czesc

Got a rejection as well, with a notification that I will get reviewer comments in May. Apparently with the IDRF only the top 10-15% of applications receive reviewer comments...is this true with this award as well or does everyone get them? Trying to find a silver lining here.

I haven't really heard of this happening so I wonder if it's really common...though I can see how it would happen if someone wanted to pursue it as a strategy. I wouldn't advise anyone to go into a PhD thinking they might do this, though; s/he is looking at a lot of wasted time given that not all the coursework (if any) will count toward the second school's requirements.

This is not at all true. Transferring is next to impossible. It can be done in exceptional circumstances, but those are circumstances like your chair moving to another university and happening to care enough to negotiate a spot for you (in which case you have no say in where you might go) or your chair dying and no one in the department possessing the expertise to train you anymore. Very possibly there are also circumstances in which professors facilitate a transfer because of a change of interest, but those are far from easy to arrange.

I'm going to contradict some of the advice given here and say this doesn't matter as much as it may seem. Grad students are a transient population. By the time you get there, half the people you met may either be gone in the field or on their way out as postdocs. And within a year of your being there, a group of new recruits will flood the scene and change the nature of the grad student community. Plus, your closest colleagues may not even turn out to be the ones in your specific department, but formally study different fields. So it's very hard to predict what your social/collegial circumstances will be like, especially on the basis of a visiting weekend when everyone's trying hard to recruit you.

Hey guys - I'm always sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but downvoting it is not a way to incentivize people in programs already to keep you informed either way.

I've heard that there's no waiting list per Graduate School policy, so it's possible (unless there's some unofficial means by which they kept some people in reserve) that if you haven't heard yet, you know.

Not sure if it helps anyone to know, but I heard that around 21 people were admitted to Cornell this year.

No one I know here lives in the graduate housing, and the most convenient bus route in Ithaca (every 10 minutes) runs from downtown to campus. In winter, you don't want to be waiting more than 10 minutes for a bus here. That said, there are places where multiple bus routes run and may actually take you to your destination more frequently depending on where you are and where you're going. As for living expenses - in Ithaca they're relatively low (at least relative to NYC - compared to anywhere else, I'm not so sure) especially if you live with roommates and don't have a car (a bus pass is only $200 a year compared to $100+/month for transit in NYC and carshare can help with trips for which buses aren't convenient). But be prepared for rents to be more than you'd expect for a small town in the middle of nowhere; all the student renters (including undergrads, for whom there aren't nearly enough dorms) create enormous pressure on the small housing stock. Whatever you do, don't live somewhere you have to depend on cabs; they're notoriously slow, overcharge crazily and you will wind up sharing with a boggling number of people who will all ask to pay separate fares even if they're taking the same trip.

Update on Cornell: I heard that, as of Monday, final decisions still hadn't been made yet. Sorry to all for the waits.

This is all very true, but I think you could broaden your selection even among the top schools (or those with good / desirable placement rates).

This is going to depend entirely on the school and whether they do interviews regularly. As will the question of whether waitlisting implies rejection in general. At Princeton, for example, a waitlisting is rarely more than a consolation prize, with little chance of actual admission possible. At other schools, waitlisting implies a realistic shot.

These people do tend to move around if they're not in the optimal location. Make sure you're not going after a big fish in a small pond who's craving a shot at the open sea. You may find yourself left behind.

Heartwarming stories aside, historigradhopeful, I would go with what you seem to have surmised in your second post and applied to more than five programs in the next cycle if this one doesn't work out, with a couple at least that weren't top ranked. That is, unless you don't think it's worth it to go get a PhD unless you go to one of those five schools.

Wow. Seven. And several may not even go. That's going to be a really tiny cohort for NYU.

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