belowthree

This thread needs more chocolates. Advent calendars and all...

Coast is only closer if you're talking about the east side of the university. Most of the engineering students living in university affiliated housing end up in Mesa and use the shuttle and that's about the same distance as Coast if you were to go to that part of campus. In fact I can't think of anyone in CSE who lives in Coast. Seems like a cool place, but the communities are slightly fractured that way.

Remember to factor in the price of gas and parking. At some universities parking is expensive enough to actually need to be budgeted for if your housing situation ends up making it so that you need to drive to campus. Look up the prices of the parking permits.

You can ask for an extension from the school you'd chose if you don't hear good things from any pending apps. They certainly don't have to and might not say yes, but you can ask for one. Or you can just decide that any place that isn't interested in telling you whether they want you by the 15th isn't worth it and go with what you have then.

As far as I know, decisions at UCSD are not centralized. This means that there's no one day that all the apps have had accept/reject decisions made on them. I believe most apps have been at least put on one of two lists at this point. Basically the first list is what makes it through the first level of review and the second list is what doesn't. The batch of rejections we already saw from UCSD were likely people on the second list who didn't make it through the first level of review. After the first level of review, different professors basically tell the adcom who they want and those people receive acceptance letters, the first batch of accepts already went out and visited here last week at visit day. The remaining people who haven't heard are *probably* the ones who made it through the first level of review but haven't been picked by a specific professor yet. The admissions staff probably can't tell you whether or not you're going to be picked because they don't know anymore, which may be why they aren't responsive. As for spring break, it's not like the staff go away. The department keeps humming and the only thing spring break brings is a stop to classes. As time goes on your likelihood of being picked goes down as more professors have figured out who they want to admit for the next year, but it doesn't drop to zero until later on in the process. I imagine the admissions office is letting people know of accepts as soon as they happen and only informing people of rejections when they *know* someone won't be getting in, which is very difficult to determine for anyone who has passed the first level of review. I know everyone's anxious, but there's probably not much you can do but wait at this point. If you haven't heard back yet it's probably because no one knows. So try to be as patient as you can. I've been telling myself the same thing. Oh.. and one other thing, those of you who have already received acceptances but have decided to go elsewhere, it might be prudent to let UCSD know as things are now far enough along where it could start to help. If you haven't made a decision yet, no worries, but if you've already decided not to go you might want to throw someone a note.

I've been accepted several places where the GPA requirement listed on the webpage was well above my own GPA. It seems to depend entirely on the school. I don't know about Georgia Tech specifically.

I hear people consistently mention that they want the reason behind their rejection. How else could it be phrased to be less rude? Telling someone that the admissions committee passed over their file because they didn't think the applicant was qualified is going to hurt no matter how they phrase it. So it really comes down to... would you rather be told the reason for your lack of admission or not? Everyone always says on this board they want to know the reason and then the one time a school actually writes a reason in their letter everyone complains that the school is being rude. So what do you want? It is exceptionally difficult to write a letter like this and it's hard to blame them for coming off a little bit more brisk than they should have. Or do you just not want them to tell anyone the reasons behind their rejection and would you prefer all schools just sent generic rejection notes for all their applicants? I understand that reading a note like this is not fun at all, (I've read quite a few rejection letters myself) but I'm not convinced that's their fault and I'm not convinced it rises to the level of either rude or inappropriate.

This is why schools usually never provide reasons for rejection... I'll probably be getting a similar note soon.

Unfair? Really? How is it unfair?

They may not actually know for sure. Some admissions offices work pretty flexibly and let people know only after they know things won't change... that can take a bit some places depending on how admissions is structured. Sometimes I'm honestly surprised it works at all, other times I wonder how anyone could give an answer later than Feb 15.

I still haven't heard back either. Last year it seems they returned decisions pretty late, I'm not sure I expect to even hear from them before April...

What sub-field are you interested in?

I mean that the next time I see that person at a conference we'll likely strike up a conversation and the tone will be cordial on both sides instead of things being awkward. She told me to keep her updated on where I end up and she looks forward to future interactions etc etc etc. Just because I didn't get admitted doesn't mean I won't see that person again. She and I will probably meet in the future or at the very least I'll run into her students. Academia is a small world. It's always nice to have friends. I think in many ways it's almost more important to send a thank you note after you get rejected than it is before if you care about seeing that person in the future. Before you get a decision back it's a more standard thing that doesn't mean much and to me seems a bit weird. (But do it if you want, by all means!) After it's a "oh well I guess that didn't work out, but thanks for giving it a shot, I guess I'll see you around?" kind of thing that also lets the other person know that you hold no ill-will against them and hope to interact with them under different circumstances anyways in the future. Do you think it'd be easy for them to say hi to you after the last thing they ever talked to you about was maybe going to their school and then it turns out you get rejected? That's got to be awkward for them too! Then again, you should probably only pull this if you get the sense the interview went well and the person truly was interested in working with you. (And you were interested in working with them!) If not, then you probably shouldn't bother sending a thank you after a rejection! Also, I waited a few weeks between the rejection and the note. I needed the time for myself and it probably wasn't a bad idea to give the prof some time as well.

Actually I waited until *after* I was rejected at a place to thank the person I interviewed with. That actually worked out pretty well...

Feel free to e-mail everyone you can think to e-mail. Your mother, your new department, your new advisor, the people who wrote you letters, the other potential advisors you were talking with (not to say "hahaha, I'm going here" but to say "hey I hope we get a chance to continue to collaborate, I'll be working with Prof Y @ Institution X, see you at the next conference") etc etc etc. Pretty much no one will mind you letting them know you're going to a place so feel free to inform far more people than absolutely necessary.

What's your field? It might be worth poking around and seeing if you could get an RA position or something. Or a TA position. I pretty much have been counting my unfunded acceptances as nicer versions of rejection letters...

This reminds me of the dress code for my field. In CS we insist on a strict dress code: You must be clothed. End of dress code. If I bother with any visits (I don't actually have any planned at the moment) I intend to follow this dress code. It's the same dress code I used when I last spoke at an academic event, it should be fine for a visit. As far as I'm concerned, walking around a college campus to swing by and take a visit isn't anything that formal, nor should it be. If you're dressing up then that's going to be a barrier. You want to drink and talk with these people and get the real information, not go formal on them. But I'm told CS is different than most fields in this regard. Most of the professors here go by their first names too. So do whatever you feel like.

This is probably a reasonable assumption. The place is gearing up for visit day and most of the attention is on that, I think everyone's in a wait and see kinda mode.

Just because tuition ends up getting waived doesn't mean someone doesn't end up paying it. If you're getting funded from a grant then that's a line item on a grant somewhere and a funding org is picking up the bill. If you're getting a tuition waiver from a TAship then it's pretty much the university doing it as part of their compensation package to you. It's mostly a formality, but it's important for universities in terms of funding and it helps them actually provide the money you folks end up receiving in stipends. Without some form of tuition, they wouldn't have a good excuse to skim extra money out of grants. If you go deep into your institution's financial information you'll find a table that lists the internal cost of a tuition waiver. Someone has to pay that money, whether your department covers it, HR covers it, or a grant covers it is part of what determines how many grad students they can fund.

Everyone else seemed to do fine explaining the point of my post to you, so maybe it wasn't quite the chasm of understanding you make it out to be. If you look at the actual thread you could have probably made the leap that such a short message might have been in response to the message, say, right above it where bgk asks for other suggestions stemming from ec86's ideas. In any case, I think my intention with that post is now quite clear! It's interesting that you assumed that everyone assumed the best thing would be to expand. I think most people are just throwing out ideas and talking about it, not just saying the site should expand. I tend to think it's an interesting concept that merits debate and outlined a few potential topics that some might be interested in. I personally have no clue whether it would be best for the site to expand or whether it would be appropriate. Things are pretty admissions focused around here and it could be pretty frustrating to continue to have those topics always spilling over into other areas of the site if admissions were no longer the sole focus. Certainly some things probably wouldn't matter, like I don't think anyone really needs a results tracker for conference submissions. (But maybe one for faculty positions? ) I dunno how well it'd apply, but seems like it might be interesting to talk about. I'm not sure whether or not the intent matters at all. If the community here now is more expansive than the original intent, why would you possibly see that as a bad thing?

Weather wise I'd say UCSD or UCSB. Plain beautiful wise UCSB gets a nod over UCSD. As for studying networking in CS, I'd say UCSD kills all your other options. So I'm biased because I go to UCSD right now, but even trying to remain objective I find myself wondering why UCSD doesn't shoot to the top of your list.

If this is your reason I'd say go to UW.

Combined with some more general and common forums for post-application graduate topics it wouldn't be significantly more split than it is now. But I think it is probably too soon to split out field-specific sections for this, the existing field-specific boards gradcafe has now could probably be made to evolve to into more general field-specific boards that cover more than just admissions. The tricky part is to actually get people to stick around to talk about more than just admissions stuff here and then I'd imagine the field-specific boards would slowly change too.

I dunno about you, but I treasure and keep all my rejection letters.

Thanks folks, for saying what I should have more eloquently. Gradcafe is heavily admissions-focused. If you want people to stick around, give them some real forums to do so, not just one catch-all forum for every topic related to being a grad student. Hell paper submissions alone could have a couple different forums if you wanted to go nuts with it: Deciding which venue to publish in, formatting/editing help, a place for people to procrastinate and complain about waiting for those too, making sense of reviews. Another set for grant proposals. Going for all of these might be too many, but certainly I don't think one forum to cover each of these processes wouldn't be out of line. Rising_star, you have a surprising tendency to assume that other members of the forum don't read. Do you honestly think people just type without thinking? :\