Gradhorn

I think Penelope is right. I have had an email conversation with the DGS there, David Barker, and he seemed like a good guy and a straight shooter. He can probably cut through any nonsense and give you the full story.

That's rather ominous. I have been hearing rumors about especially troubled budgets at Pitt, above and beyond the same belt tightening everyone else is going through.

It was the only non-poli-sci program I applied to, but it's a great match for me (I work in polling) and they were interested in my blended research interests of survey methods and public opinion.

I am accepted at Michigan Ann Arbor, into the highly obscure Survey Methodology program. While most folks will say, "Huh?" I am doing cartwheels over here!

Same here. Maybe we will get phone calls on Monday just to make triple-sure we know not to go anywhere near Madison.

I have been planning a LeBron-style decision for months.

No, I didn't say anything awful. You are probably right and I am reading far too much into it.

Things were looking very promising and then I had a phone interview that was a little awkward. Now things don't look quite as promising, although I still hold out hope.

Done!

UT Austin has really been a roller coaster for me. The mass rejection goes out yesterday and I survive that. I am thinking I am in the hunt. Then a mass acceptance goes out and I'm still on the sidelines. At this point after getting wait-listed at Pitt and having a strange experience with Vanderbilt I'm resigning myself to being the ideal "wait-list guy". Then Texas comes through with an acceptance. I've hit the board! Hook 'em horns!

Junior Brown didn't grow up in Austin, but his career took off after playing at the Continental Club in Austin regularly.

Yes, that's me playing bass in the photo. I don't normally have a Pabst 12-pack box on my head, but it makes it a handy pic if I want to be semi-anonymous. That photo was taken at a festival we played a few years ago in North Carolina.

I don't know if Austin is the best live music scene in the country, but when I was down there for SXSW several years back it sure was great!

I still show that I'm under review at Texas. For the first time in this process no news might be good news?

It's not unheard of to get funding for a terminal master's. I was funded, although not extravagantly. Look at schools where they do not offer a PhD. Schools with a doctoral track have little interest in funding MA's but those without a doctoral program will often fund their MA students because the professors still want or need TA's and RA's. Plus, when you do get into a PhD program later you might get lucky and some of those credits might transfer.

No, I kept it classy in my rejection. My list of nine has two competitive schools, five schools that are a reach, and two that were outright "hail mary" passes. Duke and Stanford were my Hail Mary's, so no bitterness here, although I do plan to root rather aggressively against Duke in the NCAA Tournament next month.

GopherGrad, my thoughts are that you should go into a terminal master's program. In my case I had a poor academic record many years ago, left school, came back later at another school and did very well. After that I picked up a master's at a third university. Proven performance at the graduate level can offset some concerns about a spotty undergraduate record. That being said, I still haven't been accepted anywhere yet either, so you may want to wait and see how my applications turn out before you put much stock in my advice.

Yeah, that was me.

I've been doing something like this, where I manually set odds on each school that I adjust daily which in turn adjusts the overall probability of getting in somewhere (in my case it's a field of nine schools). I treat the schools as mostly independent events because I think program fit is the most important factor. Updating "The Big Board" each day and posting revised odds injects a little fun and levity into what is an otherwise emotionally brutal process.

I didn't get a letter from Wisconsin (unless it's sitting at home right now and I don't know it) and I don't see any change in my status online, so I don't have any concrete info. It has been my experience, though, that all of the university websites are slow to be updated, whether it be receipt of application materials or in my case getting wait-listed at one school. Given the volumes of material they are going through, it isn't much of a surprise that status updates on the websites aren't going to be all that timely.

Stanford both called AND emailed with the acceptance notification to that applicant. That's very thorough on their part. Also, it doesn't leave much doubt for me where I'm at in my Stanford chances. This really takes a lot of the drama out of opening that rejection letter I'm getting next week.

I am a poli sci applicant at Duke going through the same thing. My iPhone cuts off the full subject line, so at random intervals I check emails on my phone to see "From: Duke Graduate School, Subject: Enrollment Stat...".