TakeruK

My point was that you should not have to "prove" that you are ready for the next step -- the admissions committee cannot evaluate this. If you say you are ready then you are!

I want to put this in a different post since I am making two fairly different points! Your application is confidential, in the sense that only the people who need to see it for admissions purposes are allowed to see it. So, for example, it would be unethical for a prof at School A to send your application to their friend at School B (or a different department etc.) without your permission. (I'm not commenting on whether or not profs between schools actually communicate information about the applicants, but it is definitely unethical if they do). However, "need to see it" can include a lot of people. In one of my past schools, the committee would forward all applications to any profs named in the SOP as potential supervisors. At another school, the committee simply vets applications for completeness and some minimum quality and then all of the applications are forwarded to the entire department, because admission is based on one of the profs saying "yes, I will fund this student". And at yet another school, the department is small enough that the admissions committee is the entire faculty. I think the answer to your question is that you won't have control over who sees your application. You might not even know the admissions committee members, so there is a good chance that your future instructors and it will probably be certain that your future supervisor will see it.

In my opinion, you should not have to give many details because the admissions committee's role is not to decide whether or not your past will affect your future career as a graduate student. Let me try to explain with an example. Example: "Bob". During Bob's junior year, Bob had depression and as a result, his academic performance severely suffered. Ultimately, through help, Bob mostly recovered and put his studies back on track. Although Bob may have occasional periods of time where depression still affects his work, he is now able to manage it so there are no serious affects on his academic and personal life. However, due to failing courses in junior year, Bob had to repeat most of his junior year classes and subsequently took an extra year to finish his undergraduate studies. (In this example, the "issue" began after starting college but this could also apply to anything that happened before college too). In this case, I don't think Bob needs to give any more details in his SOP than the fact that in his junior year, he suffered from a health issue that prevented him from performing at his best and as a result, his grades in that year are not on par with his ability and that's why he needed the extra year. He could also say that the issues are now resolved that he is confident in his ability to perform his work as a graduate student. I think that's all that needs to be said. One or two sentences in the SOP. Unless he chooses to, Bob should not have to disclose what his illness is, nor should he have to describe his treatment, nor should he have to "prove" that he is actually healthy and ready for graduate school. This is private personal information that the admissions committee does not require in order to make their decision. Even if Bob did disclose his entire history with depression, the admissions committee are not medical doctors -- they have no expertise in order to decide whether or not Bob is "healthy" enough to undertake a graduate program at their school. All the admissions committee needs to know is that Bob's junior year grades are not reflective of his ability but that is now resolved and Bob is ready for graduate study. The only "proof" they need of Bob's readiness for graduate school is the fact that Bob says he is ready. I think this very low level of detail is appropriate because it is not like the admissions committee has a chart of things like "okay, let's add 0.8 points to the GPA if they had depression, 0.5 points if they had a death in the family, etc. etc.". In every case where a person needs to provide a reason for something like academic performance (or test performance), the only thing that person can do is to declare the fact that the GPA/score/etc. does not reflect their ability. The admissions committee and the applicant have no way to quantifying how much the GRE/score/etc is affected by the thing that happened, or what might happen in the future because of this. I know there are professors that have posted agreeing with this sentiment. I think one common argument for describing more details is that something vague like "health issue" or "personal reasons" sound like it could be made up, or that providing details will make the admissions committee more aware of how serious the affect on your GPA/score/etc. was. My counter-argument for the first reason is that giving more details doesn't make it any less of a lie, and as I said above, it's not the admissions committee's place to decide whether or not you had health issues/personal problems etc. My counter-argument for the second reason is also the same as above -- there's no way for them to quantify the effect it might have on you anyways -- you can only identify that there was something. In summary, I do not think the OP needs to name what happened to them nor should the OP need to justify how they got over it. The OP could disclose it if they want, but if doing so will make them uncomfortable, then don't do it. The OP just needs to state that their performance in school was affected due to "personal reasons" (or whatever phrase you want to use).

I don't think it's accurate to say that you *must* have first author publications to get into the top programs. I know plenty of people who do not and are in some of the schools mentioned here. I think it's actually the exception for an incoming student to have a first authored paper -- usually that happens by year 2 or 3 of grad school. Even for the top programs, having first author publications is the exception, not the norm. Having co-authored publications is more common though, but again, I would not say it's an absolute requirement. I think one of your challenges might be your GPA, but as you said, if you can demonstrate academic excellence, it might be okay. Having a lot of talks/posters could be good, if you presented them at major national conferences mostly. But they are mainly good because you probably did some interesting research in order to get these posters/talks in the first place!! In my planetary science program, there are many visitors, current faculty/students, and prospective students interested in astrobiology research. But we approach it from an astronomy/physics basis and it seems like you will be approaching it from a biology basis. So, I can't really compare your profile to those that are here / applied here (it's not one of the schools you listed though). I think one potential problem you might run into is that there are just so few astrobiology programs, which means very few positions, which means tougher competition! One thing you could do is to join a biology program that does astrobiology related research? That might open up more opportunities.

I agree -- but you don't have to demonstrate "fit" with a prof from the ad comm. You can demonstrate fit with one or more profs from the entire department. The role of the ad comm is to find candidates that will be a good match for the entire department, not just their own research group.

Yes, you definitely can. I know one of my previous institutions publishes all of their departmental meeting minutes, including the annual meeting where they decide which professor will serve on which committee for the coming year. The department even puts out print and electronic versions of these committee rosters. At that school, a graduate student sat in every major committee and also the main departmental meeting, so it's not like this information is always "secret". But, like the others said, this information is pretty much useless for an application. To strengthen your SOP, you want to make sure you fit well with at least one professor in the department. It wouldn't matter if this prof was on the admission committee or not -- the role of the ad comm is to find fit for the entire department, not just students for themselves! You would be better off spending your time figuring out which member(s) of the department you would fit with the best, regardless of whether they are on the committee, and tailor your SOP to fit those people instead!

I think this would really depend on each case, but probably yes. I have known several cases where due to an accounting error, students ended up being paid more than they were supposed to were eventually asked to return the money when the mistake was discovered. Even when the mistake is the employer's fault, that doesn't entitle the employee to get extra pay. Sometimes the mistake was found almost right away (so then we got a deduction on the next paycheque) while others the mistake was found months after my friend had completely finished their research assistant job and moved on to a different school/job entirely! All of these cases happened to me or my friends in Canada though, but I don't imagine US law would be so different here. I think this really sucks though, and I kind of know how you feel. Unfortunately, I think there isn't that much you can do unless you have a signed contract that says you are supposed to be paid this extra money. In all of the above cases, we did have signed contracts stipulating our research assistant pay, and the mistake was that the school accidentally paid us more than our contract said (but neither the school nor the students realised it at the time), so they were in the right to take it back. However, if the school did make a mistake and told you that you would be getting $X in support and/or pay, then they will have to honour their contract, I think. When this happened in the past, for larger sums of money (as in your case), the school did offer to give the student a period of time to pay back what was owed, without interest, though. So if you can't get them to allow you to keep the money, maybe you can at least have more time to come up with the money?

hahaha

I'm going to agree with fuzzy and disagree with excusemyfrench. In my opinion, an SOP is a direct-to-the-point professional document rather than an long-winded essay about yourself and your experiences. So, I would also advise to begin with your research interests instead of a quote or an anecdote. I say this because the reader will be reading tens or hundreds of SOPs and unless you are a very good writer, attempting to write an interesting "hook" will just make yours look like everyone else trying to write an interesting hook. The reader is already interested in reading your application anyways, and they don't really have a choice. I feel that hooks are more useful when you want to make a reader choose to read your writing. So, instead of making the committee read through a few sentences of filler before getting to see what they really want, I would say to just jump right into it. I'd begin with "I want to pursue a PhD in X at School Y because I want to ___________" or some variant of that. State exactly what you want out of a PhD. I agree that you do want to make yourself stand out amongst all of the other SOPs that the committee will have to read. But I think it's far better to do this by what you say in the SOP. In your SOP, you will describe your past experiences and skills and how they will help you achieve your PhD goals. Your experiences and skills here should be what you want the committee to remember you by. Note that these don't all have to be academic-related -- you may have experiences and skills that help you in a PhD through non-academic pasts. In my opinion, you want to stand out to the committee because of something you did in the past that is relevant to your future career goals. You don't want to stand out because you wrote an interesting quote said by someone else, or just because you have an interesting story about why you want to do a PhD. After all, every single applicant has been motivated somehow to do a PhD. But not every applicant can be as qualified for this particular PhD program as you, and I think that's the point you'd want to convey in the SOP. But I don't think there is a single right way to write an SOP. This is just my opinion/style -- it's not like starting or not-starting with a quote/story will get you accepted or rejected!

Yes you can, but I think it might be better to wait until May/June of that year, well after the application season is over. One of the schools I applied to did mention that they can provide evaluations after May if requested. However, like fuzzy said, many rejections are going to happen not because the applicant isn't qualified for the program, but there were better qualified applicants, so your comments might just be pretty vague (i.e. "your application was strong but there were applicants that were more competitive than you"). They probably won't be able to say "well if your GPA was X higher, you would have got in" or "if your LOR writer said `excellent' instead of 'very good'", or "if your GRE score was 5 points higher" etc. because admission is a holistic process and it's probably true that there was an applicant that did better than you in any one single aspect. If your results are nothing like you expected (e.g. rejected everywhere), then perhaps it might be useful to get the feedback in case there is something you didn't know about your application!

For one professor, I sent an email in mid November and didn't hear back, even after the one follow-up two weeks later. However, in late January, the prof finally replied, saying that he just saw my email from November! So sometimes they just miss your email.

It depends on how busy your people are. Some of mine responded right away, saying they will write it, while others took a few days / a week. If you have applications coming up Dec 1, then I would probably resend any requests around Nov 1 just in case you need to find an alternate LOR writer. You are talking about the initial request to ask if they can write your letter, right? If you mean you've already confirmed who will write your letters and you have just submitted the LOR details to your application system so that the email LOR request just went to your writers, then you should probably expect to not hear back for awhile. Most of my LOR writers submitted their letters just a day or two before the deadline, sometimes one or two days after the deadline.

Remember that by definition, a significant fraction of accepted students will have scores below the published "average" value. Also, admission is a non-quantitative and holistic process. That is, the committee will look at your entire package as a whole and judge it -- it's unlikely they will assign each criteria a number of points and then award admission to the highest scores! So it's not a quantitative process, especially since you can't "score" things like LORs, CVs, SOPs etc. Thus, you can't really ask questions like "does extra points in X count for a deficiency in Y". Although some programs might have to do an initial cut based on numbers in order to cut down the amount they can look at, being close to average should allow you to make this cut, in theory. After all, if a good chunk of people that actually get admitted fall below the average, there's no way they are cutting applications at the published average scores. So I think you are in good shape to not have to worry about your application being thrown out at the school you're applying for. They will also look at your transcript as a whole and see the trend in your GPA and where your strong courses are. I'm not sure if it's worth spending the time to bump your GRE scores by 1 or 2 points -- instead use that time to write a really impactful SOP

Just a reminder that the April 15th rule is only an agreed-upon convention for offers of funding, not admission. For most programs, funding and admission go hand in hand, but this is not always true. Also, it's a non-binding formal agreement between the schools that signed that Charter, so while most schools will follow this convention, there is nothing stopping them from doing otherwise. I'm not saying that the OP's schools won't follow it, but it's important to remember that while the majority of programs will follow this convention, it's not universal.

I agree that if you think you have enough interests in the program without that person replying, you should apply anyways! I emailed every POI and only about 2/3rds of them responded. I had at least 3 people at each school, so fortunately for me, I had at least one person respond from each school. I would only use "didn't reply to me" as a criterion for not sending in an application if I wasn't really feeling like that program was a good fit in the first place (but wanted to email to find out).

I didn't mean to contradict you I somehow read your sentence as implying all private universities don't fund, (i.e. as if you mean the phrase "that don't fund" to describe all of private universities, not just a describer of a subset!) Oops. Sorry for the misunderstanding!

Yes, the workbook will tell accurately tell you the conversion between # of questions correct and the SCALED SCORE. However, the workbook's table for scaled score to percentile might be outdated. So if you want to estimate your scaled score based on the practice test, the workbook is fine. If you want to estimate your percentile rank based on the test, then use the workbook to compute your scaled score, then use the updated online table to go from scaled score to percentile rank. Does that make sense? In summary, the conversion from # correct to "scaled score" is something that is unique to any particular version of the test (there are more than one version even on the same test date). That will never change and we only ever get to see this conversion for the practice tests that ETS publishes. The scaled score is supposed to account for any differences in test difficulty from one version to another, so that a scaled score of "800" for example, is supposed to mean the same level of skill no matter what test you wrote. The percentile rank varies over time because it shows how you compare to the recent pool of test-takers, so this accounts for students getting better/worse over time.

I didn't get some of my responses for several weeks. I'd try to send the email again after the 2 weeks mark. I don't think emailing the admissions people would help, since you want to talk to the POI directly. Also, I don't think getting the admin staff to contact the POI to tell them to talk to you would do you any favours! If you think you might have an outdated email address or something though, then maybe it would be helpful to ask the admin staff to check your address.

Glad it was helpful! I forgot to mention that at one of the schools I visited, one of the profs that was on sabbatical timed one of their visits home to overlap with the prospective grad student weekend so that they could meet potential new students. So, in that case, there was really no difference in the amount of contact I had with this prof and other profs at the same school who weren't on sabbatical.

ETS publishes the conversion from scaled score to percentile ranking online. This conversion table is updated every year (on July 1) so that your percentile rank is your scaled score ranking in comparison to a rolling window of the past 3 years of test takers. That is, there should be a date on the table in the workbook and it's probably out of date at this point. In addition, this means that your percentile ranking might change from year to year as the pool of the "past 3 years" changes! Here is the ETS webpage about this practice: http://www.ets.org/gre/subject/scores/understand/ and here is the PDF with the latest conversion table (linked from that page too): http://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table2.pdf

UC Berkeley was the school I had in mind when I said that some schools will have funding sources to pay for the first year of "out of state" students. Not all private universities don't fund their students. Actually, private universities don't usually charge different tuition rates to in-state vs out-of-state vs. international applicants, so you won't even have to worry about this fact when applying to private universities that generally fully fund their PhD students (in California, e.g. Stanford and Caltech).

Good idea!! In my field, many PhD students in their final year will attend lots of conferences to make contacts, and also schedule "talk circuits" if possible at many schools in areas they would want to work in order to make connections for future jobs. Conferences are great because it brings together a ton of people in the field and it's also a place to give people 5-10 min intro of your research (by giving a conference talk) and this might lead to an invite to come and deliver an hour long colloquium/seminar talk at a school where you want to postdoc. Alternatively, conferences are a good way to network and build connections so that when you want to give a talk at school X, you can reach out to someone you know there and secure an invite. Going to Europe to do this is a similar idea but potentially much more expensive to be going repeatedly or to multiple places. So, I think attending a European conference would be a more cost-effective way to do this since it will bring a large number of people to you instead. If the conference is close to a few schools that you can take the train to, then it would be a good idea to reach out to these profs and ask if you can come give a seminar! So I think in my field, this is not only a good idea, but it's almost an essential thing to do!

I agree with what surefire is saying. Here are some additional thoughts: 1. I wouldn't worry too much about having LORs from people who are not studying exactly the same subfield. Unless I am very wrong about my interpretation of your last post, your 3 LORs are all from History professors, right? I think that is good enough because you will be applying to a History PhD program at a History department, not Specific Topic X program at Specific Topic X department. That is, the people who will read your application will be all kinds of History professors, who will know names of researchers in all different subfields. So, while you would definitely not want a LOR from e.g. Intro to Physics prof (I think a letter like this would be worse than neutral, it would be actually negative), it should be okay if it's at least a history professor. 2. I usually tell science students that it's great to have research experience, no matter the topic. That is, working a summer in a laser lab would be very useful for applying to grad school even in something like astronomy. What they want from the applicant is research experience, not necessarily established skills in the subfield you're applying to. So, others have told me that in the social sciences / humanities, it's harder to get research LORs, but if you have written extensive research/term paper for your history profs, they would be able to give insight in your ability to perform graduate level research work. Thus, I would say that your Civil War prof's insight about your ability to write a Civil War research paper would be very valuable towards your application, even if you are not applying to do Civil War research. Hope that makes sense? 3. It sounds like all 3 of your letters are from people you took classes from though. Although people have said it's harder to do research in your field, I've also heard others in your field talk about the importance of research LORs vs a "did well in class" LOR. Will you be doing a senior thesis? If you know that prof well enough, perhaps he or she can write a LOR for you. 4. When it comes to LORs, I really think you should not have a 4th letter unless all four letters are exactly the same "goodness" and there is a reason for having four. If you have four potential letters that are not the same strength, determine which one is the weakest and eliminate that. I think the general advice of the community is that all of your LORs are basically seen as a whole (i.e. you can think of it as an "average"), so having 3 great LORs and 1 mediocre one is far worst than having 3 great LORs. I would reserve the 4th LOR only if you really need to include the point of view of someone critical to a certain part of your application. And, I don't mean any offense, but given that "classwork" LORs are not as strong as research based ones, I would not think there is a real advantage to having 4 coursework LORs vs 3 coursework LORs. In your shoes, I would try to determine which 3 profs would write the best letters and only use LORs from those three!

Another way to phrase Pauli's answer to the first question is to think of it as "allocation of resources" as well as a "supply and demand" thing. Grad school applications work in a similar way as e.g. research funding grant. To make a very simple analogy -- NASA has allocated $X billion for research, and they aren't just going to equally divide the money to all scientifically valid projects. Instead, they hold a competition to determine what is the best way they can allocate their resources in order to get the most science/goodness out. Similarly, grad schools cannot simply admit every single qualified student. They have to allocate their resources (time, effort, classroom space, people power etc.) in order to get the most "goodness" (I guess in this case, the quantity and quality of skilled workers) out. In short, the school would rather spend their time training the best students to reach their maximum potential instead of training everyone to some equal level of goodness. For the second question about whether they will teach you something useful, I think that's actually a very good question to ask. Grad school (whether it's a research degree or a professional degree) is a big commitment of time and finances. It's important to critically think about whether or not the grad school will actually meet your goals before making this commitment. I always tell people that they should not go to grad school if the only thing they want to do is learn. Learning is a big part of career development and grad school, but that is not a strong enough reason to do this. I think it is very important to determine what your career goals are and identify how you can reach them. If grad school is what is necessary (either because you will learn important skills there, or because the certification is simply required for the career you want) then go do it. Otherwise, pursue what you need for your career instead -- there are a lot of other ways to satisfy your desire to learn about the field without going into grad school.

Most applications won't require you to pay the fee until you want to (finally, officially) submit it. That is, you won't be able to submit until you pay the fee, but you are allowed to do everything else. So, since a lot of my deadlines were at the same time and I didn't want to incur hundreds of dollars of debt on my credit card at once, I started paying the fees for one or two applications per week sometime in late November, to spread out the bills. I started paying the ones that were either due first or I was more sure about actually applying, because I am not sure you can get that fee refunded if you pay too early then change your mind!