Nytusse

LOL. Took me a minute, though...

After enduring one heck of an adventurous visitation weekend, I have decided to make my final decision. However, I'm not sure about the whole co-advising issue. My own advisor X will be gone my first year, and many of X's students are co-advised. I met Professor Y and it was a great match, and I would love that person to be a co-advisor. Do I have to notify Professor X formally? Is it offensive in any way to take on another advisor? How would I word such an email?

Do unfunded offers still require an official rejection?

Thanks for all the answers, everyone. I'm so worried about doing something stupid/socially awkward, especially since I'm going a couple of days early and will have FIVE whole days to make an idiot out of myself. I am contemplating just accepting the offer prior to visiting so that they can't take it back!

So I have received a rather grueling itinerary for my prospective students' weekend, and there are several dinners with current students written in. How does that work in terms of paying? And the recruitment coordinator wants to take me and my husband out; to me, that sounds like I don't pay, but this person is also a current student. Does the school give funds to the current students who go out with me? I'm a little confused.

I'm not in the sciences, but my potential advisor has totally frozen me out, while the rest of the department seems to be actively chasing me. I'm trying to be mellow about it, but it is really strange.

Just so you know, if you have to miss the mixer, it isn't really a big deal. When I was admitted, I made a big deal out of attending, because I thought there might be professors there, current students, etc. It was actually very informal and a lot of admitted students didn't bother going, and there were no professors or anything. You will find this strategy useful during orientation week as well, should you decide to attend. At first, you try to attend each and every event, until you realize that it is both impossible and usually not necessary! BUT, if you can do the summer language program this upcoming summer, DO IT!

It is rough. I've been doing it for the last two years, and it is exhausting. I think that the biggest problem is the lack of feeling like you are part of a community, because you never want to stay for any extra events when you know home is so far away. I know that I probably missed out on a lot of opportunities because I always had to worry about the commute and getting home.

I'm pretty sure Harvard didn't take any, and I know that a lot of the top programs really tightened admissions the most for fields outside American and European.

I realized after I posted that it sounded almost like I counted myself as some sort of privileged few, when what I meant by "us" is all the history applicants. Even the people who got admits have gotten no/little funding, or not-so-good fits, etc. The "happy" ones still seem to be pretty meh.

Is it just my imagination, or was last year's history results thread much more positive (I read the whole thing about 20 times, and I wonder how many of you did the same!)? Was this truly that much worse of a year? I feel like so few of us got really great news.

Notre Dame does seem like the better option. I guess it depends in part on how much you care where you live? At any rate, what one person hates in an environment and/or in a school may be to someone else's taste, so go visit each place if you can. There will be so many differences between the two that the decision will either become obvious or at least more productively complicated.

I feel like I screwed up on this choice, because I had three really glowing letters and I just thought I could boost my application just a bit more.... Can I say that this whole application season has been a soul-crushing experience? I feel like it was entirely the wrong year for a student like me to attempt this, because I had such a non-traditional path. I feel like schools are less willing to take a chance on people right now. It hit me when I was looking at condos. I saw some places that were awesome but flawed; you could tell they had such great potential, but of course, I will not have the time or money to invest in them. Then it hit me...I'm totally the unproven entity, I'm the ball of potential, and yeah....maybe I seem like a bad investment when things are tight?

I would guess it was death by lukewarm letter.

I just got information strongly hinting that one of my LORs was a major problem with my application. DAMN. I suspected this all along. Ugh, nothing I can do about it now.

How about a maximum time of delay between acceptances and rejections? It is ridiculous how long some programs wait to notify their rejects, when clearly they have already chosen who they wanted. Think of it as a right to a speedy execution...

I also have to speak against the Harvard MA. I would totally recommend it if you had serious weaknesses as an applicant, which you clearly don't. In two years, who is to say if there is ANY money left to fund people? I also have to say that I am currently finishing a Master's degree at an Ivy, have exceedingly high GREs, have my languages in order and...yeah, did not guarantee me an acceptance to a top ten school. I think I would be a little more likely to recommend the MA if it were in history, but, as other posters have said, if you do more work in area studies it may ultimately hinder you when you try to apply again. It might look like you made more of a commitment to that form of study than to history. The people who are telling you to go to Harvard are likely blinded by the fact that it is HARVARD. There is nothing preventing you from doing some kind of post-doc work at an Ivy, after all.

Yeah....and considering how competitive admissions has been this year anyways, and how professors have to fight over people, I'm not even sure how someone can admit a student when they won't be here.

So for me, it's all over in terms of results, except the formality of the UChicago rejection letter. Barring some miracle, I have two great admits with no money. My third admit is funded, but I would almost certainly be a TA starting my first semester, something I'm just not sure about given that I'll be moving across the country and I do have some health issues. My advisor will be gone my entire first year, which is scary because I have never been a history major, but I will have a Master's in a related field, so I feel like I will really need some guidance in terms of coursework. I share some of that disappointment in terms of not getting accepted into better places, but I will get over that. What really is starting to worry me is my relationship with the potential advisor, especially since the fit is not as obvious. When I first contacted the PA before applying, the response took two months and two emails, which already made me a bit nervous. Now that I'm accepted, I've really been trying to establish contact, and it is NOT working. Finally, yesterday we agreed to talk by phone at a specific time. I waited by the phone for two hours and no call. I got a voicemail hours later (when I was out) that said perhaps I would receive a call yesterday evening. No call. Now it is incredibly awkward for me, because, mind you, this person is also not going to be aavailable for visiting weekend. What the heck do I do, write another pestering email today? It's so stressful. All kinds of alarms are going off in my head about this situation...it seems like a perfect storm of potential failure on my part! Like many others here, however, I feel like I should take what I can get in this situation. There are good aspects about the program, and the current grad students seem like really good people. I just can't imagine having this kind of situation with my advisor, and it's this bad when people are on their BEST behavior.

I emailed my PA a couple of times, and heard back last Monday that I was not on the fellowship list, so I would imagine that there WAS a list. Now, I'm not certain that this means that other funding can't open up later, but I know that they only cover travel costs if you ARE funded. If you really, really want to go there, you might have to contact your advisor again, the DGS, etc., and ask for more specifics. If there aren't fellowships, though, I would think that would be bad news in terms of any funding from them at all, because it seems like being a TA is reserved for more advanced students. It's unbelievably depressing to get accepted to a great school with a perfect fit advisor and get zero dollars.

I liked the way they said no. "Unable to take favorable action." They really wanted to, but they could not.

I'm ready to crawl into a bottle of just about anything right now!

Wow, a lot of second-round great news today. Congratulations!

FUNNY STORY (for those who have a dark sense of humor, and I suspect most of us do right now) Way back when I was waiting for Yale admission emails to go out (seems like years ago, doesn't it), I received a high-importance email from an unfamiliar source. I got all excited, then found out that I was a bone marrow match for a young girl with leukemia (I had registered years ago). So it was all so very cosmic, me being focused on myself, being asked to do something so important for someone else. It could not have come at a worse time, but you can't say no to something like that. I also thought it could not help to have a little good karma on my side! Well, cut to today. To my "delight," I only received two rejections instead of three. However, I was greatly relieved to find out that they will NOT need my bone marrow right now because there was a closer match. I got all excited....I'm like, well, at least that's good news....won't have to subject myself to unnecessary and painful surgery during such a hard time in my life. Then it just dawned on me. The words. THOSE words "We will not be requiring your services as a donor because we have found a better match." It was another rejection letter! Even my DNA has been tossed out of the applicant pool!

For those still waiting on Michigan, as expected, I got my rejection email just now. I might conceivably get THREE rejections today! Good thing I already knew Michigan was done with admits, so it wasn't all that sad. I'm sick of reading the words, though.