Anger, anyone?

[Mal83]

Has anyone else had a ton of trouble securing funding?

I got accepted to three of the schools I applied to, rejected to one. All the schools were midwestern state universities. The one I got rejected to had 600 applicants for 25 spots, and I'm going for statistics, so I never imagined that kind of competition. Anyway, two of the three schools had their budget slashed to the point where they weren't even sure how they were going to offer TA's, and they told me they couldn't make any decisions until June due to budgetary issues. The fourth school I got full funding from, which I accepted in a heartbeat, but a lot of my friends graduating next year are scared to death because I had the best resume(3.74GPA in major, 1310GRE and REU exp.) of us. It makes me angry to see that so many qualified people aren't even going to get the opportunity because of the insane competition, and budget cuts. Did anyone else run into that issue or was it just me?

It's not just you, every year it gets harder and harder, especially in this job market. I think there are a lot of people out there who couldn't get jobs so they're going to grad school instead so that adds to the competition. I certainly hoped to work for a while before going, but that didn't work out and after realizing that I would never get a job I applied to grad school and I'm ecstatic I got in somewhere because now I can move on with my life and create more opportunities...obviously. But talking about competition, I applied to the International Development program at my dream school, I got waitlisted, which was of course at first disappointing, but in the letter they said that over 2,100 people applied for 350 spots in the entire school of international affairs, not even just this one program. So I'm sure there were a lot more than 350 very qualified applicants in there. I'm happy to have gotten that far with them, never mind funding.