crustaceangirl

Good job, xkcdaddict! Congrats! PS: I love that comic too.

No WAY do I want to apply to more schools! I'd be happy to never apply for anything ever again... but I know that in my first or second year of grad school I'll probably be applying for pre-doctoral fellowships and stuff, which will be even more work. Sigh... I do check this site (and some other grad school related sites) obsessively, and now that I've got interviews coming up I'm reading everything I can find about the schools that are interviewing me, as well as tips on what questions to ask during interviews, who to talk to, what to wear... and so on. Oh, and checking apartment listings on Craigslist for every city I might be moving to!

It's cool, I figured you were probably kidding. :-)

Hey, scientists do have to write! Your data is no good to the community if you can't report it clearly and concisely. I mean, journals do have an editorial staff to help you, but it's important to have good persuasive (grants!) and descriptive writing skills. Now, the GRE writing test is another thing... I agree with the poster who said that Florida Writes! in the 10th grade was the best prep of all. I've had the five paragraph essay beaten into me from a young age. Plus one of my "critique this argument" questions was all about bad statistical methods, so I wrote a lot for that one.

Re: LORs, I think you'll be okay. The most important factor is how good the letter is, not the prof's specialty and so on. If they all raved about how great you are and how they have all these good reasons for you to go to grad school in political science, it will be fine. They taught you most recently, so they can best vouch for your current level of scholarship. For your SOP and the prof who moved, I wouldn't contact them. Yeah, it might mess with your chances to get in, if you only talked about his/her research. But if you mentioned a more general area that you're into and listed Prof. X as an example of someone working in that field, the adcom can go, "Well, Prof. X left, but Profs Y. and Z. still work in this area. Prof. Z, read this guy's application and see what you think." In my SOPs I tried to always mention more than one professor in case of problems like this. One school that interviewed me wrote to tell me that TWO profs I talked about in my SOP would be unable to meet with me, aren't taking students, have left the program, whatever. They still wanted to interview me; they just asked me to pick some more faculty members I'd like to talk to. Random: I went to Brandeis for undergrad, so if you have any questions about the school in general or living in the area, I'm happy to talk about it. I'm a science person but have good friends who majored in poli sci there.

Crossedfingers, the rejections that were sent out are for people who didn't survive the first (or maybe second) round of cuts, i.e. we were not invited to the recruitment weekend (generally, invitations to a visit like that are only sent to perhaps a few dozen applicants out of hundreds). Presumably after the recruitment weekend they will make their final decisions from the short list. I did not make that short list in the first place, neither did myheartsapounding, neither did most other applicants. Personally, I'm glad they let me know sooner rather than later so I can plan for the interviews/recruitment weekends to which I was invited. I know some schools make admissions decisions in January/February but don't bother sending rejection notices until March or April (if ever), which can make some people wonder endlessly if they're on some kind of waiting list, etc.

Ooh, burn! I'll have you know that I'm a scientist and my verbal score outpaced my quantitative by a good margin. (According to you, I scored well enough to be a humanities PhD. Heh.) We write papers too! ;-) Yes, I think we fundamentally agree on this and are just quibbling over statistical issues. LaraAnn, I can sympathize with how you feel about the numbers game. It's true that a few data points do not give you a clear concept of who the candidate is, and I agree that committees should look at the hard work we put into our essays, writing samples, CVs, etc. I think that as long as your scores/GPA are decent (and yours sound like they are), someone will at least read your SOP, letters of recommendation, and so on. If you do really abysmally on the GRE or have a sub-3.0 GPA, some schools might send your app straight to the circular file, but I don't think you'll have that problem.

Minnesotan, I didn't mean to imply that a good GRE score is not important in the admissions process or that it doesn't indicate anything. I was just pointing out the inconsistency between saying that less than 1% of the general population gets a PhD, thus one should get such-and-such percentile on the GRE to be admitted to a PhD program. Being "average" for the population of college grads seeking further education (which I would argue is a different population than college grads in general -- a lot of people have a "rubber stamp" view of a bachelor's degree and consider it obligatory, but would never think of going to school for longer than they feel is strictly necessary) is not an awful thing to be. Yeah, you won't get into a top-tier school, but there are schools in the middle for people whose application stats are in the middle. Anyway, I'm not trying to be argumentative either. I tend to do well on standardized tests, so I didn't stress over the GRE and was happy with my scores. Just wanted to explain my comment in a little more detail (sorry I didn't use any hockey analogies... as a Floridian, I have no idea what the heck hockey is about).

90th %ile on the GRE doesn't put you in the top 10% of the general population, it puts you in the top 10% of people who took the GRE, i.e. college graduates who are applying to graduate programs.

Hey, treehugger, cool to see someone from one of my programs! Maybe I'll meet you on my visit. I'm a little nervous about the interview weekend -- not sure what kind of questions they'll ask me, what my chances of actually being accepted after the interview are, and so on. Any insight about how your meetings with professors went during your interview would be awesome. I'm comfortable talking about my research, my interests, etc., I'm just a little scared someone might ask me detailed questions about some molecular pathway I've never heard of and then write me off as an idiot. Sounds like your February will be as packed as mine, adizzygirl. I think you're absolutely right about being noticed because you picked schools where you love the research they're doing. That will always show in your application, and I'm sure you'll do well in your interviews. Good luck!

I'll be interviewing at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, UNC Chapel Hill, WUSTL, and Emory. I'm really excited to visit the schools and meet faculty 'cause I like all of these programs. Still waiting to hear from Berkeley, Columbia, and UT Austin.

Yes, I applied through neuroscience departments or through biology/biomedical departments. Interviewing at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, UNC Chapel Hill, WUSTL and Emory. So excited! Although I'm sure by the end of February I'll be wiped out. Still waiting to hear from Berkeley, Columbia, and UT Austin. Looks like no one else has heard from any of them yet either, so all I can do is wait...

I applied to 9 schools because I wanted to be sure I'd get in SOMEWHERE. A few reach schools/really high ranked programs (UCSF and UW included... they rejected me too), one "safety," and the rest in between. My numbers are worse than yours (3.4 GPA, 1400 GRE) but I have more research experience (3 years part time, 1.5 years full time). If you only applied to the absolute most competitive schools, you're going to have trouble getting accepted no matter how good your stats, since the top-ranked programs receive apps from basically everyone who's applying in the field each year, including the best of the best. They simply cannot accept every well-qualified applicant. So far I have 2 rejections and 4 interviews. If your other schools are less competitive then I'd say you still have good odds. Keep us posted...!

Congrats, fellow neuro people! Since my last post in this thread I received two more interview invites. Yipe... I'm starting to worry about taking so much time off work to go visit these schools. But of course, I'd rather have too many invitations than too few, so I am NOT complaining. Still waiting to hear from three more. I'm not sure if I'd turn any of them down, if they all invited me, but my calendar is already really full... I guess I'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks.

I think your odds are good. Some programs invite twice as many applicants as they can accept... but I get the feeling that for most of them, the paid-for interview weekend thing is mostly to make sure you're as good in person as you are on paper, and to sell you on coming to their school. Are you still waiting to hear from any other programs?

I was sad seeing this forum with no posts in it. Anyone here applying to life science programs this year? I'm applying for neuroscience/neurobiology, but with some general biomedical/biological science umbrella programs.

Thanks, totallyfreakingout. If the grad school karma gods ask me, I'll say you did your part. :-)

I'm one of those damned science applicants. I've now gotten two interview invitations, which is soooo awesome. Let me just repeat: awesome! I'd been freaking out over one school that announced when it was going to make interview decisions, because I didn't get one. Then I got two other invites, completely unexpectedly! And one came after I'd heard that they'd already sent stuff out (which had me assuming I'd been rejected). Out of nine schools, I'm pretty sure that three aren't going to interview me (already sent out invites to other people, plus they're very competitive programs). Two have invited me to interview. Four are as yet unknown! Now I'm wondering how selective they are about interviewing people. I've heard at some schools, almost everyone who interviews gets accepted, while others accept only about half, etc. Even if I only have a 50/50 shot of acceptance at either one that's invited me so far, though, statistically speaking I should get accepted somewhere. I hope that paying for me to fly out for a few days means that these places really, really liked my application. *crosses fingers* I'm applying to neuroscience PhD programs, some of which are under the umbrella of general biological/biomedical sciences programs. I think my stats are decent -- I did a BS/MS, wrote an honors thesis, had 3 years part-time and 1.5 years full-time research experience under my belt upon applying, 1400 combined GRE, 3.4 cumulative GPA (I was worried about this a lot), and 4 letters of recommendation from undergrad faculty and my current supervisor. There seem to be a lot of social science and humanities people posting here, so I'm sorry if this makes your heads explode. Your time will come soon! If there are any life science people with interview tips, I'd be glad to hear them... my first one is on February 4!

First post here! I'm going nuts waiting. Even though -- don't kill me -- I'm one of those science people and got one interview invitation already. That's incredibly awesome and all, but I applied to nine schools, so I just wanna KNOW! Got back from holiday vacation this week and picked up my accumulated mail at the post office. There was a big Priority Mail envelope in the pile, and I started freaking out thinking it might be a package from one of my schools... but no, for some reason Verizon just felt the need to Priority Mail me some advertisements. Good luck to everyone... might I recommend a yoga class or a massage to help you de-stress as you wait this out?