caterpillar

Just a note for anyone lurking who was accepted to Fort Hays State - my husband emailed the department and was told that funding offers won't be made until after the April 15th acceptance deadline.

Yes to both, for my husband. Spanish bilingual. He plays guitar, piano, drums, (electric) bass... He was in several rock bands in high school and into his early 20s, so he played whatever needed to be played.

Yes!! I realized that yesterday, too! Maybe I'm psychic.

This. My husband is an avid reader but didn't feel confident that he'd have the vocabulary to do well on the verbal section. He got the Kaplan New GRE flash cards (i think there are like 500 cards?) and spent months going through them, having me test him on them, etc., until he only had a tiny fraction that he couldn't remember off the top of his head. He said it really helped because a lot of the words ended up on the test, and learning the root origins to so many words enabled him to more intuitively guess the meanings of words he didn't know.

Sometimes they do, but afaik it's very limited. You might try emailing to ask when funding decisions are going to go out.

I don't either. I suppose it is good, however, that my husband was at least made aware (one way or another, after the fact) of an area of his application package that needed improvement. It still stung following all the rejections, though!

Congrats!!

I think the standard formula is the following: 1) Increase any scores where possible 2) Increase experience in the field 3) Cast a wider net - applying to more schools, less competitive schools, schools in less desirable areas, etc. I'd also suggest taking a good look at your LOR writers. This is probably not the case for most people, but after my husband was rejected from everywhere last year, he notified his LOR writers as a courtesy. One of them wrote back and strongly suggested that he find someone else to write the LOR next year. I can only imagine what the LOR looked like.

Crossing my fingers for you!

Congrats!! What a great feeling!

Retaking classes - often times the admissions committee will consider the new grade to be the "replacement" grade. This is also true of schools if the class is retaken at the same institution. For example, my husband incorrectly dropped a music class in his first term at community college and received an F. He retook the class the next term and received an A - this "replaced" the F and showed to his later bachelors program (and i assume the admissions committee for SLP, too) that the first grade was a mistake he was willing to work hard to overcome. The F does remain on his transcript, however. If your degree has posted, no, retaking classes won't raise your GPA as calculated by your graduating institution. But for outside admissions committees, who are able to see the whole of your academic record, they'll be able to see that you retook the class and improved your score. Taking classes and doing well will only help, as you are applying with ALL your transcripts, not just the one where you got your degree. The extra classes my husband took raised his GPA a whole 0.10, which is pretty significant when you're talking about the 3.0-4.0 scale.

Congrats!!

Yes, they do. My husband's undergrad GPA for his bachelors was 3.31. With his 4.0 in pre-reqs factored in, his overall GPA was calculated at 3.41 by CSDCAS. I do believe they consider CSD grades specifically separate from the rest of the courses (imagine if someone had a sub-3.0 in CSD but over 3.0 in overall GPA because they took a hundred easy art classes, for example - that would be telling to the admissions committee) but if you haven't already done pre-reqs, they're a great opportunity to bump up your GPA a little.

He's going to be emailing FHSU to check the status of his application for funding. If he didn't get funding at FHSU, I think that will really decide it.

Congrats!!

Seconding this... After discussion with my husband, we are pretty divided between our options (though fairly confident that he will be withdrawing from the waitlist at PSU). More information on the area/school would be fantastic!

Congrats!!

This is good information, though! Neither of us has been to Arkansas, so while my husband will I'm sure be very busy on campus, the kids and I will need to find ways to occupy ourselves in the meantime.

Thank you!! And yes, I can pretty confidently say that we're leaving California this summer.

Thank you! This was quite unexpected. Decisions, indeed!

Congrats SweetPea!

OMG! My husband was accepted to UCA as well, also with an assistantship! He just forwarded me the message as I was reading your post.

I agree!! I had a very vivid dream last night that my husband got accepted to UCA... Maybe it was a portent about decisions being released today.

Whaaat?! How does that even happen? I'm so sorry.

I'll throw out there that many men do feel comfortable working in school settings - not just in SLP, but in general. For example, my husband has only worked in the schools (preschool through high school level) since he graduated in 2007. One of his LOR writers was a male SPED teacher he worked under. Both the other SPED aides he works with currently are male, and several of his professional references are men. While education is a female dominated field as well, I do think it's a bit much to assume that if more men were involved in SLP, there wouldn't be jobs for female SLPs in medical settings or that the men would flock solely to medical settings.