syn2012

I'm guessing you're an international student. I've noticed that international students put way too much stock in the importance of publications. Any papers you publish as an undergrad will help your application, but they're not at all necessary. And if I've learned one thing during the admissions process it's that there's no one factor that will give you an "in" at any given school; it's very hard to predict.

The "quality" of each apartment depends on which area/building you're talking about. Do you have a specific two-bedroom apartment in mind? Like I said before, I'm 99% sure that the "efficiency" means the apartments with converted living rooms. In EV: "All mid-rise apartments have one bedroom. When two single students are sharing, the living room may be converted into a second bedroom, separated from the kitchen by a privacy divider. In these cases, students often agree to switch places mid-year. Students who want to bring their own beds may store the University bed at their own expense. No storage is available for unneeded furniture. Students provide their own cookware, dishes, utensils, towels, and other kitchen items." The 2-bd efficiencies are different from other two-bedroom apartments. For instance, the two bedroom apartments in Lyman are quite nice (my friend lives in one), but those aren't efficiencies. They are regular two-bedroom apartments.

I believe the efficiency apartments are designed to hold one person normally. One person lives in a bedroom, and one person lives in the living room, which has been converted to a bedroom except without any privacy.

While I can't be certain, I'd suspect that the admissions coordinators at a lot of schools will be working this weekend, so in these cases I think the deadline is the 15th. If you're really concerned, definitely call someone. I'm sure they'll be flexible if required.

@waiting: If your request was successful you'll get an email to your stanford account. @slorg: Priority is based on lottery, not on submission. You can edit your app until the May deadline. All the information is on the application and on the housing website.

Your program, and individual PI, will likely have a very strict policy about what you can and cannot do with your lab notebook. You don't mess around with this stuff. Issues of IP are taken very seriously.

It really depends on how you feel. Some of us (myself included) get really restless when home for a long summer break, regardless of how many trips I take, or how many books I read, so starting early is just fine for me. The month and half break I get before moving to my new school will be plenty of time. Others will want 3 or so months to just relax and do nothing.

I've used uni-ball Signo DX 0.28 exclusively for nearly 2 years now. Love, love, love them.

I'm in pretty much the same boat as you. I'm moving >2000 miles away, and I'm starting during the summer quarter. The main reason I wanted to do this is because grad school is a huge leap in terms of the responsibilities that you have. In many cases you're living completely on your own for the first time, you have to balance research with TA responsibilities and classes of your own, and you may have to deal with things like entrance exams. For me, starting during the summer is a good opportunity to ease into grad life so that, come fall, you're already settled and can hopefully manage your time better. I think I'm going out pretty early (end of June), but that still gives me a month and a half to just totally relax at home and spend time with old friends. In the end it's up to what you feel most comfortable with, but I think that exploring your research options and getting settled are the two biggest benefits of moving early.

Had a difficult time deciding between MIT and Stanford in the end, but Stanford it is!

Is anyone else planning on joining Stanford this fall?

Hahahahaha. All the guests were FastLane admins.

AWESOME!

Yeah, I guess I don't know exactly what past scoring methods were like, but I got this information from a veteran reviewer who's been doing this for a while, and he said it's definitely different this year. Maybe it's that each reviewer has a less-complete pool this year?

I spoke with one of the reviewers today, and he shared some interesting information about the review process. Apparently they changed the way that applications were scored. Instead of being based purely on raw score, the scores were each of the three reviewers who looked at each application had their scores scaled based on all of the other scores they gave. In other words, the average was determined, and z scores were assigned so that there was a "scale" to each grade. Many of the reviewers complained that this method was unfair to the applicants since a "moderate" score from a reviewer who assigned mostly low scores overall could count more than a high score coming from a reviewer who had a high average score. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if every reviewer scored every application in the pool, but since they only scored a small pool (for chemistry this was about 30/500), each applicant pools were judged by different standards. He suggested that since so many reviewers expressed concern about this system that the final review board could possibly (and this is pure speculation) go back and re-evaluate the applications using the old, more fair, raw scores. This would likely mean a delay in the release of results, beyond what we're currently expecting. Again, though, this is just a little information he passed on to me. He's not on the final review committee, so who knows what they'll end up doing?