Aroma Black

I'm still waiting for my last two results, but I find myself leaning towards the schools that contacted me earliest in the process. Even if I get into those last two places, I'm not sure I'll have time left in my schedule to visit; the school that accepted me third (and perhaps has the highest name value) is probably going to suffer the same fate. It's unfortunate that they wait so long.

Last year I didn't hear back from NYU until March.

Columbia is always the slowest as far as I know. Washington has contacted some applicants but I don't know if any official acceptances have gone out yet.

I've been half hoping I'll get a phone call in the middle of the night....

Looks like the Illinois results have started to come out. I didn't apply there myself, although I thought about contacting one of the professors there.

That can happen with e-mail too. One of my consolation prizes last year came in an e-mail with CONGRATULATIONS as the subject line.

E-mail, by far. It gives us as much time as we need to formulate our responses to acceptance letters and allows us to move on faster in the case of rejections. I can understand that a rejection letter is more respectful than a rejection e-mail in some ways--and for the admissions committee, makes it harder for someone to write back with a diatribe. But if the letter isn't going to be personalized anyway, it might as well be an e-mail. Last year it took more than three weeks for one of the letters to get to me because they used the cheapest possible service. In the meantime they sent me other e-mails saying, "As you already know, we were unable to admit you to..."

I was on a waitlist last year until around April 10 before I got my final result, so I'm really hoping to avoid that this year. But waitlist at Yale, nice. If nothing else, that should mean you're likely to get in at other schools, right?

It totally depends on the school. Last year the first time I heard from Chicago and Yale was when I got their decisions (consolation prize and rejection, by e-mail and by post). Chicago wasn't eligible for FLAS in East Asian languages this year according to their website. And some schools don't let first-year students take TA positions--which makes sense to me. But all of the TA apps I've filled out were separate from the grad apps.

I overlap with you on three schools--maybe not programs, since you have "studies" listed. One of those contacted me to remind me to apply for the FLAS and two were silent on the matter, but I had already completed the FLAS applications for all three of my own accord. In any case, I doubt I will win any FLAS awards because I was honest and listed "higher education" as my career goal. Contacting the departments, hmm. I pretty much stopped once I submitted my applications, since it's not considered very good form to press things after that. Unfortunately, left things in a bit of an awkward spot with a professor from at least one school; I hope he'll understand, but my chances at getting in there probably weren't very good anyway. I finished the JLPTs a while back (went 3 for 3, but haven't taken the new format). I find the kanji kentei tests to be more challenging, if also more esoteric. Studying kanji is a good way to clear my mind.

I find that just reading is a better way to keep my kanji level up. Reading books, reading novels, reading online. But that's just me. Maybe proficiency tests are good too...? There's always the kanji kentei, and if you have a Nintendo DS you can get a lot of kanji practice programs for it. I still have one TA application (maybe two, meh) and two FLAS applications left to submit. Very late deadlines for those!

I wish there was more to say in this thread. Has anyone been contacted by the programs, aside from acceptances/rejections? I don't know of any schools that do interviews, but some do "conversations"...

If the schools would base their decisions on something as minor as a typo, is that really a place you would want to study? Asian studies programs aren't huge like business programs or even English programs; there should be few enough applications that they can give each one the attention it deserves without resorting to such things. (Off the top of my head, I remember that last year at Chicago there were a little over 100 apps and Washington had about 75. Of those, Chicago took less than 5% of applicants and Washington accepted more but ended up with 5 commits. You should be able to find other statistics like that if you search around.) Anyway, it is not uncommon to find typos in the published work of professors. Having said that, if the typo in your Chicago app was telling them you want to go to Minnesota, that probably hurts.

Well, last year I didn't get financial support with over 750 on both sections of the GRE. I say this not to discourage you, but to point out that the GRE isn't a good predictor of success in grad school applications. They will be much more interested in your statement, letters, and writing sample. In my own case, I think I've improved these three this year--but I never thought about taking the GRE again. Should only be about two more weeks before the earliest batch of results....

A pretty quiet thread compared with last year, eh? This is my second time applying for programs in Japanese literature. Last year I received various unfunded offers, but I turned all of them down and tried again. I'm a little leery of making it too clear who I am, so I'll be a bit vague: Degree: PhD/MA, Japanese lit. Schools Applied To: eight Fellowships Applied For: FLAS and other smaller ones Undergraduate School (or school type) Major: BA from an Ivy, middling GPA, quite a while ago Experience in Asia: several years abroad after school