elasticegg

Hi This is my first time applying for grad school. I emailed several professors, and thankfully, some of them kindly replied. Common statements were "You look like a good fit" "We have PhD opening, mention me as PI in SOP" "I highly encourage you to reply" The problem is that, from what I know, all of the programs I apply are committee-based, meaning that the committee first screens out individual PIs hold the applicants and then the interviews. Would getting positive replies indicate a good sign of passing the committee stage? I am not too certain if I should broaden my program choices and send more contact emails at this time of the year... Positive email reply so far (Number of PIs replied): MIT-Harvard MEMP: 2 MIT EECS: 1 Stanford Biomedical Data Science: 2 Yale CBB: 1 Berkeley Computational Health: 1 Johns Hopkins Health Informatics: 1 (Other programs w/o email sent ) : Harvard BMI, NYU BMI, Columbia BMI