tofunoodle

I got my first SSHRC check today here in the U.S. I opted to have them convert it and send me a check in U.S. funds, and the converted amount was $9320. Not too shabby!

Congrats to other lucky recipients! I just received my letter from SSHRC, and I got a doctoral fellowship! My final score was 23.8 after an initial score of 26.something. I'm an external applicant in the US.

Thanks for all the recent posts, and congrats to the lucky recipients! It looks like the cut-off for doctoral fellowships this year is somewhere between 17.4 and 17.8 -- it's nice that we can narrow it down that much!

Congrats, Sarah7! Thanks for posting your results. It sounds as though the funding cut-off is between 17.4 and 18.5, but they could just be throwing applications down the stairs and seeing which ones end up near the bottom.

If people are willing to post their scores, we can compile some data, if we're feeling obsessive. (And we most certainly are.) So far, we can see that 16.3 and 17.4 are above the waitlist cut-off, and 22.4 is above the doctoral fellowship cut-off. By the way, my 26.? was my initial score, and I've heard that the scores can go down by as many as 9 points between the penultimate and final rounds. So I could well end up on the waitlist, but I'm hoping for a 22.4 or thereabouts. :-)

Thanks for your reply and good wishes!

Hey, thanks for posting your results! Do you mean that your final score was 22.45, or was that what you were given as a score in the penultimate round? If that's your final score, how much did it go down from the previous one? I was a given a score of 26.?? (can't remember exactly) in February, so I'm wondering whether to be encouraged by your results or to continue to be totally uncertain ...

I got the following reply to a`recent e-mail today: "The results letters were sent by mail this morning. Sorry for the delay. You should receive it soon."

Ditto. I'm still waiting to hear, too. If most people in Canada still haven't received their letters, I'm guessing that the letters won't reach us in the U.S. until next week at the earliest. If anyone has counter-examples, please let us know!

From skimming the earlier posts, I gather that we think the letters have already gone out. Is that right? I'm in the US, already at a PhD program here, and I applied directly to SSHRC, so I don't think there's any Canadian school or DGS I can pester for results. I'll just have to wait for Canada Post and the US Postal Service to get my letter to me, which can take a long time ...

Thanks for the quick responses! It's probably good that there's no way to check "online status" for SSHRC ... I'd just get to read "under review" 400 times a day ... :-)

If you could fill me in on how to check my "online status," I'd be grateful. I couldn't figure out how to find it on the SSHRC website.

I applied last year and didn't get into any PhD programs but did get into a one-year MA. I applied this year, and I've gotten into some good programs. I think the MA really helped, as I had been out of school for a while before that. It not only made me look more serious about grad school, but also actually made me much better able to prepare a competitive writing sample, talk the talk in the personal statement, etc. So you might want to consider the MA route. I wouldn't bother trying to re-take the GRE, unless your scores were egregiously low, as I really don't think the schools take them all that seriously unless they're below some cut-off or other, which probably varies by school. The amount of time it would take to study for and retake the test and get a better score just wouldn't be worth it. You'd be much better off spending that time on your writing sample. You could also try visiting some of the schools you're interested in, if they're open to it. If you present well in person, you'll have a leg up over people who are just names on paper. It will take some digging, but the "Who Got In?" threads are great sources of advice, as there are plenty of people every year who are in your situation, and they ask for advice and get it. Check out the following links: http://community.livejournal.com/who_got_in/26814.html http://community.livejournal.com/who_got_in/66785.html http://community.livejournal.com/who_got_in/88132.html Best of luck!

No way, that stuff's old news! :-) Seriously, though, I've heard ancient is a good niche because there are so few really good students who do it to go around. Programs like Toronto, Cornell, Princeton, and Arizona have great faculty strengths in those programs and could have special funding available, but there just aren't that many people who have a good background in Greek and/or Latin and the other "bona fides" to be taken seriously as ancient philosophy specialists. If you are one of those people, you might be in a good position to get into one of those schools. Or so I've heard.

Hey, I know I'm probably jumping the gun here, but I couldn't resist starting up a who_got_in entry over for Philosophy 2008 at Livejournal: http://community.livejournal.com/who_got_in/66785.html Feel free to head on over there and post what schools you're applying to, what results you've received, what you're drinking to keep yourself sane while you wait, etc.