PoI googled me?

[ishouldbeworking]

Hello my nervous peers,

since im religiously checking my email these weeks, I thought I'd take a moment to ask you to speculate about the following as we communally procrastinate and await messages of admissions and rejections. 

I submitted an app to UCLA's anthro program in December. Shortly thereafter, I received an email notification from Academia.edu telling me that someone from LA googled me and incurred upon my Academia profile. If you're not familiar with Academia it's a website where you can publish/share your research. I don't have anything uploaded; I just have it to follow certain researchers and publications. Do admissions overlords google potential students? What could that mean? Is this common?

 Best wishes, fellow budding scholars

[TakeruK]

Yes, this is normal and it's certainly never a bad sign (i.e. they wouldn't google you if they were already planning to reject you). However, I wouldn't read much into it either---you don't know if they google every applicant as part of the review process or if they only google top ones. You don't even know if it's even someone from UCLA. 

So, don't overthink it

[kekology4]

@ishouldbeworking this exact thing happened to me too!! It doesn't surprise me that they google us and look at our academia page. It probably just means that they are curious about us, maybe even interested. 

[ishouldbeworking]

@kekology4 ah hope so! Best of luck

@TakeruK true all very good points, thx!

[CoffeeFueledAnxiety]

My LinkedIn page got visits from "an employee of Penn State" and "a private user in Buffalo, NY" in early January. Got interview invite from Buffalo, but nothing from Penn State. At least I know someone was interested enough to look me up, though. Good luck with your apps

Edited January 24, 2017 by CoffeeFueledAnxiety

[nevermind]

When I had a result in the same city as a school that I applied, I got an interview request. So fingers crossed for you.

[avflinsch]

7 hours ago, CoffeeFueledAnxiety said:

My LinkedIn page got visits from "an employee of Penn State" and "a private user in Buffalo, NY" in early January. Got interview invite from Buffalo, but nothing from Penn State. At least I know someone was interested enough to look me up, though. Good luck with your apps

My LinkedIn page constantly gets visits from "Employee of Rutgers", which isn't unusual, since I am a fulltime employee there in addition to being a parttime grad student, . I also got a "request to add to network" on Saturday from my POI - again not unusual as the department is quite big on connecting students to faculty and staff there so I did not give it a second thought since I had my first in-person class with him on Thursday, but never mentioned my PhD application to him.

I did get an email from him late Sunday evening, asking if I had time for a brief chat about my application (I am assuming that it is an unofficial interview of some sort) - scheduled for today, so my fingers are definitely crossed.