Poppet

I'm sorry to hear your news, Foreign Guy. I hope the decision from York is favourable. I'm still waiting for news from Carleton and I'm kind of surprised that I haven't had any yet. I was told to expect my admission package last week, so figured I'd at least get an email before then.. Nada.

^^ That song never helps to put things into perspective for me, it just makes me feel petulant. Just another bad feeling to add to the list ... Good for those of you it works for though. I'm sorry to hear that you didn't get into your dream school and that you're not handling it well. I agree with what was said above -- you are allowed time to grieve this decision, and if it takes a couple of days, then it takes a couple of days. Mourn, but try not to let it last more than 2-3 days. Don't eat too much pizza. Go outside and breathe the fresh air, go to the gym, drink lots of water, take a lot of deep breaths. After all that, try to remind yourself that the decision is not a personal one and is not a reflection of you as a candidate. Start making a list of the positive reasons for why you applied to the second program in the first place, and start to focus on those things. I think it's healthy for you to mourn this, but once your mourning time is up, you've got to push through the personal sadness of things that you can't change, and focus on the things that you can. In the meantime: ((Surprisecake))

I received an acceptance from one school, and then two days later received a form email informing me I was waitlisted. I responded to them and basically said, "" and they wrote me back saying they'd sent the email to the wrong listserve and reassured me of my admission. Apparently all admitted applicants were accidentally informed they were waitlisted. They had to send out a mass PLEASE DISREGARD LAST EMAIL message in response. I bet they got a lot of panicked responses in the few minutes before the problem was corrected... I also know that some students received the waitlist email and then were accepted afterwards; for those of you who recognize this situation, I would write to confirm that you were on the right list!

I don't think anyone else here was applying to UCL, but just in case they were, I just received my offer to the school of Public Policy. No word on funding. I don't know if they ever give funding for masters and/or for international students. It's nice to be liked though.

Thanks so much! I'm crossing my fingers for you too.

I don't know where else to post this because I can't really see straight and this is the thread that I've most been watching and hoping/empathizing with.. But I just got my acceptance to an MSc in Human Rights at LSE. Half of it is in international political economy, so I figured it fit here. And they gave me funding. Funding! I can't stop crying and my fingers are shaking. I had to share. I don't think I've ever been this happy about a school-related decision before.

I have to preface this by stating that I'm not an American, so bear with me. Like the title says, the application deadline for the MA in Human Rights at Columbia was March 15th, which is precariously close to this April 15th deadline. Does anyone know if students accepted to my program are bound by this April-15th rule? Applications aren't rolling, so this seems like a very short turn-around time the school's imposed on itself if they have to have responses out before April 15th... I would look for this information myself because I know not all schools are bound to the April 15th-thing, but I really don't know what these rules even are. Forgive me for my ignorance, but I'm Canadian and our schools admit and reject you according to their own schedule and there are no mandatory state-wide dates that determine anything for us.

Received my admissions email from University of Toronto (at 2:36pm EDT) for the MA in Political Science. Email was from Louis Testos, who is quite pleasant on the phone if you badger him. I received no funding, which was expected since MAs in PoliSci aren't funded there... I'm excited. The sunny day seems brighter. Maybe this will boost me out of my serious case of senioritis and let me actually work on my thesis instead of spending my time refreshing pages!

I am in this spot too. The rule I've heard and which I've tried to share as much as possible, is that a manageable student debt can be no more than your lowest expected starting salary. Remember to calculate the taxes. There are lots of student debt calculators online though, if you do a google search. They'll let you calculate based on your projected career path what your starting salary will be, and then you can plug in what the interest rate is on your potential loan, and how many years you have to pay it back and they'll calculate for you what your maximum debt load should be and how much your monthly payments should be.

Oh, I never responded to this? I found the responses in this thread incredibly useful, thank you all for your responses. Your comments made me feel much more secure about the SOPs I had already handed in, and gave me the fuel needed for me to write the rest of them. I was very concerned because I heard admitted masters students asking other admitted students, "So, has anyone started thinking about what they want their thesis to be about?" I was shocked. I couldn't understand what they could possibly have written in their SOP's if they hadn't even considered a thesis topic yet, and I became scared that I might not have submitted the right kind of document. This thread made me feel a lot better about things and it also helped me come to terms with the fact that since I am very certain about what I plan to research, schools will know immediately if they can accommodate my plans and admit/reject accordingly. I think the only way such specificity can bite me in the behind is if schools don't have a supervisor capable or interested in my subject - and if they don't, then I'm glad I'm not going there anyway. So thank you again.

My senioritis is getting worse. :/ It seems like a lot of us are feeling this way - is anyone else worried about the consequences this will have on their applications? I've already delayed graduation until the summer so that I could give myself a break, and now I'm even seriously contemplating moving to part-time status and dropping another class. Whereas before I was obsessed with getting A's, I'm starting to not care even though I'm heading towards a low mark, one low enough that it doesn't exist anywhere else on my transcript. I'm wondering if it's better to just drop it now and become a part-time student and be a full-time student in the summer, when I'm more likely to do well. (I do my best work in the summertime when I can write in the sun.) The single only reason I haven't dropped to part-time is because if I do that I won't graduate until the end of August and if I end up going to Europe or something for my graduate studies, that's not going to leave me a lot of time to pack up and go... And if I stay in Canada, where class registration usually starts in July, I will end up being one of the very last people in my entire cohort to register, leaving me with few class options. I'm so afraid that I end up being so burnt out and fed up that I decide not to do my MA next year after all, and then when I reapply I won't be able to get IN anywhere because I was too burnt out this semester to function, or that if I try to take a break by going part-time I will have such trouble registering that next year will be worse and I'll be even more miserable..

I don't see why you'd force yourself to wait. You've already found yourself in a situation where your transcripts were lost and you were not notified of this properly. I don't think there is anything unreasonable about calling your top school and saying, "I realize that this is a very busy time and I apologize for bothering you, but I received disturbing news from another school that my transcripts had not been received. Can you please confirm for me that my application is complete?" I adamantly believe that it is far more prudent and reasonable for you to watch out for your application than to practice a passive politesse that neither ensures the success of your application nor prevents the (realistic) possibility of error. As long as you are polite and gracious in your request for information, I do not think this is an unreasonable concern in the least. I worked in an immigration law firm for years and managed over 1200 clients myself - I received hundreds of emails and telephone calls every single day from panicked clients asking if they'd signed documents properly, if I'd received the email they sent 30 second prior, if they were going to receive a decision soon, etc. Sure, some of the calls and emails were fruitless and annoying, but human beings are generally capable of understanding the stress and anxiety of other human beings who are trying to process life-changing decisions. The administrative staff of graduate admissions are also people, and as long as they are treated with respect and appreciation, and as long as communication with them is polite and gracious, I do not think that anyone should worry about the call causing any negative consequences. In contrast, sometimes the act of passively waiting instead of calling can have very bad consequences.

Oh god. I definitely need to google kitties now. Reading this thread was a MISTAKE. Edited to add: This helped.

Touche! Thank you! I spoke with them again this morning and they said that a decision was made on the 7th, but that since they update the tracker in order of receipt of decisions, they are still only processing decisions made on March 4th. Mine should be up next week. I guess I can't fret too much about deferral decisions until I find out whether I've even gotten in anywhere yet.

I also disagree with the idea that we should adopt puppies instead of taking proactive action regarding our applications. Clearly if you've been informed that a decision will not be reached until a certain date then it is unreasonable to call before that time. But past that, I don't think that inquiring about your application is at all unreasonable, particularly if you've paid application fees. Admissions committees receive numerous calls from anxious and annoying students and I'm sure they aren't waiting by the phone hoping for more applicants to bug them, but in my experience, I have only had considerable success in contacting schools - not only have staff members been extremely polite and helpful, but each time I have obtained information that I wouldn't have otherwise had. I think that as long as you practice extremely polite email and telephone etiquette and that you don't make unreasonable demands, there isn't anything wrong with contacting admissions departments regarding your application. Don't presume that such inquiries will never be successful, because given what can be seen on the results board and the number of unofficial acceptances that have allowed people the opportunity to start planning their lives accordingly, that presumption clearly isn't always valid. I advocate that people should be reasonable about their inquiries, but that no one should ever sit back and wait around for things to happen when they don't have to.

God no, don't let it lapse! Just call Carleton and ask them for an extension. I'm sure they will give you one.

I'm really considering this too. Except that unlike you, I'm applying for a masters, not a Phd. And I'm 31 years old. I don't know if I can put this off for another year.. But I also don't know if I can go, say, $50,000 in debt for a single year of school. I don't know what to do.

Why don't you call the department directly to ask them for more information? I'm not in CS, but I've found that despite the fact that graduate departments must get a million phone calls a day from eager and anxious and annoying students, they are always helpful even if they are limited in the info they can provide. I've called U of T for the past two days in a row and have only received helpful information, and just today I called LSE and they told me that they couldn't say anything about my application, then told me that it was "probably" still being considered, and then admitted that a decision had actually already been made. Obviously this might mean that a negative decision might have been made, but at least with some friendly persistence I'm getting some answers. The U of T online app is notorious for never being properly updated, so I'd just go ahead and call the department if I were you.

Oh god. A phone call with LSE confirmed that a decision has been made on my application, but they can't tell me what it is yet. I feel like I want to throw up, I'm so anxious trying to guess the response from the woman's laughy smiling chatter (I must have been accepted!!) but awkward reluctance to tell me that a decision had been made at all (oh god she didn't want to tell me because she knows that it's bad news.) I don't want to know either way now.

Maybe you should refrain from making those kind of comments then. There are thousands of universities in the United States, and many of them are very specialized and prestigious in certain fields and unknown for others. It doesn't mean that they are not worth going to just because you haven't heard of them and because you don't know what their strengths are, especially when your knowledge is limited to so few US institutions in the first place. Your comment is unnecessary and irrelevant, and just comes across as ignorant and elitist.

I feel like I have to point out an important consideration when it comes to attaining real success - Don't ever underestimate the value of humility. It can be a very positive thing that differentiates you from the sharks. Don't think of it as a weakness that they can use against you, but a strength that you can use against them. Congratulations on your admit - I'm sure you deserved it.

I definitely think that if your disability has inspired you in your research plans then you should incorporate that information, and explain how the impact on your life has inspired X research at Y facility with Professor Z. That's exactly the kind of information you should put in your SOP. Also, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, "While my disability has prevented me from obtaining relevant work experience in __________, my intensive research project on ______ demonstrates my ability to perform advanced research on __________"... Adcoms know that not everyone has work experience - but demonstrating that you have the ability to perform extensive research is, in my opinion, just as important. So I would argue that you should concentrate on the positive things that you have done instead of trying to explain the things that you haven't. Good luck!

Wait, there might be some confusion here -- It's true that in the UK marks in the 70's are great marks, but they are not the equivalent of Canadian marks in the 70's. It's a completely different system. In Canada if you get 71% on something it is not considered a positive thing (and at the MA level, possibly a very bad one.) In the UK, however, anything over 70% is a very high standard on par with A-/A. I'm not an expert on the subject, but generally 60-70% is considered to be somewhere around the B-range, 50%-60% is C, 40-50% is a D, and under 40% is a fail. (Don't quote me on the exact translation of these percentages, it may vary slightly.) But this basically means that even though we might all be using the same numbers, the numbers were use do not all have the same significance. Any Canadian university would see a British 71% and convert it to an A, not a B-. So, something to be wary of when converting grades between systems.

I waver on this a lot. Normally I refresh multiple times a day, even on weekends, and even in the evenings (hey, you never know) but I woke up this Monday morning and literally forgot to check any applications anywhere until around 2pm when I remembered that I'd been obsessed with this in the first place. I called one of my schools to see where we are in the application process and when they told me that I would receive a response next week, my excitement disappeared as soon as I hung up. I don't want to know anymore. I'm not ready to receive my rejections yet.

I have to absolutely agree with the above. I have several strange discrepancies on my transcript, and I didn't mention a single one of them, instead emphasizing my strengths as much as possible. Don't forget that your referees also have the opportunity to explain your discrepancies for you - I didn't ask him to do it, but I know that one of my referees explained to the AdComms in his letter that I'd suffered a housefire which interrupted my studies. So if it's a really serious case that you feel must be addressed, see if your referees might be willing to mention it on your behalf. If it's not really serious, I'd strongly recommend just emphasizing your positive characteristics instead. And for what it's worth, despite not providing any explanation for some relatively serious flaws in my application, I was told by the DGS of one of my programs that I was their strongest applicant. Bringing attention to your positive characteristics will have more positive effects than explaining-away your negative ones, in my opinion. Good luck.