lolnumbers

if you WANT to do a phd, then absolutely go where you have funding. two reasons: 1) they want you, 2) graduate degrees are often not worth the investment, monetarily. if you want to stop at a masters, then don't waste anyone's time at penn state.

what's going to happen is you're going to spend a lot of time trying to write the perfect email and they're just going to respond "okay." don't worry about it, just be respectful and to the point.

as someone who moved from the east coast to berkeley last year... you won't regret it. it is amazing out here.

out of curiosity while i was applying to schools i went to the websites of ~30 civil/environmental departments and took counts of where their professors got their phds. berkeley produced the most professors (stanford, illinois and mit were 2nd, 3rd and 4th), but when you considered the size of the department caltech outperformed everyone, and it wasn't even close.

i'm currently at berkeley, so i have some bias, but i did my bs/ms on the east coast and feel pretty comfortable saying that the difference in reputation between berkeley and mit is negligible. and living in the bay area is the most amazing turn that my life has ever taken. it's expensive but really amazing.

you have to look at the type of department, and how they pay (or don't pay) their students. in engineering or the hard sciences decisions trickle out b/c getting accepted normally depends on whether or not a professor is willing to make a financial offer, and those decisions are made individually by the professor and pay little attention to a departmental timeline. if you're in planetary science, more than likely individual professors are waiting to see what grants come through before they decide if they're even pursuing a new student, and then are recruiting individual students. point being, if a place has sent out some rejections, but you have not yet been rejected, the likely reason is that you are on some professor's short list, but they either prefer another student or do not yet know if they have money to make you an offer. the grant cycle is not the same as the student application cycle though, so these types of decisions often get dragged out to the very end of the application period.

visit days that are a mix of people being recruited and people being interviewed are pretty common, at least in engineering.

this is ultimately the ONLY thing that matters, at least if you're applying to a scientific phd program. i don't think any department in the world will reject a student that a professor both wants and has money for.

some bad advice in this thread. if you've done research you'll be competitive at the very least, provided you are able to talk about the research that you've done and that you'd like to do, and it fits well with the person you're applying to.

all of the departments compete with their peers for a finite number of students that are the appropriate quality, so even top top programs get a lot of declined offers every year, b/c the best students get offers from all of the top programs and can only go to one.

i sent them, although i don't think it makes a big difference either way. don't sweat the little stuff too much.

i had the same issue, got this email from them (i find it hard to believe that you didn't email anyone... maybe you just want to hear it from someone on the board) We regret to inform you that we are unable to accept any letters of reference past the 5 p.m. EST, December 24 deadline. We had granted all reference writers an additional week to complete the form after the application deadline had already passed. Therefore, we regret to inform you that there is nothing more we can do in this case. Please know that your application will still be reviewed as long as there are two successfully submitted references attached. If you have any further questions please let us know. Thanks, The NDSEG Program Team at ASEE 1818 N Street NW, Suite 600 Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 649-3831 Fax: (202) 265-8504