I e-mailed Brown about when there would be a decision (because I have to make a decision soon on a fellowship - I'm not just super impatient!) Anyway, word on the street is that there will be a decision made this week.
hello!
I was hoping that whoever received an email from the DGS from Minnesota's American Studies program could please share more information? Do you know if they already emailed everyone that was offered admission? Thank you so much.
How "bad" is it to accept all your offers and not actually decide on which program you'll stick with till after you've REALLY had a chance to figure it out and visit campuses? This would mean first saying yes to all offers, then telling all but one school that you're really sorry and you made a huge mistake and actually, you won't be attending their program in the fall despite what you committed to earlier (and losing some money on tuition deposits, etc).
Does this happen all the time? I don't know who I'm afraid of pissing off, but it can't be good to burn bridges before you've even made them in the world of academia. At the same time, I feel compelled to visit the campuses I am accepted to before I make a decision and I can't very well do that without missing class and spending a fortune on plane tickets before April 15 (and no one's offered to fly me out; these are all terminal MS programs).
Were I to fake-accept all my offers, it'd definitely buy me some more time. I could visit in a month when it's most convenient for me. I don't know why I feel the need to prolong this horrible decision-making phase, but I just don't feel quite ready to kill off my other options yet.
Of course there's the ethical line of thinking in which other really qualified people on wait-lists are dying to get in and I would just be prolonging the torture for them and messing up their plans. What if someone who's waitlisted at their 1st choice, which happens to be a school I accept and then later back out of, doesn't find out they're accepted till August, after they've already made lots of plans to go to another school? I'd be pissed if that were me.
But then again, this is ALL ABOUT ME. In many ways this whole process is a selfish one. There's fierce competition. So is this type of move a seriously dirty trick? And should I care?