TakeruK

I agree with everyone else that: 1. Do not consider any offers as official until you get an official letter of acceptance with the details of your financial offer (i.e. dollar amounts) in writing. Even a "written" letter like an unofficial email is not enough. 2. It is a good practice to withdraw your applications once you know for certain (like actually 100% certain) that you will say no to them no matter what their program is like or what they will offer you. If you still have some possibility of attending, then don't withdraw your application. 3. Related to the above, keep in mind that some schools can look very different on paper than in reality. Two of my schools were very different than I expected after actually visiting them (one became a lot more appealing, another became a lot less appealing). For me, I did not make any decisions until I visited my top choice and determined that yes, I would actually be happy there. Once I confirmed that, I turned down / withdrew remaining schools that I knew for certain I would not choose over my current top choice.

In my field, when this happens, it means that the prof is asking if you would be interested in working with him at the new program. This does mean that the new program will likely have to accept you, however, a new prof often has the power to make such things happen, to some extent. So, part of the reason he might be asking so early is to be able to start the process early enough (perhaps before his new school even makes their own admission decisions, which would give him more flexibility). I agree that it makes sense for you to say that you are interested in moving with this prof (first check out the program) but you can't commit yet and I don't think the prof can reasonably expect you to commit now. But if it is really is your 3rd choice (after your 2 dream schools), then I think you don't have to wait until you hear back from all of your schools, just enough schools that you can make a sound decision. I would also recommend that you keep this professor in the loop as you make important decisions! Also you might check with the prof on what he means. That is, if you say yes to him now, is he going to guarantee your admission (and therefore look really bad if you don't take the offer), or is he just going to forward your application from his old school to his new school for consideration like anyone else (with the added benefit that new school knows this prof wants you).

From the sciences point of view, I would also agree that there is no "throwaway" papers either. All of my core classes are fair game in qualifying exams and even though my quals are research based, we were advised to use the final projects/papers as a way to prepare for the exam. In addition, it would be a good idea to either choose 1) projects related to your research (i.e. topics on the quals exams) or 2) choose projects related to one another across all of your classes. Depending on the circumstances, it might be more beneficial to you to not follow the course project directions exactly and just do what's best for you. That is, having the extra knowledge for your quals, or having a project lead to a paper, might be better in the long run than getting an A instead of B+ etc. That said, I do think that professors should give more feedback, even at the graduate level. I think it's a sign of mutual respect for each other -- I'm not going to write crap that will waste their time and they are going to make sure I get something useful from them out of the process. In my experience, I've always had decent feedback. I'm not expecting detailed comments like suggestions on how to word my sentences more clearly but just small things like "this is a good idea but flawed because xyz". In a lot of my classes, we actually get peer feedback, which is great, in my opinion. The prof sets it up so that each student reads 3 or 4 other students' work and provides strong/weak points. I think this was a great learning experience for me as well, to see how other people write things. And, finally, this is especially helpful when our final projects are things we would actually need to do later in life (i.e. writing mock grant proposal, preparing oral or poster presentations etc.)

I don't have any personal experience with this! However, since you asked about success stories, I'll echo what others said about it not being doomed to fail. I do think that they are higher risk though, because I've seen many such relationships fail and sometimes they fail in dramatic ways. But, I would say that for each graduate student relationship I've seen fail, I've seen just as many (if not more) relationships that are successful. Actually, it seems like there are more success stories when the couple are at different stages in their career! In some cases, the couple do have a few years of long distance, but there are certain areas of the world / US where there is a high enough density of institutions that the couple works at different universities but still live together. The "sacrifice" is that often one or both of them would have a fairly long commute. However, for three recent couples that did the "long commute" thing, all of them are now working at (or about to start new jobs at) the same institution. In these three cases that come to mind, one is a tenure-tracked professor and the other is currently employed as a contract-based/temporary research scientist/postdoc with an opportunity for a future tenure track position. These are just a few anecdotes and what works for each person depend a lot on what each of you values of course! But just wanted to provide some success stories. I'd also second Eigen's suggestion to look on the Chronicle.

This is what we do in Canada too, however, we still have the post-acceptance "interview" where we can go into the details of proposed thesis topics. Also, it's a good time to ask questions like "do you have money to send me to conferences?" or "what are your expectations with regards to vacation/holiday time" and other such questions that might be a little too "sensitive" to ask prior to admission. But in the US for my field, it seems like most professors are not willing to say much more than "yes, I will be taking students, please apply" until an admission decision is made. I guess this makes sense because I think US schools get way more applicants so if they talked to every applicant, they would probably spend all of November and December writing/talking to students!!

I would also recommend the strategy of "simply memorize as many common words as you can". I used the word lists from this page: http://www.majortests.com/gre/wordlist.php I only made it through the first five word lists (500 words). These word lists are arranged so that each list has a good representation of words from all over the alphabet (so it's okay to just take a subset of the 10-15 lists provided). I had about 6 weeks to prepare for the General GRE (my MSc courses ended in April, test was scheduled in June, started in mid-May) and I got through about 100 words per week studying for about 2-3 hours per week. I didn't have time to dedicate much more than that because I had a lot of other things to do too (MSc research, planning my wedding etc.) I found that personally, I memorize (not learn, just memorize) better when I have moderate length sessions. At first, I was fitting in 10-15 minutes here and there to study and that wasn't very good. I worked a lot better when I could dedicate an entire hour to going through the same 100 words over and over and over and over again. So two or three of these 1-hour sessions per week was ideal for me to learn. I also agree that having context helped me learn the words. However, I didn't try to use them in everyday conversation because well, it's pretty hard to fit most of those words into everyday use, and especially not without sounding incredibly pretentious! Instead, I decided that the best "context" to use these words is in GRE test questions! Luckily, the same website has GRE-like questions based on the same words in the wordlist, so I alternated memorizing form the list and then answering questions based on words from the same list. Finally, I would also dedicate some time to learning how the test works. I really think the GRE is maybe 70% knowledge and 30% understanding how to take the test. I also dedicated about 1 hour per week to just take practice GRE test questions to get used to the format and learning what ETS is expecting from their questions and learning why they ask the questions the way they do. Overall, this strategy worked really really well for me on the test day. It has done nothing to actually teach me the words though, because I remember almost none of the words I memorized. That's fine with me though, I didn't want to actually learn the words, I just needed them to do well on the test

To give a more "general" answer, the "Results Search" Decision/Date column has the format "X via Y" where X is the decision and Y is the method of notification, so as others said above, this is an interview request sent via email! And to answer the original question/concern, you should not expect to have to do a future interview if one was not requested when they gave you their decision. For me, only 1/8 programs actually wanted to interview me prior to acceptance (and they emailed me to select a date for a Skype call). My field does not typically do interviews prior to acceptance. However, our programs often fly accepted candidates out in order to have them meet professors (and set up future projects) and woo/recruit them! So, we might still have one-on-one or panel meetings with professors, which might take a format similar to an interview, but it's not an interview in the sense that they are evaluating you for admission. But with these meetings, it's often true that both parties are evaluating one another to determine if they would like to work with each other if the student accepts the offer. Finally, I would like to add that (at least in my field), if it is not in writing in your offer letter, you should not assume anything told you to verbally (including future interviews, recruitment visits, funding and whether the medium is email, phone, Skype etc.) is set in stone yet. If you were expecting the offer letter to say something but it is not there, I would follow up immediately with the program and definitely do not accept/reject the offer until you find out!

To clarify, when I used the GRE score as an example in the third paragraph, it was just a randomly chosen example! I don't know the standards for Chemistry GRE scores so I have no idea if your score is competitive or not at the top schools (although if you had that score in the Physics GRE, you definitely would have a good score). I agree with pepsico that if this year does not work out, your best bet on improving your chances of grad school next year is to apply to many more schools! However, it's still early and you have not heard from the other 3 yet, so don't lose hope If you do apply to more schools next year, I would strongly recommend going for at least 8 schools in total. Many international students that aim for top programs usually apply to at least 6-8 schools and they often only apply to top programs (personally, I did this because it's not worth uprooting my whole life if I was not going to get into one of the best programs for my field). I would say that even the best students are rarely a shoe-in for top programs and your odds at any given program might be something like 10% to 20%. The best way to beat these odds is to increase your numbers! And if you do apply to more schools, apply to more private schools!! International students cost a ton more at public schools and the UC schools (e.g. UCLA, UC Berkeley on your list) are well known to have a very low international student rate and also known to be very popular amongst international students. When I was applying to schools, my Canadian profs (who had some experience working in the US) predicted that I would get into private schools but not the public ones. They were right--I applied to a lot of California schools and I got rejected at all of the public ones! But for now, I'd focus on the current application year and just wait to see what the other three schools say. If you do need/want to reapply next year, it might be worth it to ask for feedback in May (it can't hurt as long as you keep in mind you might get useless advice), but I really think the best things you can do to improve your application is 1) apply to more schools and 2) get that submitted 1st author paper into an accepted 1st author paper! And finally, when considering which additional schools to apply to next year (if necessary), you should decide if you want to only attend top programs or if you would prefer any program instead of no graduate school. If you were in my field, I would say that your profile is excellent and while there will still be people with higher GPAs or GREs, you definitely have a good enough profile to seriously consider top programs. Therefore, it would not be unreasonable for you to only consider top programs and apply to a lot of them (in fact, one might go through the entire top 20 list and apply to every program that matches your interests--although if you already did this and only came up with four, I would say you might be looking too narrowly). At the same time, it's also a good idea to apply to safety schools if your goals require that you attend any PhD program! If you have the time and money for applications, you could even do both.

I would recommend emailing them after the busy season is over, whenever that is for your schools. In some cases it's as late as May. You could always try now and then try again in May (or try now and ask if they would prefer if you asked them again later). However, be prepared for very very generic feedback. They reject far more than they accept so it's very unlikely that they recorded reasons for rejection. They will also be unlikely to go back and perform a re-review of your application to determine exactly what you can improve. Sometimes you might get lucky with some more meaningful feedback, especially if you were a close call. And also be prepared to get useless feedback. That is, they might just take a quick glance at your profile again and find the first thing that is below average and mention something like "GRE is lower than average" even though they might have admitted people with a lower GRE because other parts made up for it. And perhaps you do have other factors that more than make up for a low GRE, but they didn't fully re-evaluate your profile and then you end up thinking the GRE is the main reason you got rejected but the real reason is something else (e.g. LORs) but they never got there.

From your first post, it sounds like you are in year 2 right now, and will have 3.5 more years of courses from this moment on, right? I am not sure about your field but many programs will place more emphasis on the later years/courses when evaluating your GPA. So you definitely still have the opportunity to apply to grad school with a much higher GPA than your current number. Even so, I don't think you need to aim to have a GPA of e.g. 3.8 or 3.9 in order to have a "chance" at grad school. Many students get into graduate programs with GPAs between 3.2 and 3.5. Of course, you will have many more opportunities with a GPA of say, 3.5, than 3.1, so working on improving your GPA should definitely be part of your path to grad school. Just also remember to not go overboard (some students spend hours and hours more just to get another 0.05 GPA when they would really be better off spending 10-15 hours per week on research). But at 3.1-3.2, I would say there is still plenty of room for improvement there

A small number of schools do have quotas enforced by law or other policy, but most quotas are just limited by money. But you have to make sure your external funding covers everything, including university overhead for it to actually make a difference. For example, in my program, one would need a fellowship that covers something like $75,000 per year in order for you to actually be "free" to the university. I have a 3-year external fellowship from Canada for about $20,000/year, which is nice but does not even offset the cost of a single year here. And schools can't just take students based on external money because you will still take up a spot in class, take up a desk in an office, take up hours of professors' time. I don't think a school is going to take an international student with external funding that is not already on par with the other international students they are already accepting and paying for. That is, I think having external funding will help if, 1) it's enough to cover almost all your costs and 2) you would have been really close to being accepted anyways.

No, you don't have anything to worry about. Just be yourself!

I don't think you have to worry. If you were honest in your application and if you are not a terrible person, then you will be fine. It's not like you have to watch every little thing you say or do because one wrong step would result in rejection. Inappropriate behaviour could be things like harassing other people, so it's not like you can "accidentally" get yourself rejected.

Agree with all of the above! You can ask the prof about some of their graduate students or you can just cold-email us out of the blue. Just be polite and friendly and those who have time will respond, just don't take it personally if someone does not reply! Personally, I always take time to answer questions.

I agree with Gvh -- when a conflict arises, always let them know and they will most likely reschedule you or set up a phone/Skype interview. For big programs, conflicts are almost always bound to happen!

Something that clearly shows that you're not what you seem to be on paper and/or clearly show that you do not fit in the department (e.g. inappropriate behaviour).

For research based PhD programs, I think that yes, graduate classes are lower on the priority list and I would choose some priorities ahead of classes (e.g. recovering from illness, vacation, meeting a deadline, seeing an important talk elsewhere on campus, conferences, weddings, etc.) However, for professional or terminal masters programs, these are more course based and I would say courses take top priority there. While I would probably not purposely seek reasons to miss classes, I do agree that grad students in research based programs should use classes as a way to get the information they need and if some lectures are not important, it's okay to miss them if something else more important to you is happening.

I don't think they are asking for a quantitative/specific ranking. Like you said, they are not idiots and they went through the exact same process themselves many many times (grad school, postdocs, tenure track job interviews). They will be able to spot BS right away so be honest. It's okay to say that you don't have a single top choice or that you can't assign a rank to their school. How can you, when you have not yet visited them?? When schools asked me this question, I was honest. If the school was in the top half of my list, I would say something like: "Your school, school X and school Y are my top choices and I really hope for a chance to visit these schools and find the best fit for me." Or, for the schools that were in the bottom half of my list, I would say something like: "I've also applied to X, Y, Z [top half schools] and I hope to get the opportunity to find the best fit for me after I visit your school and these other schools." (If X,Y,Z are higher ranked schools than the school I'm talking to, then by implication, you are saying that you would slightly prefer those other places). Or, another way to approach it is to say what you like about the program you're talking to and what you like about other programs you've looked into (don't say negative things though). In my field, I would say this question is common and also fair (as long as they don't expect you to say that you love their program no matter what). They want to know how many of their top choices consider them a backup choice (perhaps they have 5 spots and they will fill it with 3 people that said "top choice" and 4 people that said "backup choice" etc.). I think it would be stupid of any program to reject a great candidate because they feel that candidate will reject them.

Grad schools will not care that you took 5 years to finish. I would say that about 40%-50% of grad students in my field (also a STEM field) do not begin grad school right after 4 years of undergrad (usually they take 5 years of undergrad, like me, or take time off between undergrad and grad school). 4 courses instead of 5 is no big deal and that's what I did in my 5th year because I didn't need to take a full load to meet degree requirements. Also, many students have to work part time or have other obligations during undergrad that prevent them from finishing in 4 years (with 5 courses per term). If you are going to take 5 years to finish anyways, you should pick the distribution of courses that work best for you. My advice would be: 1. Try to use the extra year to get as much research experience as possible. Perhaps taking 4 courses per semester from here on out will allow you to do a directed studies / part time research during the year. 2. If possible, take advantage of the summer between years 4 and 5 to do research. This will give you one more summer of experience than other applicants. 3. When choosing courses, I would try to do the more important courses within the first 4 years so that when you are applying to grad school in your 5th year, they will see good grades in these important courses already. That is, leave some of the more tangential courses for 5th year, if given a choice.

No, you should not tell them about this process. It won't change anything because you don't have a green card for sure, and there's no way they will risk the possibility that you don't get approved when making the decision--it could mean an extra $200,000 or so in costs for them. Also, (for this part, I'm not an immigration expert so please also get expert advice), I think it might be a bad idea to mix permanent residence applications with student visa applications (if you need to get a new visa for grad school). One of the requirements for both the F-1 and J-1 visa is intent to return to home country and it would be very hard, in my opinion, to convince the visa officer that while you have a petition for a green card in process. But I guess if you are able to extend your current student visa to this new program somehow (not sure if you can) then it might be okay?

I also want to say that in my field, it's common to only interview some applicants. Interviews cost a lot of time, and if you are say, making 30 offers, then you probably don't have to interview the top 15 candidates or so. Sure the one that you think is 5th best might really only be 13th best, but why does that matter when you are admitting 30? Interviews sometimes are only necessary for people on the fence or if they are worried about one aspect for some reason.

I got engaged a month into my Masters program and the married was during the summer between year 1 and year 2. During the first year, I took about 2 weeks off total (once in December, once in April) to fly back home to do all of the wedding planning and then another 10 days off (in the summer) to actually get married. We waited until the fall to take our honeymoon, so that was another week off (I was in France for a conference so I stayed another week and my wife flew out and met me in Paris). But those 4.5 weeks off were basically the only time I took off during the entire 2 year program, so it wasn't unreasonable at all (I'd say grad students in my field get on average about 2-3 weeks per year for vacation), just a little "front loaded". My honeymoon was taken during the term I was TAing (but couldn't pass up the chance to honeymoon in Paris!!) but I was TAing for my advisor, who agreed to cover my office hour shifts in exchange for me doing more work later in the term (when he needed more work from me anyways). **Note: This happened at a Canadian school, where I feel that grad students have stronger vacation/time off rights and our TA contracts have strict hour requirements so it's easy to reschedule one week's worth of TAing (9 hours) to another time. Also, a Masters in Canada is equal to the first two years of a PhD, so it's not like many US masters where your advisor is not really invested or cares about you. I highly second ashiepoo's method of finding a place that coordinates all the logistics. We basically just had to pick a theme colour, choose the shape of our table glitter (stars, of course!) and then pay up. We also did DIY invitations and had spreadsheet after spreadsheet of planning details. Our guest list was in three "waves" because we had to balance meeting the venue's minimum (50 adults) without going over budget (and of course, the problem is if you invite one person, you usually have to invite everyone else in that friend circle too etc.) Anyways, I just want to say that it's really common for grad students to get married. Not only that, it's really common for grad students to take time off from grad school to go to their friends' weddings! Of course, while you might take anywhere between a few days to several weeks off for your own wedding, going to a friend's wedding is probably just a long weekend (i.e. only one or two days off). However, it's also understandable for grad students to take longer time off for e.g. their sibling's or really close friend's wedding (especially if they are in the wedding party). We might be grad students but we are still humans. Life happens. Most people do not just pause life for grad school and a good advisor/school should not expect it of their students.

No, it won't matter and no, you don't need to say anything. You will have to send them a final transcript after you get your degree so they will see it then (but it won't matter). Now that you have an offer, your grades only matter for: 1) not failing a course and thus not getting any degree at all, and 2) your GPA for scholarship/fellowship applications you'll make in your first (or later) years of grad school.

I don't think it's true that "the reputation of your PhD university does not matter as long as your work is good". Even within academia, I think reputation does matter a little, and it's not just your university's reputation, but also the reputation of your department, your advisor, your advisor's group, and your own reputation (these latter things matter more than the university's overall reputation, I think). As for the non-academic jobs, I think it does depend on field but also the type of job you are seeking. For example, if you are looking to work on a research-based job outside of academia, it's more likely that the employer will be interested in your specific research results/abilities than if you are looking for a job based on the general analytical skills developed in a PhD program. Personally, I ended up with a choice between a few very good programs that are highly reputable within academia in my field. But because I was not sure about my post-PhD career path when selecting schools, I did consider reputation inside and outside of academic circles when making my final decision. I wouldn't say it was the deciding factor, but I definitely considered "which school name would be more impressive to someone who didn't have a PhD in my field?" part of the decision.

In my opinion, all it can really mean is that you are not already rejected, because they want to see that final letter. It sounds like you have a good chance though (i.e. probably made it through some initial cuts) and they will need the last letter to help them make the final decision. Based on how much they emphasized that you are still eligible, it is possible that you are basically accepted and they just need the final letter so that they can justify their decision. However, it can also mean that they want to reassure you that having this letter come in "late" due to the miscommunication will have no negative effect at all and that you shouldn't worry. I would not assume it means acceptance yet. But it's definitely not bad news (yet)