TakeruK

I'm sorry to hear that you are in this circumstance. Unfortunately, our system (not unlike other work environments though) is such that our bosses have way more power than we do. I would second fuzzy's suggestions above. In addition to what the others said above, I do not think you can expect to get a positive reaction to a request that any of the professors in your current Masters program give "no response" if contacted. First of all, academics generally do not like being told what they can or cannot say, especially not from a student. Second, a recommendation is the most valued part of the admissions process (at least in my field) and a "yes" or a "no" from a highly respected professor (like your department head) can make all the difference. Thus, many professors feel it is their responsibility to academia to give honest and uncensored reviews when asked. Also, I would say that a "no response" or "decline to comment" type review is just as damaging as a bad review. Sometimes, the lack of details may cause the other party to imagine/wonder what really went wrong, and imagination can be much worse than reality. I think fuzzy's idea to think of a careful way to say that you and your dept head have a personal, non-academic issue in future applications would be good. The downside is that it might draw attention to an issue that would not even be there if you had other profs from your Masters program as references already. I would say that by default, schools might contact people that you worked with (unless you did work with this professor as well), since Department Heads don't really have much contact with students, especially if you are not in the same subfield. In my 2.5 years at my current program, I've talked to my old Division Chair exactly 1 time and the current Chair zero times (the Division has about 100 graduate students). Both chairs were in very different subfields than mine. So, I also think your best bet is to follow fuzzy's advice and try to talk to the other profs in your department. Find the ones that you have had the best relationship with and see if you can earn their support. You should also try to talk to the other professors who might have had a bad opinion of you from the head, but not because of anything you did directly. Have an honest talk where you do not blame anyone and let them know that you want to start fresh with them. I would not mention that the previous head has sabotaged your admission etc.

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To answer your last question -- no, I don't think writing to the Dean of the school will be effective. The Dean is even more removed from the process than the admissions person that you talked to. If your goal is honestly just to get feedback in order to best improve your application for future years, then I think your best bet is to just try to contact the Director of Graduate Studies or similar position in the department you are applying to. That person would have the best idea of what the admissions committee was looking for and how they made their decision. However, the way you approach this question will have a huge difference in your outcome. For example, as rising_star suggested, if you got a lawyer and made a formal request, you will be seen as a (potentially litigious) threat, and this would greatly reduce anyone's desire to give you any answers at all. You will likely face similar resistance if you seem like you want to challenge or appeal their decision. Therefore, my advice is that if you truly are seeking the reason for your rejection solely for knowledge on how to improve for other schools or for a future year, then you need to first accept the decision that has already been made. Maybe you have already done this. However, to me, the tone of your first post sounds like you do not agree with their decision and you are still seeking a way to argue/dispute their decision. If you convey this same tone in your communication with the department, then I don't think you will get the answers you want. Also, keep in mind there is probably a very good chance that they don't have any more information for you than "not enough experience". Most schools reject over 90% of their applicants so they definitely do not have time to prepare detailed reports on each decision. Perhaps the committee felt that your experience was not the kind they were looking for. Or that you did not have enough experience compared to the candidate you were directly up against (as above, I said that sometimes candidates with less experience can be favoured over other candidates for reasons completely beyond your control, e.g. lab space, funding, or a professor argued more passionately for another candidate etc.) Finally, keep in mind that many graduate programs do try their best to give feedback when politely solicited in a non-threatening way (i.e. so that they don't feel like they need to go on the defensive). For traditional programs, decisions are made in Spring, so I would say the best time to inquire would be the following May because it is after all the decisions are done (so there is no threat of appealing and after all the crazy busy-ness of making admission decisions) but it's still fresh in their mind. If you are lucky, you might get feedback but remember that they have no obligation to do so, and that they might not have kept any notes at all on their decisions. The only thing that might leave their big long meeting is a list of names to accept.

Indeed, they might call you first for a more personal touch and/or to answer any immediate questions but you don't have to worry about missing out on anything important without a phone. The official notification will generally come via email or snail mail.

I agree with Eigen, grad_wannabe and others here--it's pretty tough to rank people by the "best" and especially tough to distinguish between top candidates! Usually, programs cannot accept everyone who they would like to attend! For example. they might get 20 highly qualified candidates but can only accept 10, and each of the 20 people might have uniquely good qualities that make it tough to directly rank. In this case, most schools would admit according to best match, either to specific supervisors or to program goals as a whole. For example, if some all-powerful being were actually able to rank the candidates 1st through 20th and the top 8 are all from subfield X, they might just choose to admit 5 of the top 8 and then admit others from lower on the list. So, someone ranked 12th might get in but not the person ranked 6th just because it's better to have a very good Y-subfield research than too many very-very-good X subfield. In addition, it might be helpful to know that most schools do not have an appeals process for graduate admission, so I don't think that is a good path to go. That is, it is very common for most people to not know exactly why they are rejected because it's not often possible to explicitly record a reason for every decision. But, I do think if you feel strongly that the school wrongfully rejected you for an unethical reason, then you should definitely consider following through with your suggestion of finding a lawyer. You should note that taking this action will definitely burn bridges at this school and you will definitely not be able to "sue for admission" -- or at least, if a court legally compels a school to admit you (is that even possible?), I feel that would permanently damage your relationship with everyone in the department and make life very difficult for you. In addition, keep in mind that if you take this action and your field is small, even if you end up attending somewhere else, people might know about this and depending on how things went, it could hurt you in the long run. That said, if you are willing to take the risks above, and you still feel strongly that the school has acted improperly, I think it's important to take the fight to them. I am not going to pretend that admissions committees are infallible and are always in the right. Academics that act improperly damage the reputation of academics everywhere so I would encourage you to find a lawyer and see what action can be taken if you feel strongly that improper conduct occurred and are willing to face the consequences. Finally, one last note -- keep in mind that lack of information might often make it possible to appear like improper conduct occurred. So, for your own protection, be careful not to jump to any conclusions! In my opinion, I would advocate for all admissions committees (and all grant/promotion/tenure/hiring committees really) to be way more transparent in their decision making procedure and have some kind of oversight. There would be more bureaucracy but in my own humble opinion, worth it if it meant more trust in academics and ultimately, more justification for supporting our work.

Don't call back It's super awkward to call someone and be like "Did you call me?". This is way easier said than done, but I think the best strategy is to relax and remember that if it was actually really important, they will call back, leave a message or email you. They have a lot of ways of reaching you!!

I am not an expert in education nor am I an expert in diversity. One of the things I currently work on is to help create a inclusive and welcoming atmosphere/environment for everyone at my current school. So I would echo MAC2809's suggestion to read about equality and equity and especially how this affects higher education. As I said, I am also trying to learn these things so I am not in a position to know what to recommend to you. However, I do feel that having an inclusive atmosphere is much more than just mentioning certain themes in your syllabus! I'll share an experiences from my past (at Canadian universities) that I feel are related and might be helpful? One of my favourite university classes was my mandatory first year English literature class (I was a Physics major and it was my first year so to be honest, I was pretty naive and was expecting it to be one of those classes I'll just have to suffer through). We read a lot of fiction and analyzed it. The theme of the fiction is completely up to each instructor and my section read all about "coming of age stories as a hyphenated Canadian". For example, we read about teenagers growing up as a Japanese-Canadian, Chinese-Canadian, German-Canadian etc. I didn't think about this until many years later, but I think that topic made a big difference to me (I identify as a hyphenated Canadian as well). Prior to that class, almost all of the fiction we read were about Caucasian Canadians or Americans growing up: my high school reading list were titles like The Outsiders, Cue for Treason, How to Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, etc. Although all children face common themes when they are "growing up", and all these titles tackled important issues in society, in an overwhelming majority of the fiction we read in high school, the protagonist was almost always white. And some of the extra things I felt that I struggled with (e.g. feeling trapped between two cultural worlds) were never in these stories. This college class made a big difference and I finally read stories where someone "like me" is actually the protagonist. I felt like I was able to fully identify with the protagonist, for the first time. Also, I felt like other people who might not identify as a hyphenated Canadian might gain some insight on the perspective of a hyphenated Canadian. Not to continue the whole "us vs. them" mindset, but it did feel good that it was "them" reading about "us" for a change. Most of the analysis of my feelings above came years after the fact. When I was taking the class, although I registered that I felt good about the class, I didn't really figure out why. And I think that's because the professor was subtle about it and that was good. The prof did not make a big deal out of it at all, and instead introduced the theme for the class just like he would have introduced any other theme. And I think that's the whole point -- the best inclusive atmosphere/environment includes everyone without making a point to show why a group is different! Or in summary, I think it's important for all of us to remember to take a step back and realise that our worldview is a product of our background and our experiences and that different people with a different experience will have a different worldview. And to remember that no worldview is necessarily "right" or "correct". And as educators, we should strive to make sure all worldviews can succeed, not just the ones that are aligned with ours.

I'm not in this field, but just want to let people know about the "Results Search" part of this website! (Link at the top, or on the homepage) You can search for things like "Berkeley Journalism" and you will get the results from past applicants who reported their info. e.g. http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/index.php?q=Berkeley+Journalism It looks like for Fall 2014, 3 interviews happened this week in December 2013. For Fall 2013, 3 interviews happened between mid December 2012 and mid January 2013. So I would guess that interviews happen sometime in December and January? It's hard to tell with only 3 reports per year! So, on that note, if you didn't already know about the Results database, please make sure to report your interview date to help others

To echo what rising_star said, the results survey is also a really good way to figure out when to expect to hear from your schools. At least in my field, most programs do the same thing over and over again each year. You can use wildcards to search for your school name and program name and you can then go back many years and see the pattern of acceptances/rejections show up (with the way the applicant was notified) and figure out approximately which week of Jan/Feb/Mar you might expect to hear back! And then don't forget to record your own results

Extra (and perhaps unnecessary) explanation: The percentiles are updated every year (I think in May) because they always reflect how your scaled score (out of 170) compares against the pool of test takers in the last 3 years. Therefore, with each year, your percentile score may change each year because the set of scores you're compared against gets updated each year. It is especially true that scores from 2012 and 2013 are more likely to be affected because the Revised GRE was implemented August 1, 2011, which is just barely 3 years old now so the "baseline" of the 2013 percentile scores is shorter than normal. The official GRE score report will show the "new" percentiles, so like others said, you should report the latest values from now on. You don't have to worry about them changing again until next spring. But if you already reported old values, it won't really matter--schools understand that numbers change and they will have the official report to use anyways.

I agree with proflorax that we (graduate students in general but also specifically the users of this board) need a safe space to vent. C&C did not post anything that would harm any other person. We might not always agree with the poster's point of view, but that doesn't mean we always have to criticize or react negatively to it. Since there are no details that would identify any person and that C&C is not taking any actions that would harm our community here as well as the general "academic/grad student" community elsewhere, then I don't think there is any harm in a venting of frustration/stress like this. I would say a post like this by C&C is far different from a lot of other posts that were "harmful" venting because they either specifically named programs or schools or people and/or they advocated for extremely unprofessional or dishonest behaviour. In addition, I would note that the original post asked for advice on how to proceed with asking the professor for a grade increase. The first few comments were responding to this question directly. I agree that it's helpful to advise C&C that perhaps 89.89 is just a coincidence, but we should keep in mind that 1) each poster might not share all the details of the situation and 2) for the sake of establishing a supportive community, we can recognize that sometimes some of us are more stressed out or feeling very frustrated and just need to vent their feelings without having their situation analyzed and criticized. I know I sometimes give unsolicited advice so I'm guilty of this as well. GradCafe is an online, pseudo-anonymous forum that can be used for a lot of purposes. Sometimes, the poster wants advice and feedback on their actions; sometimes the poster just wants to vent and say unprofessional things behind the safety of the Internet, and sometimes, the poster just wants to ask one specific question without having to justify their past actions or motivations. Or sometimes a combination of the three. I think it is reasonable to say that for the latter two cases, it's not too much to put our highly analytical graduate student minds in the background and just be supportive when another colleague seems to need it.

I only sent my SOP when it was specifically requested. The person that requested it said that they wanted to make sure their letter mesh well with my SOP. That is, if I write about my experience in X and desire to do Y in grad school, they will be able to frame their letter to emphasize my previous success in X and my ability to succeed in Y. Later, when I applied to PhD programs, I knew this and so I just gave them a short paragraph summary of what I wanted to do in grad school. With this info (in addition to a CV, summary of transcript and a list of schools/deadlines), all my recommenders had everything they needed and no one asked for a SOP.

Maxtini, the percentage to GPA conversion depends a lot on the country you are in! In Canada (RachaelMC's listed country), most schools use this system: 90% to 100%: A+ = 4.3 85% to 89%: A = 4.0 80% to 84%: A- = 3.7 76% to 79%: B+ = 3.3 72% to 75%: B = 3.0 68% to 71%: B- = 2.7 64% to 67%: C+ = 2.3 60% to 63%: C = 2.0 55% to 59%: C- = 1.7 50% to 54%: D = 1.0 (or 1.3) 0% to 49%: F = 0.0 (Fail) Therefore, RachaelMC is right that 80% is about a 3.7 in the Canadian GPA system. Most Canadians schools don't really use GPA but actually issue grades as percentages instead. My undergrad school's official grades are %, the letter grade is just a reference and they don't even have a GPA system. My MSc school just recently switched from % to GPA system; however the % are still used to compute the student's final grade, then the above lookup table is used to convert all grades and report a GPA. For RachaelMC: Don't worry about small differences in your reported GPA because as you said, your transcript will clear everything up. I had a ton of trouble converting my % grade to GPA for American schools and when I contacted them, they said it doesn't really matter what I self-report, they will confirm it with the transcript anyways. You can contact your schools if you want to be sure too. But, I would recommend that you compute your grades by taking your number out of 4.3 and converting it to the middle of the range of the table above (look up specific table for the school) and weighting your courses like you said you did. If you end up with 79.5, you can report it as 79 or 80 and it won't make a difference since it's just one percentage point. It doesn't matter that 80% and 79% are 3.7 and 3.3 at your undergrad school, respectively, because if the school is asking for % score, they won't care about the GPA system.

Well, it sounds like you have a good plan then! It makes more sense now and I definitely would agree with Prof B's philosophy about publishing/grad school! I agree that he is the right person to move forward with too. Again, according to the norms in my field, I would ideally want to move forward with both Prof A and Prof B, with Prof. B being the main advisor and Prof A being included on the basis of being your original advisor (surely he contributed something to your development?). That is, I would ask Prof B to advise me on turning the work into a publication and mostly work with Prof B. in getting the draft complete. We would then send it to Prof A for comments/suggestions at the very end. I hope Prof B agrees to work with you! From your description of Prof B, it does sound like he would want to support you if he has the resources (time mostly) to do so. If he declines, perhaps I would ask him for his honest opinion on the work's viability as a publication. If he thinks it would make a good paper but he just doesn't have time, then I would ask him to suggest other professors that might be interested in working on this! Good luck! Thanks for providing the additional details; I think it would really help other people in similar situations too!

Are you still physically at the same school/department? I think it would be best to meet to him about this in person. If it were a prof from my department, I would email them and set up a time to meet, either in their office or over coffee etc. But you would know the best way to arrange a meeting with profs you're more familiar with! I don't think reaching out in multiple ways is necessarily a good thing. You don't want the prof to grudgingly agree to help you only because you kept pestering/bugging them to do so. There's a fine line between persistence and desperation! Again, if he is hard enough to contact now, how much harder would it be when you're not even a student there? This might be a difference in field but the very first person I would ask is my own thesis advisor. In my field, I would absolutely have to include them as a coauthor. Therefore, I must have their support to continue. At the very least, I need their support "in spirit" if not actual guidance. That is, in my field, I would need my advisor's blessing to continue working on this project and turn it into a paper, although I might get most of my guidance and supervision from another professor on the committee. Then the author order would be: Me, Committee Author, Supervisor. If your advisor refuses to move forward on this work and turn it into a paper, I would strongly reconsider writing a paper at all. If, after reconsidering, I still think the work is worth writing up, then I would try to approach another professor that knows me and get a second opinion. I would only do this if I strongly believed that my advisor is not acting in my best interests when they say my work isn't worth writing up into a paper. I don't have much experience with a malicious advisor, so I don't really know what to say here, other than to get another professor on your side. So far, I would trust every advisor I ever had and if they said the work is not ready to be a paper, I would trust their judgment. Finally, yes, it is very unconventional to ask a professor in a different department that doesn't know you at all, out of the blue, to coauthor a paper with you that you worked on with another professor. If I was this other professor, I would first ask you why you sought me out and probably talk to your advisor about the work (after all, I would not want to accidentally steal your advisor's work!). I would also be hesitant to take on unsolicited work in this manner because like you said, you would no longer be a graduate student! Overall, in my opinion, if you do not have the support of your advisor and your committee, I would say it's not worth pursuing this further. But that's based on my experiences in my field.

I would recommend that if you are interested in turning the work into a manuscript, you should meet with the people you want to support you / help you / coauthor the work before you leave your current program. You all need to be on the same page in terms of how much work each of you expect from each other. The work dynamic will be different after you leave, since you will no longer be "their" student (or their program's student). Thus, the only obligations you have to one another in terms of how promptly you reply to email, how much work you put in etc. are completely up to you to decide. Thus, you really need to pick your coauthors carefully. I would be really worried with the prof that would not return emails within a month etc. But you should talk to them because if they are actually interested in this project then they might work on it more! You should also ask for the profs' honesty when it comes to the viability of turning your thesis into a paper. From my experience (my own and others), there could be a lot more work necessary to go from dissertation quality to article quality. Find out how much more work it would take and whether or not the experienced profs actually think the result would be interesting enough to merit the extra effort of writing it up as a paper. I guess what I am trying to say here is that you should first make sure your coauthors are on board with your idea to turn this into a publication. Once you talk to them, you should also evaluate if you will have the support and resources necessary for you to finish this work after you graduate. It could be a really long process, especially if you are busy with other work and can only spare a couple hours per week to think about the paper. In the end, you need to decide if it's worth it based on how much work you need to do, how much support you expect to get, and how much time you have to do the work!

Remove the references section for graduate school applications.

Normally, I think it would be okay for you to remind them at this point (for deadlines on the 15th and 17th). However, since you only have had the link open for about week, I would wait until 2 days before the deadline (most people probably open the link about a month prior and send a reminder a week prior). Or, if you feel that you would be too pushy sending a reminder only 2 weeks after the first request, perhaps you want to wait until after the deadline to send the reminder (since most deadlines are for you, not for the LOR writers). When you send the reminder, I wouldn't just email them though. If possible, I would go into the application website where you entered your LOR info and click on "send reminder" if that is an option. This will cause the system to send your profs a reminder email that contains the link for them to upload their recommendation. Having the link handy is convenient for the prof and will probably make them more likely to do it faster!

I am at an "elite school". I would say about 1/3 of the grad students here come from other "elite" schools but the majority of the grad students (including me) here come from non-elite schools. And here, by "elite", I mean something like the top 15 or top 20 across the nation (not just the top 5!). I've been at both elite schools and non-elite schools. I know for sure that the top students from schools ranked in the 20s to 30s are better than the average student at an elite school. When I went from a non-elite school (my MSc school is not even in the top 200 worldwide, I think) to an elite school, I did not magically transform from someone you can associate with to some hyper-intelligent untouchable being! I'm still the same person. I would say that yes, it is true that elite schools do admit better students than the non-elite schools, but it's not like the elite school students completely surpass all other students in every way! And yes, elite school graduates do tend to have more successful graduates. But really, I don't think the "output" of the elite schools is so great because of the "better input". Instead, I think the reason elite school graduates are so successful is that elite schools provides a lot more resources for good students to become great researchers. That is, it is the wealth and resources available at the elite schools that make its graduates so great, not the actual quality of students. Any decent student can produce great research with the right support and resources. (This sentiment is echoed by the administration here). I do understand a little bit how you are feeling. In Canada, we don't have elite schools that rival Harvard, Stanford, etc. so we rarely meet students from these schools. Before moving to the States, I also kind of imagined them to be hyper-intelligent super-beings. I remember one memory from my visit weekend to my current school, when we introduced ourselves by name and undergrad school. Everyone seemed to have come from Ivy League or other elite schools and it was really intimidating. I felt that I completely did not belong with this group of people. But when I got to know everyone better, they are all very nice and just like any other student! In addition, I later learned that the number of people from "elite" schools were not in the majority at all, but those names just stuck out to me due to my own insecurity.

That definitely helps. But as the discussion here have said, there are other support systems that might not be available at a CC. In addition to what was said above, another one we might take for granted is access to journals. Smaller schools like CCs might have a very limited number of journal subscriptions and they might not have access to the papers you want/need to read. As I said above, if you were going to go the "research at a CC" route, I would strongly recommend affiliating yourself with a 4 year university where possible! My undergrad had some researchers from nearby colleges as "visiting fellows" or some title like that where they aren't employed by the school at all, but they are able to attend seminars, interact with other profs a little bit, access the library etc.

I agree that you can just politely inquire via email (don't tell them the whole story about why you are emailing so late etc.). Also, are there other professors you would be interested in? I would be hesitant to apply to a school where there was only one single professor I would want to work with! If there are other people you could work with and you can afford the application fee, then why not apply and see!

- Absolutely sure about the references section for a CV applying to graduate school. - Your CV is currently 3 pages and I don't think increasing it to 4 pages would make a big difference. I would say that 2-4 pages is a typical length for an academic CV for graduate school applications. But it's definitely your choice if you prefer your current format, I'm just saying you shouldn't have to worry about length when it's only 3 pages.

As lewin pointed out, grad school *could* take about as much time as a "full time" job, and there are only so many hours in a day so you have to choose what's important to you! And as proflorax mentioned, you should make these choices based on what you want out of your time in a PhD program / your future career plans. I agree that you definitely want to keep the TA position if it provides other really good benefits like health care etc. But this is not true at all schools (at my current school, we all get health care and other benefits because we are students, not because we TA; and in fact, many of us do not TA at all). I think another very important priority is to make sure you are not violating any school policies about working on the side. It sounds like your professor knows this so you are covered probably! Then, after that, it's up to you what your priorities are. Your only real obligation to grad school is to do as much work as you need to so that you don't flunk out. At some places, this can be as little as 20-25 hours per week and you can spend the rest of your working hours on other parts of your career development. If you do this, you obviously will not look good to the school but if your future career plans are not going to be academic and do not require publications etc. then you don't have to worry about this. Maybe each field is different, but in my field, publishing is an important part of graduating and getting a good job only if you want to stay in academic research. Plenty of students I know who are not interested in this do not publish at all during grad school. However, I would not neglect grad school so much that you are actually in danger of flunking out. If you do flunk out, then you would have wasted all this time and so if your other priorities are more important to you than grad school and/or take too much time away from grad school that you may flunk out, then I would recommend taking a leave of absence from grad school or quitting grad school to focus on other priorities more important! I guess my main message is that you should do what you are motivated to do and what you are passionate about. There's nothing wrong with you or your plan if this means prioritizing other work over grad school/research or even leaving grad school altogether. It's better to leave as soon as you are certain you don't want to continue further instead of wasting away several more years and delaying the inevitable. That said, it sounds like you are interested in spending more time on your grad school work, which is fine too, but don't feel like you have to do it / stick it out in grad school. Life is short--do what you think will make you happiest in both the short and long term!

I fixed the typo for you

If it makes you feel any better, one of my TA assignments was an 8:30am-10:30am lab session on Monday and Tuesday morning! At least with the lab component, it made sure the students actually showed up, though. On the bright side, it really did help my productivity because if I had, e.g. a 2:30pm to 4:30pm lab session, then I would probably not get any work done between 2pm and 5pm!! (at 2pm, it would be like "no point starting something when I have to teach in 30 mins" and at 4:30pm it would be "no point starting when I am going home soon!") etc.