Rejected for this year -- what to do until I apply again?

[telianathegreat]

Hi everyone,

 

I've just been rejected from a few PhD programs, and I haven't heard back from my other programs, but other people have received interviews (or even acceptances) from them, so it's not looking good for me to go to grad school this year. It seems like applying straight out of undergrad is pretty tough since you're competing against people who have master's degrees or who have had real jobs. Next year I'll have my honors thesis done, a real degree, and some work experience, so I hope that will help.

 

What I'm wondering now is what I should do this coming year. I plan on applying again next year, but what could I try to do to most strengthen my application? Try to work in a lab? I'm a linguistics major with a psychology minor who has taken developmental psych, so I'm thinking that maybe I could be a somewhat competitive applicant for language acquisition or child/infant cognition labs, though that's not really what I want to do (sociolinguistics). Are there other things I should be trying to do?

 

Any advice?

[uromastyx]

Everything!!

Beef up your CV. Professional experience (lab, internship, job, teaching), conference presentations, publications, service/outreach, etc.

Be sure to 4.0 your final semester(s).

Retake the GRE!

Improve your relationship with LOR writers, or additional writers. Think 4 or 5 total.

Rework the SOP.

Did you submit a writing sample? EDIT this paper or work on a better sample.

[fuzzylogician]

Everything!!

Beef up your CV. Professional experience (lab, internship, job, teaching), conference presentations, publications, service/outreach, etc.

Be sure to 4.0 your final semester(s).

Retake the GRE!

Improve your relationship with LOR writers, or additional writers. Think 4 or 5 total.

Rework the SOP.

Did you submit a writing sample? EDIT this paper or work on a better sample.

 

Some of these more than others.

 

If you have three strong LORs, you don't need 4-5. Maintain contact with the ones you have and seek out their advice about improving your application. If your GPA and GRE are good, I wouldn't worry about them either. I also would not recommend intentionally seeking out experience in fields that you are not interested in unless you can't get any other position. You'll have a hard time working this experience into your SOP in a way that flows because it'll disrupt the flow of interests/experience/future plans that your SOP should have. (though note: any experience will go a long way so take what you can if there is nothing more relevant you can do.)

 

Spend time reworking your SOP and writing sample. If your writing sample is good enough, consider submitting it to conferences. If you can end up with a proceedings paper based on your work, you will have done much to improve your application. Maybe you should start a new project - will you be able to get faculty support next year? An independent study project with a professor will help you produce a quality paper at the end and/or go to conferences and will help generate a stronger LOR. Most of all, for a good application season it will help if you spend time first narrowing and focusing your research interests, and then get very serious about researching schools to find the ones that best fit your interests. Fit is all important! Once you have a good idea, look at CVs of early-career grad students - first and second years at most. What is on their CV? What was there when they were accepted? That's a good indication of the level of students that this department accepts, and that's what you should aim to have too. This is something you may not be able to do right now, but as soon as you feel that you have a good idea of your interests, before you do anything else I'd recommend seriously looking at schools and learning what they expect of (successful) applicant.

[uromastyx]

I recommended what worked for me when I reapplied. Without your full profile all I could do was give a full checklist.

To say "do these two things" is silly. You need to think about improving everything that you can.

[fuzzylogician]

Sure, glaring holes need addressing; but do you honestly think that pointing out that some aspects of the application are more important than others is "silly" but recommending that the OP improve "everything!!" is useful advice?

I've noticed you have a tendency to apply your limited experience with applications (sample size=1) and no experience with actually attending graduate school on the board without pausing to consider that different fields might work differently. If this advice is based on personal experience then take the extra 2-3 sentences and explain how your advice is relevant - what was missing in your application before (assuming your know), what things you improved and how. Do you actually know which of the aspects you improved made a difference? That would have been much more informative than suggesting that all aspects of the application are equally important and merit equal concentration, when clearly some are more important than others. All I can hope is that people who get advice on this board consider its source before they act on just anything they read.