Cringe-worthy (again) >_<

[tnt92]

I misread a question for my written statement. Spent two months answering the misread question, received very positive feedback from two professors that were also my references. Two days before submissions closed, I was combing through the application instructions and caught that I misread. I had already submitted my written statement to my references, which they used to write their reference. Nothing I could do there. Just answered the question properly, submitted, and still waiting to hear back from the school. Face palming since December 15th. 

[rheya19]

1 hour ago, tnt92 said:

I misread a question for my written statement. Spent two months answering the misread question, received very positive feedback from two professors that were also my references. Two days before submissions closed, I was combing through the application instructions and caught that I misread. I had already submitted my written statement to my references, which they used to write their reference. Nothing I could do there. Just answered the question properly, submitted, and still waiting to hear back from the school. Face palming since December 15th. 

>_<

I can't tell you how many times I misread assignments in school and wrote the wrong thing. So frustrating!!!! 

[Mippipopolous]

4 hours ago, novazembla said:

So I misspelled the name of a professor I wanted to work with on the application for one of my top schools. It wasn't in the SOP -- the application asked you to list three professors you were interested in working with and gave you three text fields, and I just switched around two letters in the middle of his last name. I screwed up my GRE score, too -- I had gotten a 151/43rd percentile on the quantitative section, and I entered that I got a 143, which is like the fifteenth percentile. I think I'd spent so much time reading and rereading my SOP and writing sample, making sure that everything was perfect, that I forgot about not effing up the application itself. 

This school is the only acceptance I've gotten so far.

I did the same thing except it was in my SOP! I didn't even realize until later, saw I'd left off the last letter of his last name somehow. I got in too, so it worked out! The professor just sent me an email congratulating me. Life works in mysterious ways sometimes. I also had a pretty significant typo that was in all of my SOPs—an omitted word in the topic sentence of my second paragraph, so very noticeable—I was pretty convinced my goose was cooked, had a freakout about it. All's well that ends well I guess! 

[CoyoteBlue]

I have the greatest one, my professors back home called me "Molly", it was a nickname my dad and very close friends called me. So i got to my interview and all my recomenders apparently used my nickname and no one knew what to call me. I DON'T LET CASUAL people call me by my nickname. It was so awkward.

[Charlsa]

I pissed off my most impressive recommender by continually reminding her to finish my letters. She hates technology, but the only way I could contact her was over email. She finally submitted them a week after the deadline. I always select that I don't want to view the recommendations out of respect to the professors, so I'm... not feeling very positive about her feedback.

I know nagging her was a bad move since professors are busy people, but I am very neurotic about deadlines and punctuality. And I received positive feedback from another professor that actually requested that I remind him when the deadline was approaching. So I had the impression that reminding professors would be helpful. Universally, this is not the case. Unfortunately I think my formality in emails to professors may come across as somewhat hostile...

[TK2]

My strongest recommender was wildly unpunctual, as in, no hint of a letter more than a month after the earliest deadlines and a week for the latest, and after it had actually impacted one application - there was more going on there, late physical transcripts and stuff, but also the missing letter - and it finally took really telling her all that and saying 'this is urgent now' for it to happen. All that said - I don't believe for a moment that it impacted the quality of the letter in the slightest. Lots of professors are busy and lots are absentminded and lots procrastinate and postpone stuff (and lots are all of the above.) I can't imagine the one who would let that turn into a miserly recommendation letter they had promised after it was late because you reminded them, especially if you otherwise expect them to be your best recommendation. (I got waitlisted and admitted to the two schools with the early deadlines that had had to wait ages for that letter, fwiw.)

My worst moment was meeting a potential supervisor at one of the top programs in my field at a large conference. Now, I'm from a small country with only a handful of departments in my (or anyone elses, really) subject and, as it turns out, there's a certain level of mutual snobbishness and competitiveness between the two most prominent ones, say Universities A and B, (of four all told, so where we all get off being cliqueish, I couldn't tell you.) I had arranged to meet POI by email and we finally synched up at some giant, ivy-league alumni event thing in a crowd next to a cheese bar he seemed a lot more interested in than in me. Fair enough, I like cheese too. I get that its on me to be more interesting than the onion dip at this sort of thing. The moment it got really cringey, however, was when what turned out to be the head of said top program in my field shuffled up for chit-chat and was promptly introduced to me as, oh, you don't say, being from the same small country.

He kind of looked me up and down, asked if I was from university A and asked if I was doing program-related-to-my-field. I said, yes, and my-actual-field. He snorted, observed there was no such thing as my-field at University A, and proceeded to ask me if I even speak the language-of-the-small-country (while actual POI and another random prominent-scholar-in-my-field kind of stood around chuckling.) Now, I speak English well, but all higher education is carried out in the local language, so I have no idea what he was even getting at at this point. I spent the rest of the conference wandering around with a constant esprit de escalier, just hoping to run into him and engage with a series of well crafted but cutting remarks showing what a brilliant, stubborn and generally un-cowable and un-impressed by him potential young scholar I was, partially because Small-Country is not known for its respect for formal heirarchy and obesquiousness to status, not least to itself. Who does he think he is, doing the patronize-a-random-MA-student-with-my-fancy-title thing, like we're Americans or something? I took that back home and it turned out he was from University B originally and it was all part of some A/B stuff presumably going back decades. Probably fortunate that it was just a half a day left at that point and I never did run into him again. But I will some day! And it will be awkward! Oh, yes it will!

 

 

 

 

[Ferris604]

As cringe-worthy as some of these are...I don't think I've seen anything worse than this: 

 

[CoyoteBlue]

That is the most awful thing I have ever read in my life

1 hour ago, Ferris604 said:

As cringe-worthy as some of these are...I don't think I've seen anything worse than this: 

 

 

[AspiringGC]

1 hour ago, Ferris604 said:

As cringe-worthy as some of these are...I don't think I've seen anything worse than this: 

 

I legitimately laughed so hard I cried at this. Poor guy

[HiFiWiFi]

I talked on the phone to set up a future phone interview, including such statements on my end as "Let me check my calendar" and "Hold on, grabbing a pen really quick." and other such things, taking several minutes. I'd pulled over (not well) on the side of the road and another driver honked at me and the person on the other end of the phone call asked "Are you driving?" to which I happily responded "Oh, don't worry, I think I'm just blocking an ambulance or something."

A+++ impression for the public health program! (I work at a hospital and our employee parking garage is near where the ambulance maintenance garage is, it was not an 'active' ambulance and in fact it had been a fellow employee honking to say hello, but I didn't think to say that until after we'd hung up.)

[HiFiWiFi]

On 2/6/2017 at 9:58 AM, CoyoteBlue said:

I somehow managed to miss an entire section of my applications(goals) and get an interview with berkely *shrugs* mysterious powers that be.

"This applicant is leaving their options open. I like it. Schedule the interview."

[SocCog]

On 2/17/2017 at 5:28 PM, Charlsa said:

I pissed off my most impressive recommender by continually reminding her to finish my letters. She hates technology, but the only way I could contact her was over email. She finally submitted them a week after the deadline. I always select that I don't want to view the recommendations out of respect to the professors, so I'm... not feeling very positive about her feedback.

I know nagging her was a bad move since professors are busy people, but I am very neurotic about deadlines and punctuality. And I received positive feedback from another professor that actually requested that I remind him when the deadline was approaching. So I had the impression that reminding professors would be helpful. Universally, this is not the case. Unfortunately I think my formality in emails to professors may come across as somewhat hostile...

I had to do the exact same thing. I started out emailing her once a week. Then twice a week. Then every 2 days and also emailing her grad students. She just was NEVER responding. I wonder if she even wrote it before the due date. She submitted a week late. And she was definitely my strongest recommender reputation-wise, because she has connections to three of the programs I applied to. But I don't know her very well (I worked in her lab, but dealt only with grad students). I offered to meet up and talk (I even told her days "I would be on campus" and drove over just to sit in the library and hope I'd hear back). But we never talked. Kind of glad I didn't apply to be HER grad student haha. But really, not actually laughing. I'm very concerned that the rec was sub-par. 

[CoyoteBlue]

10 hours ago, SocCog said:

I had to do the exact same thing. I started out emailing her once a week. Then twice a week. Then every 2 days and also emailing her grad students. She just was NEVER responding. I wonder if she even wrote it before the due date. She submitted a week late. And she was definitely my strongest recommender reputation-wise, because she has connections to three of the programs I applied to. But I don't know her very well (I worked in her lab, but dealt only with grad students). I offered to meet up and talk (I even told her days "I would be on campus" and drove over just to sit in the library and hope I'd hear back). But we never talked. Kind of glad I didn't apply to be HER grad student haha. But really, not actually laughing. I'm very concerned that the rec was sub-par. 

Hell, I flew 2000 miles to my campus to go ask my letter personally to PLEASE write my letter. He wrote on guys letter late and he didn't get in to anywhere as a result. Mine got in though, a day before they were due. 

[rheya19]

On 2/18/2017 at 5:13 PM, Ferris604 said:

As cringe-worthy as some of these are...I don't think I've seen anything worse than this: 

 

I don't even care if this is true or not. I LOVE <3 <3 <3 it.

[SocCog]

@rheya19 Thank you for that. We could all probably use a good laugh. 

[victoriaaa]

Not nearly as bad as some of them here, but I realized a few days after the deadline that I had uploaded the SOP for my thesis application to the non-thesis application, so they had two copies of the same statement instead of different ones for the different programs. I got lucky and the application portal had a built in chat box and the person on the other end simply deleted my SOP from the non-thesis application and I uploaded the right one. I owe whoever let me do that a beer.

[SocCog]

Sigh. I messed up. It could be nothing, or it could be major. So I posted a photo of my cat wearing a hat I knit for her on Facebook, and I made it public so that my friend could share it with all her friends. Well, apparently everything I posted for the rest of that day was public too. Including a status where I complained (slightly childishly) about how I'd gotten a rejection email that started with "I am very pleased to tell you that you have been admitted", and my friends commented justification why it wasn't the school for me. So if anyone looked that my profile, they would have seen that. Sigh. I just hope no one looked me up in the past week... 

[CoyoteBlue]

6 hours ago, SocCog said:

Sigh. I messed up. It could be nothing, or it could be major. So I posted a photo of my cat wearing a hat I knit for her on Facebook, and I made it public so that my friend could share it with all her friends. Well, apparently everything I posted for the rest of that day was public too. Including a status where I complained (slightly childishly) about how I'd gotten a rejection email that started with "I am very pleased to tell you that you have been admitted", and my friends commented justification why it wasn't the school for me. So if anyone looked that my profile, they would have seen that. Sigh. I just hope no one looked me up in the past week... 

tell me more about this rejection email

[ElKel87]

On 2/13/2017 at 3:49 PM, ElKel87 said:

I have one from an interview I recently attended at my top choice school. There were 2 writing assignments for us to do while we waited for our individual interviews. The one I chose to complete second had very specific instructions for how to use the two pieces of scrap paper they gave us. I had already used one of the scrap papers on the first assignment so I screwed that up right off the bat. On top of that, I accidentally held onto the instruction sheet for the first assignment and the department chair had to come out before we all went on our campus tour and ask who hadn't handed the instructions back in (in front of everyone). The interview itself went great but I think part of the writing assignment task was to show you're not an idiot and know how to follow convoluted directions so.... not getting my hopes up for that school. 

Wanted to post a quick update to say that I received an acceptance from this program yesterday! Maybe I'm not the only one who doesn't know how to read directions properly! 

[Lexifer]

I was talking to my POI about how I was fluent in French when another professor (who is a native French speaker) heard and came over. He started speaking to me in French, but I was so anxious that I stumbled over my words and ended up answering in English. Not terrible, but the memory certainly makes me cringe 

[meep95]

I accidentally wrote "suck as" instead of "such as" in my SOP.  ugh