expfcwintergreen

you should go something like this


Dear Princeton University,

Thank you for rejecting my application for the fall 2012 admission. While I assure you that your rejection letter was carefully reviewed by me, I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me admission to your department.

This year, I have been particularly fortunate in receiving an unusually large number of rejection letters. With such a varied and promising field of programs rejecting me, it is impossible for me to accept all rejections.
My rejection decisions take into account not only the universities’ prestige, but also the suitability of the department’s program to my personal interest. Hence, despite your university's outstanding qualifications and previous experiences in rejecting applicants, I find that your rejection does not meet my needs at this time. Therefore, I will join the ranks of graduate students in your department this fall. I look forward to seeing you then.

Best of luck in rejecting future applicants.

Sincerely,
Meep

I'm in the same boat. It's torture; at this point I wish they'd just send me a rejection so I can stop getting my hopes up and get on with my life.

Anyway, I'm officially losing my mind over this cycle. I was just taking a nap, and I had a dream where I got a call at work, and it turned out to be one of my schools saying they'd changed their mind and they were rescinding my admission offer. I protested that I already had a letter and a funding offer, but they said, "Yeah, but if you read the letter carefully, it just says we've recommended you for admission, it doesn't say you're actually admitted." I woke up sweaty and terrified. In the dream, my boss was CJ Cregg from The West Wing.

Gah! I just got an email with an attachment and the word "University" in the subject line, so naturally my heart skipped a beat, but it turned out to be one of those unsolicited "have you considered us?" mailers from those weird little universities that get your info from ETS.


Heh, I said the same thing when I got my first letter, and yet here I still am, obsessively refreshing online status checks...

Following up on my earlier post, I'm also feeling a little uneasy about Davis. A couple of days ago they sent me an email because one of my transcripts was lost in the mail, so I had to order another one. That was Februrary 2, and they sent out a bunch of acceptances the next day. I hope the extra wait doesn't hurt my chances...


Thanks, and best of luck to you.

So I'm going for a Ph.D. in comparative, and my general areas of interest are in party systems, elections and electoral systems, and public opinion, with a strong focus on Western Europe and Scandinavia in particular. I'm almost a year into my grad school search with applications coming up in a few months, and I feel like I've learned absolutely nothing. It's like there are no big European politics programs - it seems like every school in the known universe is strong on Latin America, but I'm very lucky if I can find a faculty with more than one or two Europeanists. Same with parties: you can't swing a dead fish without hitting someone studying democratization, but party people are few and far between. I'm taking a grad-level European politics course this semester, so I went to my prof for guidance, hoping she'd know of some big-name programs, but to my dismay her response was basically: Yeah, sorry, that's about the state of things.

Ah, crap.

Obviously my best option would be to get into a top-ranked school that's good at everything, but I'm not exactly a model candidate for, say, my dream school of Berkeley. Other schools I'm looking at, with varying degrees of fit potential, include UNC-Chapel Hill, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Colorado, and Oregon - I mean, after a year of searching I just have no clue. I'm not even looking for some mythical Perfect Fit, I just need to come up with a pool of 10-20 schools I'd feel good about applying to.

So, to recap: parties, elections, opinion, Europe, light on the quant (I'm not bad at math, I just really don't enjoy it). The question: Where should I be looking? Should I lean more towards the programs with the most and best-established Europeanists, even if they aren't much interested in the other things on that list? Or should I lean more towards programs that are studying parties and elections and opinion, even if it would break my heart to give up on European politics?

My long-story stats are as follows:
- Degree: Government and Linguistics double major at UT-Austin, graduating May '12
- GPA: 3.17 cumulative, major 3.83 Gov/3.9 Lin. The reason for the cum/maj discrepancy is because there was a lot of misery and woe during my first two years, but in my last two years I've gotten mostly A's and perhaps two or three B+'s.
- GRE: I just took it this week, and they couldn't give me my exact score because they're still working out the new scoring system (130-170 or whatever). The computer said my score would be comparable to somewhere in the range of V 680-780, Q 750-800, which puts me somewhere between the 96th and 99th percentile for verbal and between the mid-80s and mid-90s for math. AW I'll get with my actual scores in November.
- I'm currently in an undergraduate research program, but I won't actually be producing anything until well after applications are due. No other research experience, publishing, or relevant extracurriculars. (I do, however, have some great research papers for potential writing samples.)
- Zero relevant work experience or internships. I haven't had a job of any kind in almost three years, and even that was just part-time retail.