snes

hey amadeus122! Do you know if UCLA interviews all applicants or just comp? I know that composition and musicology are in different "departments" but who knows... Good luck on your interviews/auditions!!

Medical school, focusing on Neurology. Imagine my parent's disappointment (more like utter fear for my life) at my choosing a humanities (music!!) PhD.

THIS! Every time I even tell people the full list of schools to which I've applied I feel like I've done something terribly inauspicious and I have to knock on wood and cry about it.

thank you fall2012 and let us know how it goes!

now that the ball's slowly beginning to roll in the music world..........I'm eagerly looking for distractions from my email. I have three video games in my immediate queue and many, many books. For one, I've never read "To Kill a Mockingbird" and I'm being shamed by my mother for it. And, I almost forgot! Getting my instrumental skills back up to performance levels. Also, most of my work is computer-based, and internet-based, so I'm using the LeechBlock browser add-on to block my email. And possibly this site too. Treating myself like a baby who needs gates around the house is the only way! I also need to file a FAFSA, I guess. It's taxin' time. What are other people doing in the meantime? Is anyone not in school?

That is really weird, since the point of a PDF is to be universal and I've never had a problem transporting a PDF from a Mac to a PC or vice versa! But for the record, I'm on a Mac now and I bet everything at the departmental/grad admissions end is PC-based.

Hahahaha last year I did this! I said if I get in ANYWHERE I'd buy myself a Nintendo 3DS. I only was accepted to a master's I couldn't afford....but 6 months later (when the 3DS came down in price) I got one. THIS YEAR if I matriculate into a PhD program I will upgrade to a smartphone, I think. I still have an old, beat-up flip phone that refuses to die. It's great at making calls and terrible at texting, which is okay because I hate texting (*old*) but I think I need the GPS feature as I get lost easily...everywhere....but I'm not sure. I think I'll stick to a pen/paper planner. Also, I already have action figures of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner (alas, they don't have Haydn or Debussy)

Hey, have you resolved the problem? This thread made me paranoid and I have begun to check all of my applications. Question: Are you looking at a PDF-saved version of your application or the proof shown in your browser? I think that Yale School of Art and U Chicago (a school I'm applying to) use the same application service and the proof seems fine in the browser, but when you click print to PDF, all hell breaks loose. Pages are out of order, entire sections of the form are missing...and it seems random. If I click to save as a PDF again, it chooses other sections of the application to mess around with. What the hell! I sincerely hope that this is only a problem at our end, not at the department.

Karajan, I might be seeing you at Penn! Have you gotten the scheduling email yet? (I'm waiting for that so I don't think the first email was a mistake...)

Ladidadida...*whistles while I wait*....'twould be nice if Cornell updated my app to be "complete" because it seems it is. Maybe it's a similar issue to Penn's app. Someone just has to check off a box somewhere. I'm about to finish a video game I've been working on, so I have to delve quickly into a new book/game/piece before I go even more bonkers as February approaches.

round 2 for me! Blaming my first round on naïveté, mostly. For one, I had not discovered this or any website devoted to graduate applications until after I had submitted. I just had one advice book, and it turned out to be not very good. I also didn't have as good of a sense of what I really wanted from a program. I applied to 4 PhD programs (all tippy-top-tier), 1 Master's. Waitlisted at 1 PhD and accepted to Master's, but forewent the latter because it would have put me in a deep hole financially, which is not good to do on a track toward a humanities PhD. This year I'm applying to many more programs, although they are all still top programs and there are things I could have done (with more money, time, and courage) to beef up my application more. I did moderately revise my writing samples, completely revised my SOP, and added one more professor to my mix of referees, but I am still very threatened by the possibility of universal rejection. I'm just livin' on the edge.

When I inquired last week, they told me that it should be updated in two weeks (so, by around the 20th) -- and they might be going app by app, not department by department.

As of at least this morning, Columbia PhD apps are at the department. (Well, at least it was noted on mine, along with all of the received components, thank God). Hello DrinkAwayTheDays! (I feel like doing so right now...) I'm jealous you visited schools prior to applying. I did not. I still have not. Mostly because of $$, but also because I felt like my application at the time would be better than me in person (a bunch of prior failed job interviews had me not very confident at the time). Now I wish I made those connections earlier. (At least, I did correspond via email and phone.) Also, some of the programs I was applying to--according to their websites--seemed like they'd be bothered if you tried to visit before they invited you. Others were more encouraging!

in trouble

Yeah, happened to me and others too. Common error that probably only has bearing on what you see on the app, not what they see.

Did the same double-take today too! The subject was "Application Status" and I thought I'd been rejected already.

Lol, just got an email from Yale that my application has been sent to the department, and I assumed I had been rejected already.

True -- in my two application seasons, I've had really good experiences with graduate admin people AND professors---95% of them were quickly responsive, thorough, actually answered my questions, sounded nice and cool over email/phone, etc. But in between, I was applying to the big bad world of real life jobs, and may have gotten that same nice experience maybe 5% of the time. I would be duly anxious about my applications if that's all I had to go on---the fact that the vast majority of communication attempts will be lost/unnoticed/ignored and you may never know what happened to your application.

I've had to contact a graduate secretary for 6 of the schools I'm applying to to check that everything's good. I actually emailed every one except Harvard, which basically has a call center dedicated to checking people's apps. All of the ones I emailed responded within 24 hours! So maybe email is the way to to go for some places if calling is getting you nowhere.

That's insane! My Harvard app was also due on the 31st so this topic made me freak out a little. I hadn't yet even called them to check if my application was complete!

Also @Karajan and whoever else was wondering, I just heard back from Penn that my application is complete. And, they changed it to "Completed" on ApplyYourself after I inquired. And yay that we have more music people finding this forum!

A general admissions officer at Columbia told me that info, and it seemed she meant all of GSAS. I'm hoping (in vain, no doubt) that music is having a dry spell this year.

Same here. Also, if anyone applied to Columbia and is wondering why their App status PDF hasn't been populated with any information yet, it's because they got a ton of applications this year (is any year not a record-setting one?) and they're behind on doing that.

look behind