Two-body international student advices

[gabriele]

Hi! I'm looking with my partner for a PhD position in the USA for the Fall 2012. We'd like to get some advices for our admission. We are italian students.

It would be really great to get admitted in the same city or, why not, in the same campus. We can sacrifice the university ranking/prestige for this purpose.

Our field of interest are Computational/Theoretical Chemistry(me) Material Science/Thermochemistry (her), we already have a Laurea Triennale (equivalent to a BoS) and hopefully we're going to take a Laurea Magistrale (equivalent to a MSc) in Phisical Chemistry on July 2012. We already have done a 3 month long research internship (+thesis) in our University (it's required for graduating) and we will do another 9 month internship (+ thesis) for our MSc.

We have a very different grading system and since almost all of our exams are oral our average scores are variable but they're around 27/30 - 28/30 where 18 is the minimum required to pass the exam. We don't know if our grading is comparable with US grading system. The fact that our exam are oral means that the grades are not very objective, it much depends on the professor: for example sometimes is just impossible to take a 30/30, or to refuse a grade when you get > 27/30. We're not top students but we are pretty good.

We are studying and hoping to get a good TOEFL score, we believe we can do well on GRE quant but analytical writing and verbal won't probably go very well (as as you can see from my poor writing skills:-).

About our letters of recommendation we will ask to our internship mentors (pheraps two researchers and full professor). We have a pretty good relationship with them and they appreciate us.

Considering this situation do we have any possibility to get into some grad school (we need funding)?

What is the school level in which we can aspire (approximately)?

How do you suggest to proceed?

What can we do to improve our possibilities?

Thank you very much for reading,

G & V