liszt85

I was rejected by a univ but am back in the reckoning only because a few profs who viewed my application thought I deserved to be there and applied for alternate sources of funds for me. It helps to get in touch with the profs you're interested in working with well before the application deadline so that you get to know each other better. If profs are genuinely interested in what you've been doing and what you intend to do, they will respond favorably and will keep in touch. That is what happened in my case. When the dept committee rejected me, these two profs went ahead and did what they could, allocated funds from their grants and reapplied for some departmental fellowship funds.

But that would be celsius, not farenheit? I guess you were right in the beginning about 0 F.

Any idea about the departmental stipend amount (Psychology)?

People who plan to visit Columbus, could you please come back here and share your experiences with us? I received an email today which implied that I would most probably get funds from a prof's grants for the first year which will then be followed by a few years of departmental fellowship support. Does anybody know the stipend amount that Psych grad students receive?

I was pleasantly surprised when a professor personally contacted me to let me know that a negative decision might come my way and that it had nothing to do with my qualifications: Dear __, I have been monitoring the admissions process for graduate school at XYZ. In case you have received a negative email from the admissions committee, I should mention that I would certainly have liked to have you in my lab if this had been possible. The problem was that the Psychology Department does not admit international students unless they bring their own funding through a Fellowship or Award - and so every year they turn down several excellent international candidates such as yourself. (The reason has to do with allocation of funds from the State of California, and the decision is not a capricious one.) Hopefully you have anyway been, or will be, accepted somewhere else. At all events, please accept my best wishes in your career - I hope that you decide to go into music cognition, as you have some very interesting ideas in this field. Sincerely, X I then wrote to X saying that I hadn't received an email yet from the grad school and X replied immediately and asked me not to lose hope in that case as they probably might've been looking for alternate sources but the email arrived a few hours later and this email was a cold one. I forwarded it to X who then told me that X was glad X contacted me prior to this cold email because X totally wanted to have me join X's lab. This is what happens during recession ( Why did you guys vote for Bush??!

I agree that Indian students have a tendency to do this but we did our research and I've read his SOP. There has been no such patronizing in this particular case, but yes, I agree that there exists such a tendency. This stems out of the relationships students have with professors here, its a slave-master/God relationship in a lot of cases. They have full authority over what grade you'd get, regardless of how hard you work. I mean, there are people who top examinations but end up getting poor grades and the professor always has convoluted reasons for assigning those grades "Your attendance was low" (when he had no weightage for attendance in the first place), "You were late by one day to submit that report", etc. There is also no system by which you can protest in such cases. I know of a recent case when a professor read his feedback forms and was angry because of the negative feedback he had received. He summoned the entire class to his office, threatened them with dire consequences, made them write an apology and made them fill out new feedback forms! This class was a sophomore class and this professor was scheduled to teach them courses in the future too. They had no choice but to comply.

Good luck to you all. I had planned to apply to Tufts too but then the person who I wanted to work with, Jamshed Barucha, informed me that he wasn't accepting students due to administrative workload.

How about zhukora's post about his/her friends at an Engg College who scored badly on the quant section and the explanations they gave for the poor performance? Also, people post about their GRE scores on their profiles and signatures on these forums. So its not necessarily about bragging.. If you visit the results page of the phygre.com site, you'll see exactly what I mean. People post their results along with all their scores. Princeton, Harvard, MIT acceptances for a guy with a GRE score of 1200 and a Phy GRE score of 650 and a Cornell reject for an international student with a GRE score of 1580, Phy GRE score of 990 (the maximum possible) and 2-3 theoretical publications and rank 1 in the department (which is probably the best in the country). I'm quite clueless as to how this can happen, and that too on a regular basis.

I don't think that's a very plausible explanation. We do all of that stuff too. Topology (elective), graph theory (elective), Nonlinear dynamics and fractals (elective), calculus (core), a lot of differential equations (core), complex analysis (core), real analysis (core), discrete math, etc. This is how the math part of the transcript of an undergraduate student in Physics normally looks like here. I do not think its possible to forget how to calculate simple probability or how to calculate areas of simple figures, etc because these analytical skills are basic to being successful in applying higher concepts to real world problems. It is just not possible for somebody who claims to be an expert on all things mathematical but provided they are higher concepts to screw up the quant section on the GRE. I don't understand how that can happen. In fact, you don't need to have done math at all to figure out how many days a person would take to complete a task given that 2 persons working in tandem complete the task in x number of days and given that the other person takes y no of days to complete it on his own! How do you "overthink" such a question? Assume deviations in initial conditions that lead to a fraction of a second difference in the ultimate trajectories that the two people take (due to nonlinearities in the dynamics) and that this difference increases exponentially and that the liapunov exponent would tell you how different the values would be from the expected value that normal human beings would arrive at? :shock:

I don't know about being a linguist, but being a physicist interested in linguistics, I've had random thoughts during a lecture on synonymy about how graded synonymy can be analyzed by making a 3D plot (where axes are contexts, magnitudes of synonymy and the set of synonymous words ) and the magnitudes are related to the extent of synonymy and then analyzing the distribution of points using a multifractal spectrum so as to arrive at a computational method for assigning a numerical value so that this then can serve as a basis for comparison between groups of synonymous words. I'm not sure if this makes a lot of sense..the magnitudes have to be assigned using judgment tests and I have no experience in research design (in a linguistic setting). So this might not be all that practical. I should probably have stuck with Physics but I decided that interdisciplinary work would be most satisfying to me. I hope it turns out that way. :|

Has anybody heard from Berkeley Psychology as yet? The results page show a few interview invitations extended to school psychology and social psychology applicants. What about the cognitive section? Its driving me nuts, I've emailed them about thrice this past week and there's been no response. Do you think this implies that my application has been rejected? Do they send out rejection emails? They had sent me a link to a status page ages back. I happened to notice it only a few days back. The administrator had left me a note which said that my transcripts hadn't been received and also requested me to tell them the name of another professor who I'd like to work with since Prof X was no longer a faculty member at UCB. I have now emailed the administrator those details. I'm pretty sure they received my transcripts because I have evidence that they signed for it from my courier service. I also have email confirmation from UCB that they received a scanned version of my latest transcript (which came out after I'd submitted my application). UCB is probably the only place I'd prefer above Northwestern, McMaster and Ohio State (who have all mailed me saying that my name would be recommended to the graduate school for admission), so this is driving me crazy and NU has been pressurizing me to start my visa application process. Please do let me know if any of you have an idea about why UCB's taking so long and if they send rejection emails (unlike MIT for BCS which doesn't send out rejection emails).

I play stick tennis. Check it out, its a great stress buster http://tennis.sticksports.com/gameallstarsmash.php

2 out of 3 showed me their letters.

I'm quite intrigued as to why people wear the same clothes after having time traveled. Daniel's tie is a case in point. Also why does that woman always have a smile on her face? (I don't recall the character's name, she roams about with Sawyer now while time traveling..she used to be with Ben's group. Julie?) All this time traveling has made me dizzy.. I am just about to watch the latest episode. Btw, Kate is one of my favorite characters because she killed her father for ill treating her mom but the fact that her mom turned her back on her wins her my sympathy. Everybody else seems to have ulterior motives to all their actions. Kate is different, pretty straightforward, except when it comes to protecting the kid, which is okay.

If I decide to attend, I'd arrive on the 27th of July for the summer orientation program which runs from July 27th to August 30th. They have asked me to apply for grad housing for the month of August or to let them know if I find off campus housing for that month. They advise people that its best to stay on campus for that month in order to be able to attend their classes and social events easily and then also use that time to look for something cheaper off campus. Grad housing, if my wife accompanies me right at the beginning, would be very expensive. They pay me $1600 for that month though. Anyway, I shall carry some extra cash with me. So what do you advise me to do? Apply for the grad housing? Is it impossible to find something cheap just for that month, online? The link given by Laura shows some pretty cheap 1BR apartments (~$500-600) but I'm not sure if they'd rent out for just the month of August. So from what you've written, I understand that it would be a good idea to look for a sublet and stay there in August and maybe Sept, find something better and inexpensive, and move out whenever that happens.

From one of those sites to which links were so industriously given here by Plisar who claims not to be a jerk: It is easy to imagine how these actions by the ETS, the GRE Board and the U.S. academic community could affect those test takers from China and other countries who arrived at their scores honestly. It is equally easy to imagine the impact on all students, regardless of nationality, competing for a limited number of slots in top business schools. One can also see how the scandal in Asia could spread quickly to the U.S. In the past, cheating on the GRE has been a problem in the U.S. [4] , and the involvement of the Internet makes containment an issue. Several sources predict seeing more evidence of cheating as U.S. students discover these Asian-language web sites. GRE Cheating Causes Arrest Of Ivy Students: Two Columbia students arrested for suspected cheating on exam, http://www.cornelldailysun.com/articles/7201 (Dec. 5, 2002) People cheating on exams is a totally different issue, one which we were not interested in here, I do not see its relevance here, unless of course this was a troll, which I believe it was. Synthla seems pretty enthusiastic about calling all International students cheaters. If that'll make you happy, so be it.

:roll: Nice deduction!

Thanks for the detailed explanation. When I talked about the entrance exams vs SAT as criteria for entering Universities here and there respectively, I guess it was the same selection bias I was talking about, about the different conditions that exist here and there, and how that leads to different avg scores on particular portions of the test. So its probably fair not to compare the two groups. That's a point well taken. The GRE is used by universities as an elimination criterion as far as I know. Now even on an objective scale, irrespective of conditions that exist within the two groups, a score of 600 on the quant is just too low for a science or engg major! I just am unable to explain that phenomenon. The 21% who scored between 600 and 690 is what I'd like to look at. A lot of them are probably not from Science streams but my guess is there would be a stark difference in the no. of international sc majors and the no. of home sc majors who'd be in that 21% group. Now, as most of you point out, lets not compare intl students and american students on the basis of GRE scores. Explain to me why more sc majors from the US have low scores on the quant section of the GRE (my sample size is only the scores I've seen posted here, on the phygre forum, etc. I'm not claiming that this is a reliable sample space). I do not know about the averages but I'm sure quite a lot of American students ace the quant. I would think that the Standard Deviation would be much higher in the American case than the Intl one and it is this that I wish to explore.

Point well taken. This also tells me why quant scores may be higher with lesser effort in this part of the world. Let me however tell you what the perception about American education is in this part of the world. We believe (from experiences of grad students as tutors, etc) that the quality of undergraduate education is probably better at home while there is a HUGE world of difference when it comes to the grad level. US universities outdo our home ones by miles. We go on internships outside, interact with ug students from American universities too. This (ug education in the US universities) however would not make any difference in the long run since the grad education makes up for all of it. So yes, like I said earlier, I'd prefer an emphasis on liberal arts education in the ug years too provided that the grad level education would take care of all technical deficiencies. When I talked of "quality", it was purely in the technical sense of being able to solve more difficult problems, deal with a lot more course content and a tougher curriculum. We could compare ug curriculum is any of you has done a BS in Physics from the US but we won't have to spend time on that if you get my point and take it well.

I'll tell you what I think it means. It means that the international students probably put much more soul into the GRE due their extremely high levels of motivation to go to the US for higher studies. His/her statement about means is however wrong. I was just trying to look for a reason as to why international students inculcated this habit of being serious about this examination and why they obsess about high scores on these tests. I said that its probably because of the tradition of many years when American Universities have treated home applicants much more leniently in terms of test scores than the international applicants. What do you think orangepotato meant by "selection bias"?

This was a comment that your "spoonfed" group made. If you can identify yourself as part of that group, this holds just because you agree with it in principle. In any case, I sense that I would be able to have a more coherent and fruitful discussion with orangepotato than with you. You still haven't told me which part of the world you come from and where you were educated. If you want to keep that to yourself, its fine. I suspect however that you do not want to divulge that info because it'd explain wh'y your grasp over the language is better than mine, without making assumptions about your intellectual capacity. You also seem to be acting as if your "group" is somehow better than mine (whatever that means) when it comes to language skills and mine's superior to yours when it comes to math skills. I didn't make a claim about skills, I made a claim about better training in math in this part of the world and probably a better all round training in your part of the world. I personally prefer the latter, but I don't think you'll see my point, ever, because you seem adamant on making this an issue of Developing Countries vs USA. For me, its a comparison of two systems, both of which have their respective pros and cons. Grasp over language is no good without a cogent thought process behind it. Good luck.

This is the first sensible comment I've heard in here. You are right about the bias. If you compare International test takers to the Americans, if the results do show higher scores for the internationals, it could be the result of years of tradition where Universities treated home applicants more leniently than the foreign ones. What I'm trying to say here is that people in my college wouldn't score below 750 even on their worst day, with zero preparation. Again, I request the ones who want to make this personal to stay out of this. This is a fact. 95% of the scores that I know of have a 800 on their Quant sections and I know for a fact that people don't prepare for the quant. They however spend quite a bit of time on the verbal section and come up with quite horrible scores. So as valid as the point about bias may be, I don't think its that huge a factor. I would place my bets on the level of math done in high school or core math courses at the undergrad level. Also its unfair to compare students in this college with the rest because the entrance exam that they write to get in to this particular college is written by about 200,000 students and about 4000 are accepted (2% acceptance rate) into 7 institutions with this "brand name". The level of math in this exam is pretty high. So lets not talk of the students here because the math background is obv strong. The remaining Engg Colleges also accept students through rigorous entrance exams which again have decent standards for math. The only people who don't go through these rigorous exams are the rich kids whose parents pay money to the administrative boards of private Engg institutions. What is the criterion employed by Universities there for UG admissions? Do you have to take entrance examinations? If so, what level of math do the Sc and Engg guys have to do in order to pass these exams?

No amount of sarcasm is going to take away the facts. Your dig at my batchmate is also helping you in no way. I'm sorry that the facts are this way but grow up! I was trying to explore what difference there might be in the schooling systems in the two regions of the world so that I could understand why people in some parts of the world in general find the GRE tougher than people in some other parts of the world. Wow,.. you say these scores don't mean anything and then you say I was trying to imply that I was an idiot because I scored less than you on the verbal! They should include a section on logic too from now on to eliminate your types. Also, you have no clue as to what "objectively" means, do you? There's an objective way that exists that can be used to probe social and cultural factors that go into deciding how people generally perform on certain kinds of tests. I guess you are in no mood for a productive discussion.. go on making sarcastic comments if that's what you're good at. In a way, I'm glad that you're good at something or the other. Well, I'm equally cranky and I stand by what I said about the GRE quants. If you're in a science stream, you'd better be good enough to achieve at least a 750 or at the very least a 700 on the quant. If you are unable to achieve that score, it means the level of math that you did at school was probably lower than that in these parts of the world. Why does this observation irk you so much? You talk of attitude, you have one that is equally "bad", if not worse. Which part of the world are you from anyway? Where were you educated all these years? I'm quite intrigued. You classify yourself under "developing world". Btw, so much for your "light hearted" approach. It doesn't hold anymore with this post of yours where you've made personal remarks. You also don't seem to think that calling a person an idiot doesn't fall under "ranting and raving ..personally". Does anybody know of a place we could get some stats from about quant scores, divided regionally?

Absolutely! I applied to the cognitive section.. I've sent them 3 emails in the past one week. No response at all! :roll:

Btw, my comments about the quant section of the GRE are reserved for the Engg and Science majors who've been doing math all this while. So yes, I simply don't see how the GRE quant can face a serious problem to any of them. I suspect the answer lies in the level of math at high school because most, if not all, of the questions on the quant section are lower in standard than the matriculation math that is done in schools here. Why do you get offended when I state facts? Its not your fault that math is not given a priority in schools. Instead, you have a rich extra curricular tradition which I absolutely appreciate and love. I love the fact that your schools have bands, lots of music and arts going on, etc. Please do not say things like "lets pack up and leave and have this higher intelligence race take over". Do not make it sound like I was trying to make this personal and racial! I agree though that I could've toned it down and I apologize for the selection of words, it was never my intention to demean American students. Please try to look at this objectively.