As a general agreement among schools, April 15th is the the deadline to accept or to decline an offer. It is almost April and I only received decisions from 6 out of 12 schools that I applied to. Yet, the available choices are not the ideal ones. There should be a topic like this somewhere in this forum which is for all majors, but I think it is better if I post it here in order not to read the posts starting with "it depends on your field, ..."
The first option is the admission to University of Wisconsin, Madison without guaranteed funding. That means I by myself have to apply for the Epic RAship and other positions that are available in order to get a funding otherwise I have to pay for a while. The second choice is UMass Amherst. I'm admitted to the MS track and on the waitlist of PhD track. Both are good schools but the funding situations are still very unclear. Not much of surprise, I received rejections from the very top schools like Berkeley and CMU.
The schools that I am still waiting for are actually good ones like Michigan, Maryland, NYU, UCI, Rutgers and OSU. One of them is my undergrad school. Should I expect to receive all of their decisions by April 15th. Generally, do you guys know when should I expect to know whether or not I'm getting off the waitlist of UMass by the deadline?
I know it is a very bad situation to accept an offer and then decline it. So what's the best strategy here? Feel free to discuss and give advice for my case as well as adding yours here.
Cheers.