Another chances thread with very specific questions:

[dem]

I have asked this on a different forum as well, but since I am just sitting here still undecided whether I should send in my application package in a month, I thought I would ask here as well, maybe somebody has been in a similar situation:

Background (skip if you just want the question )
I have for 5+ years been interested in the same academic areas, which included a branch of social science and mathematics/computer science. I never thought the two would ever merge, but it did, so right now my interests lie in social computing; doing social science with "Big Data". I have an undergrad from the best university in my country, which no one has ever heard of outside the country. My undergrad grades are pretty awful, since the degree was not very challenging, but I graduated with an Excellent diploma, which is the highest honors you can receive (when grading the diploma, they don't look at your GPA; they only look at your thesis grade, which has to be excellent, the result of your final exams, which is an intense oral and written exam of everything you studied during your undergrad -this also has to be excellent- and recommendations from two professors who taught you, your supervisor and an extra prof, who have to agree to grant you an Excellent diploma), but I think they rather look at your grades than the grade of your diploma, so I don't know how much that offsets my not so spectacular grade average.

I started a second undergrad in Computer science, which is going well, but I am only doing it as a hobby, as my academic interests are not in computer science, it is rather a tool I use to do research in social sciences.

I did two summer research 'schools' with a well-known university in Europe, and then I did my master's degree at this university, graduating with an 81% average, which is considered an A. All throughout my studies I was very successful, even when I wasn't getting good grades, it was accepted that I was the best at both my undergrad and my grad schools, so my recommendation are going to be very good. All my professors are urging me to do a PhD, I got offered two PhD positions already, but I don't want to take either of them, since I want to explore a new department. 

I have presented at one major conference at the university that I want to apply to, my presentation didn't go too well, it didn't seem very professional in my opinion and then my paper that I submitted for the conference journal got rejected. So that is a huge blow. I have presented at two workshops, and 4 of my assignments for my master's are going to be published in a book that is being put together by the head of my department (however, I don't know whether the details will be smoothed out before I can make my application, so that might not appear on my CV).

I know I was a very advanced master's student and an undergrad student, some of my results make this obvious, some not so much. However, I don't have any publications yet, none of the works I did received any media attention and I haven't interned in any of the big research institutes. The reason I am listing these as shortcomings is that most of the people who are doing PhDs in the one school I would really like to end up in have very impressive CVs, and I am not sure how mine compares. Currently I am actually working as a researcher in my specific academic area, doing the things I would like to do for my dissertation and I am doing this for a company, where I have complete freedom.  

The school that I want to go to is in the UK, and I talked with the prof that I'd want as my supervisor during the conference, we only talked for a few minutes, I expressed my interest in doing a PhD and having her as my supervisor, and she said that if my application got to her, then she would definitely like me in her group, however she doesn't have much say in whose application gets sent to her, since that decision is made by the university wide admission commitee first. I don't know whether this was just a very polite way of rejecting me in advance. I am not saying that she should have offered me a PhD position right there and then if she really thought she wanted to supervise me, but she didn't ask for my name or anything to make sure that she pays attention to my application or didn't ask me to contact her by e-mail or anything. 

 

So the bottom line is, I don't think I made the best impression on this department by getting a rejection from my paper being published in the conference proceedings (which is edited by 3 people from the department, one of them being my potential supervisor), and I can't tell if the potential supervisor was being polite by saying she would want to work with me, or she really would, since she hasn't made any for to contact me afterwards (we didn't exchange contact information). How bad do you think getting rejected from the department's own journal influence my application?

Edited December 22, 2012 by dem

[blakeblake]

Maybe the rejection will matter and maybe it won't.  Surely the people in your potential future department don't remember the names of everyone who they reject for their journal, so you might be stressing out over nothing.

 

I think the only thing that you can do at this point is to stop worrying about it, apply to your desired program, brag about your unique attributes (your computer science background and how it will benefit your research), and see what happens.