Are all decisions in a department made together?

[mixolydian]

A few friends of mine who applied to the same department that I did but a different specialization started getting acceptances. Is it that all the decisions in a department are made together by the same committee or are the decisions for different specializations in a department made separately?

PS. Sorry if this question tied a knot in your head . But this is a genuine doubt that I have.

[Bukharan]

It depends on the field, the university and the department in question. Don't worry yet: there is a good chance decisions in different specializations in the same subject are made separately in your field in your school.

For History, for instance, a few acceptances have already been reported for big schools on Gradcafe a couple of weeks ago, yet we are still waiting for final (and most) decisions to be made.

[neuropsychosocial]

It depends on the field. In my discipline, subfields makes their own decisions, but they still need to be voted on by the entire department, but it's mostly a formality. However, people from one subfield heard one week, people from another subfield heard another week - and several of the subfields haven't popped up on the results board yet. In disciplines where there are deep lines between subfields without much crossover, I think it's quite likely that various programs make their decisions at different times.

At a number of schools, applicants who were nominated for university-level fellowships have already been notified, because most graduate schools have deadlines for those programs in February, but applicants who are not nominated but still under consideration for admission haven't been. If only one or two people for a given program have appeared, with most people receiving no word at all, my guess is that those were nominees for fellowships.

[Vacuum]

I called one of my programs to ask about this. They said that there are completely different committees for the two subjects within the same department. But, like the previous posters mentioned, this may vary from school to school.

Edited February 14, 2011 by Vacuum