RWBG

Really depends on living expenses. Everything from 12-13k to near 30k for some really expensive areas.

As I understand it, their stipends come from the salary given to project assistants, which also include a tuition waiver. You can probably find that info online.

From what I understand, they have ranked lists by subfield, so who gets funding will likely be determined by who declines offers (and, of course, position on your respective list).

So far, I have no evidence to suggest they've notified anyone, besides anxiousmike who was a special case. Anxiousmike suggested he had just received official notice (after his unofficial notice), which suggested to me there was a possibility that official notices had begun going out, which is why I solicited anyone who had received a response to let us know. In absence of such information, I certainly am not ready to cross them off my list, although I hope to be able to know for certain the results as soon as possible!

From looking at the data, I've seen pretty significant skew towards the top of the applicant pool, clearly because TheGradCafe involves serious self-selection bias by strong applicants. As a quick example, knowing the admissions stats for Michigan and looking at the numbers on the results forum, it included over 20% of the total number of people admitted, but less than 10% of the people rejected. I suspect that most of you in this thread are well above the curve, if not in GPA or GRE scores, then in dedication to research, understanding of what a Ph.D entails, and clear understanding of your own research interests (i.e. the stuff that really matters.) Best of luck!

Given that the two misses would be Chicago and Stanford, I wouldn't get too worried about it.

Congrats on the official notification! Anyone else on the forum in at Stanford? I'd like to know if I can cross them off my list.

Well, I was also rejected by Duke, so maybe they're particularly grade-focused! In any event, I suspect it is entirely possible that all those factors will make your application competitive. Best of luck!

Oddly enough, I've had a bit of a different experience; I am enrolled in an MA program in large part in order to get the strong grades that would compensate for my undergrad record. However, I didn't even have any grades in my MA program when I applied this year (which I figured would just be to play the lottery and see what happens), but I've been accepted to 3 out of 4 of the schools I've heard from. This suggests to me that not only is it true that MA GPA can compensate for UG GPA, but you can compensate for having a weaker record with other aspects of your application as well. Edit: To add to this, I'm not from a top 20 US school and only one of my letter writers in a political scientists. So I don't think it's connections that got me in either. Congrats to the Chicago and Berkeley admits!

Interesting, I hadn't seen this data! Thanks for sharing.

Congrats!

Congrats!

Right there with you, all the way up to the tennis part. I find the degree to which football appears to be integral to American culture a little bizarre (as an outside observer), and if I end up at Michigan it's going to be an interesting experience trying to understand it. I mean, people identify Canadians with hockey, and it's definitely important here, but we also don't keep track of college or high school level hockey the way Americans follow the counterparts for football. But I'm not much of a hockey fan either, so maybe there's just a part of human experience I'm not tapped into. Edit: Also, ditto the Vanderbilt congrats.

Sorry to hear that grantman! There's still a lot left of the cycle though.

My thoughts on the game: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2107

Also a Duke IR reject. Someone mentioned the SOP thread, so I thought I'd mention this now: after this cycle's finished, I'm going to post my SOP along with some advice about this process, and I hope that many others here will do the same. I found the information others provided me on this forum to be invaluable to my application, and I hope to provide future applicants with even more to work with. Oftentimes, people disappear as soon as the cycle finishes, making it difficult to get people to post SOPs; I tried to get more people to post SOPs after last cycle, but everyone was already gone, so I didn't have any luck. I am hopeful that not all of you will do that this year!

My success thus far has been well beyond my expectations, so I'm certainly not worried about Duke's rejection. I would have been happy to get in one place and be rejected everywhere else. It does seem a bit odd that there aren't more rejections posted; my last name starts with a D, maybe it was on the top of a list? I think I got my message late afternoon, so they might have postponed the rest until Monday.

I received a rejection, so I suspect if you haven't it means you're at least in consideration for a waitlist. Best of luck!

Maybe BBdM will lend us his model... I was 3 for 5 with my last set (Michigan, Duke, and UCLA, but not Stanford or Rochester). Now I'm guessing Stanford, Rochester, Berkeley, Northwestern, NYU, UCSD. Of those, I think the first three are basically a sure thing, the last three are probable. Altogether, I'd say 5 out of the 6 on my list will release decisions. Edit: Let me add a list of schools I don't think will release decisions: Chicago, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia.

Could be waitlists! If you get desperate, I'd just send an e-mail by the department and see what you get back.

It's good to get a rough sense of the placement ranking, but it's hampered a bit by the age of the data. Ultimately, faculty move around a lot, and placement itself is a lagging indicator, so it's hard to get a really good sense of what placement would be like for people entering the program now. For instance, Wisconsin's program I think is underranked (in terms of where students starting now would likely to be placed), and NYU's isn't even on it. That being said, it does appear to capture some broad strokes that are generally true (e.g. Rochester tends to place better than its overall ranking thanks to its status as a boutique with strong formal training), so I think it's a good first cut at the placement data. I'd follow it up by looking at schools websites, contacting departments for detailed info, and maybe using this to the extent you can: https://sites.google.com/site/honestgraduatenumbers/

Thank you everyone. I feel truly fortunate, and I hope all of you hear good news soon.

Just received offer from UCLA with full funding, with a note that they meant to send me an e-mail earlier and I was somehow missed.

Now Duke sent me an e-mail to let me know the letter was there. Beat them to it! Obsession ftw.

It was kind of hidden at the bottom. I didn't notice it at first.