mv0027

Alright. This really is the final goodbye. Just got back from visiting CU Boulder. Campus is awesome. Professors are on point as well. 5 years funded with a decent stipend from TAing. Super excited. Any future applicants considering CU, feel free to PM. I bet I'll keep lurking on this thing for a while! Thanks again for all the guidance!

Thought I was off this, and I'm back. Looks like UCLA sent out some rejections, not too many though. So are there a lot of people out there still waiting to hear? I'm being optimistic and allowing myself a few surf day-dreams. I emailed them to find out more, but no word. I'm hoping there is an unofficial waitlist going. It is looks they sent out rejections in waves in past years too though...

alright folks, looks like this cycle is over for me! I got one school to visit and I guess I'll decide after that! It's been real. Some great e-friends here!

I wish. In our business though, it seems no news is bad news, so I've stopped hoping...sorry for the negativity...just saying it is good to move on!!! (knock on wood)

440 apps this year at are stanford. wow.

Notice you have a low UGPA, but killer GREs. Did you take those multiple times? Do you think that made a difference. I didn't do as well as hoped on the quant section (157) and feel I could get that up for future years (probably to 160+), but didn't think it mattered that much...

Oh. I meant that rankings don't matter. overall or sub-field.

Neither.

Wow. yeah, that sucks. My guess is that you will be getting a flood of info in the next two weeks. I got lucky and got accepted somewhere I want to go early. In the end though, it only matters until you know, then it doesn't. Good luck and hang in there. You will know eventually. No matter what.

No way. Lots to learn in a town with the most powerful legislative body and executive in the world. No?

None taken!

I think it is California, for Berkeley. Should be Cal-tech though. That program is boss.

That's the one. Thanks for the summary. so that is what I would call first (top 4) and second (next 7) and third (all the rest). I get that quality will vary a lot at "all the rest," and agree that it is all about fit between you and that program at that point. It might be a defense mechanism, but I've been reading more from the department I plan to attend. Very excited to meet these profs in person during my visit!!!

Ok. So I'm a little jealous of lonestar. I would actually call my future school (assuming I get the funding I'm hoping for) third-tier. There was a paper (posted here) about how 4 schools get about 50 percent of the hires. I would call that first-tier. The rest of the top 15 (I dunno, maybe 20), I would count as second-tier. Think schools like UCSD. I've known lots of student their over the years there, and it is crazy how low their confidence in finding a gig afterwards is. When I told them I wanted a PhD, about 70 percent would tell me not to do it there (I still applied though). All the rest, I'll call third-tier. I plan to go a third-tier myself. In all honestly, I think of these are "do-it-yourself" programs. They will offer up all the resources and opportunities required to conduct world-class research, but it is totally up to me to get through it and make my research something the intellectual community values. I'm going because I'm a big believer in myself and still believe academia is one of the few career paths that still offer enough intellectual honest that good research is what matters, not institution (though a good institution is a much safer ticket in). So, I may not go to Harvard, but I plan to bust my butt to make sure my dissertation is as good as a graduate from that, or any other, program.

I appreciate the thought, but I see a lot of green in your signature Lets not pretend we are all equally disappointed this cycle. I've recently accepted that I'm likely to go to a second-tier school, so I'm all anti-ivory now Tinkerbell, I still believe!