piccgeek

under wear

down under

down beat

mad cow

So, as it turns out, being on a waitlist REALLY sucks. I thought I knew how much it would suck before it happened. But I had no idea. It sucks a LOT. Part of me is actually thrilled...holy crap I made it onto the MIT waitlist with practically no experience! Good for me! ,...but mostly it is just more torturous waiting, without any end in sight. Who else is in this waitlist boat? What do you think sucks about it the MOST? Any rays of sunshine or hope or optimism you want to share? For me, the worst part is telling people I've been waitlisted, because they're not sure how to react. There's this kind of surprised "oh!" Then either "Good for you! That means you were pretty good!" or "omg I'm so SORRY, that's horrible!" or, from the more diplomatic crowd, "Hey, at least you're not outright rejected, right?" I feel like I have to supply them with my thoughts on the matter because they feel uncomfortable until they're supposed to say next. It's very frustrating.

banana bread

back pack

Little Foot!

Little Rock

string theory

basketball game

department head

Well, maybe, except for the fact that we're all ANONYMOUS. I can't imagine any adcom going to the trouble to piece together the tidbits of info we reveal to figure out which of their applicants piccgeek might be.

It doesn't mean anything about the status of your application. The program coordinators are super busy and I think many of them ignore emails from apps at this time of year unless they're marked URGENT or something. It's easier to just not respond than it is to actually tell every single person who asks that there's nothing more to hear...and unfortunately for us, they're in a position to just ignore us if they want to.

butt crack (yes, my sense of humor is sometimes equivalent to that of an eight year old)

Here's the deal: The head of the department told me in my interview that the adcom was scheduled to have their final meeting regarding admits on March 1, exactly one week ago. According to the whole 5 past submissions on the results page (not exactly a wide sampling, but it's an obscure program), the 1 admit was notified via email, and the others via postal (not all in the same application season). Am I totally crazy in thinking that they would have sent emails to their admits by now?? I am 95% certain a rejection letter will be arriving in my mail box any day now because it seems like if they were going to accept me, I would have heard, because they're not as concerned about alerting the rejects right away (and that makes total sense). I want to think I'm being detached and logical, but the hopeful part of me is saying I'm just being irrationally fearful and expecting too much out of the slow admit process. What do you guys think? Probably rejected, or the jury's still out? Anybody else feel like they're trying way too hard to make logical sense out of the irrational patterns?? Are you finding yourself clinging to tidbits of information and building schedule castles in the sky?

rubber chicken

Rejections should be handled with class. When I got rejected from Notre Dame last year, it was in a one line email, no greeting or signing, sent en masse to a group of about 50 of us, emails clearly shown. That's just not okay.

rough day

bleeding heart

deal breaker

big deal

No, that's not unreasonable at all. There are certain hardcore academics who seem to feel like if you're not going to go all the way and get a PhD and be in research/academia for the rest of your life, why bother going to graduate school at all?? Or maybe they understand your reasons, but they act like they're more *serious* about getting into grad school than people who want MAs for non-academic career goals. It happens. Like everyone else has said, it's the way some people are, you've just got to be confidant that you are doing what you need to do to achieve your goals, and the people who look down their nose at that can go hide in their ivy covered towers and be the kind of out-of-touch teachers undergrad students resent, instead of the awesome profs who are both serious academics AND people who are able to see outside the academy's walls. (no offense meant to anyone here, I LOVE the academic community. But I find profs/grad students who pretend like the rest of the world is irrelevant just as annoying as people who think they're better than me because they have "real" jobs while I'm "just" a grad student. It's two sides of the same holier-than-thou coin.)

science writer !!!