sansao

If I get rejected from all four schools while there's still time to switch things up, I've thought about withdrawing my graduation application, and turning my math minor into a major, I wouldn't actually need more than a year to complete it - just a couple lower level programming courses and like 4 more classes in math/stats. I could easily finish that up in a year... I also thought about teaching at the high school level, but really I'll probably just try to boost my application by having concurrent degrees.

And you would not be alone in this.

Oh cool. Yes, I am applying to ASU, and I haven't heard anything yet (no one I've talked to has either, btw). Which professors are you looking at? ASU has some pretty awesome planetary science stuff going on right now (including a NASA Space Grant fellowship - go to nasa.asu.edu). I applied to the geophysics/mineral physics focus.

Did you receive a message of some sort suggesting this? I know I started contacting people at the end of Summer, with a pretty good response rate. But certainly none of the programs I applied to sent me any type of message explicitly telling me to do this (beyond the faculty telling me I was doing the right thing when they responded).

Awesome! Now if it will just pan out for the rest of us.

Response from partner to first rejection: "they're a bunch of assholes there anyway." Me: "they were pretty nice about it." Partner: "I hate them." Perfect support system.

vector field (ha!)

3/2/11 Retirement infomag for my folks, a DVD from Blockbuster for my brother, and for me: a mailbox full of air.

force vector

This thread turned into abstract metaphor central, heh. What with my previous post about "et, tu...," I find this alarming.

I don't know if that increase is really affecting geoscience students for the most part. Everything I've read on the job outlook is that our unemployment rate is about as close to 0% as it gets, there's no expected bottleneck, and that our salaries are going up. I also know they've posted some amazing positions, both full-time and part-time at my UI. On the other hand, the one professor that I had significant dialogue with at the school that rejected me back in early February... he said that the economy has really affected funding opportunities, and while they want grad students, they have no way to supplement their research. Most of the other people I spoke with have open funded positions and are actively looking for grad students, though. I'm hoping it's more that the departments are just taking their time and evaluating everyone closely for fit. Yes, and I was off by two weeks. Our predictive abilities must therefore converge on happiness, right? (there is absolutely no logic behind this, haha). *Edited for idiotic grammatical errors*

bad apple

You are not allowed to be as stressful and neurotic as February. Unlike February, you are an adult month and have no excuses, and if you pull a Julius Caesar with me (et tu, [insert university name here]?), I will be very sad.

Just that first expected rejection early in the month. Beyond that, nada. It looks like I'm going into March in the dark. Time to stock up on candles, I guess.

There would be a little peace of mind in that for me. All I heard was that they'd come out sometime between February and April.

1. You aren't stupid - computer science is both difficult and very competitive. 2. See what the other schools say, because you could still get a great offer.

Tell me about it. It's finally going to be March, but I also really thought I would know more than I do by now. I don't know what I'll do if this process drags on through all of March too.

Mineral physics was a lot of fun... that's one of the angles from which I want to approach marine geophysics. You can learn a lot about mantle dynamics from combining seismology, lattice and crystal growth processes, and stress/strain relationships. Granted, it's a sea (ha!) of matrix algebra, but it's amazingly interesting, too.

Idk, I'll still take the silence, at least until I get an admission somewhere. I'd rather deal with the rejections once the semester is almost over.

Yeah, if I do end up working over the Summer, it would be nice if I could do something related to my field and/or POI.

I'm definitely not at the point where I'm ready to trade silence for a rejection.

I did the same thing, at least 3 faculty members per school, sometimes more. The one school where I wasn't very successful with faculty correspondence was also the school that already rejected my application. One rejection's not so bad. Just keep focused on the other schools now.

They definitely looked at my networking info. Not gonna say which network, but yeah, I would count on them doing it if they didn't reject you on the spot. If they're going to invest money in you, they probably don't want too many surprises.

I've lived in Arizona my entire life. I never did acclimate to the Summers here (or for that matter, the Sun in general). The idea of 5-6 years elsewhere, and preferably further North, is incredibly appealing. Especially now that it's the end of February and we could be looking at 90 degrees soon.

I guess I probably should have applied to a couple masters programs too, but a couple of my profs advised against it due to a lower "return on investments" for the POIs. I've narrowed down what I want to do pretty clearly, not necessarily to the point of a thesis proposal, although after a year of research, I could probably put a solid one together. I have this crazy idea about using hidden Markov models too, but that's for a post-acceptance debate.