. I'll save plenty of space for the grad admissions chapter lol

Sorry this seems to have struck a chord with everybody - I was thinking it would just be me experiencing this funk. I think I can most identify with the idea that I've spent so long determining what it is that I want to do, and how to achieve it, that now any second order preference seems to pale in comparison. Even though I know if I didn't get in this year it wouldn't make much sense to just give up, I'm not sure I could put myself through the emotional turmoil of going through all this again (including inevitably trying to better my GRE scores). The thought of 'wasting' a year out to get more experience when a PhD is already going to take a minimum of five years is just too much to bear... I'm really praying now that someone at Princeton, Stanford or Penn has somehow (against seemingly insurmountable odds) taken a shine to my application and will offer me some funding and a spot... If they don't I'm going to find it extremely hard to motivate myself not to slip into a complete funk that leads to my current degree tanking without something positive to work towards It's taking a lot of self-control not to email my programs and ask to be put out of my misery now :cry:

Well I just got an unsolicited email shouting 'GRADUATE ADMISSIONS' from the Joseph Korbel school of IR. I'd really rather people stopped sending me stuff I didn't ask for that makes me think I got in somewhere I might actually want to go...

I know this is kind of the antithesis of the 'On a lighter note' thread, but I'm feeling pretty downcast about my chances at the minute. I had a scholarship interview on Saturday that I thought had gone really well, which would have made me a shoo-in for the program at UPenn but I heard yesterday that another guy has already been offered a place on it. I still haven't heard anything so I'm assuming that's a pretty bad sign. That basically means I'm down to my 5 applications, to pretty much the most prestigious places I could have applied to, with only a 1300 GRE, no Masters to back me up and no more than a few months of relevant work experience. That coupled with the grim news about PoliSci grad applications being down has left me feeling like it's pretty much a certainty I'm not going to get offered anything else... This has left me feeling pretty unmotivated for my current dissertation and uni work, and extremely unsure about what I should even do in the future Sorry for the extremely negative venting

I was a bit later going into my undergrad career than a lot of my cohorts, but I knew that politics was something I was driven to study and understand. About a year into my degree I knew I wasn't going to get to go into my course in the depth or breadth that I wanted to, so I think I was always thinking about the possibilities of graduate school. As I got more into my degree and surrounding subject matter I knew I wanted to go into the practice of policymaking rather than writing about it (news journalism had been my original goal). Two years down the line and I'd narrowed it down to wanting to work in foreign policy with a Middle East focus - preferably in the USA as I feel that's the hub of what I'm most interested in. A PhD was really my only option to get funded study in the USA and get me wired into the community I one day hope to be a part of. I'll only be the second person in my family to do a doctoral degree if I do get in (after my grandfather) so it would be a pretty big deal. I'm hoping that with a PhD rather than just an MA or BA there'll be no limit on how high I could rise in terms of my career, and I would be equally well suited to a think-tank or the State Department. That's all pie in the sky at the minute pre-March though

I've edited now and I hope that does a slightly better job - only having 10 options is a bit of a problem and now it seems to have aggregated some people who've already voted into the Middle East category :S It's extremely difficult to do it in 10 polling options.