@catscatscatscats

wow! your results are perfect. You got into all the best ChemE schools. Congratulations! You're probably the top ChemE candidates this year.

@ajb312lehigh
Two of my recommenders kept sending in my rec letters around the day before each application's due date. Like, they sent in UT Austin's on like the 15th of december, but for the other schools, they didnt submit their rec letters until around the 27th. I have been really shocked at the turn around of these schools.

@hyphens88
Thanks for the support, I'm honestly pretty shocked at my results since I have no first author publications, and I'm not exactly at the top top of my senior class. However, my friends have been getting similar acceptances. With grad school admissions seeming like a total crapshoot these days, I think it may just be a good year for my school.

Good luck with your guys' apps!

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Woke up this morning with a phone call from MIT, ACCEPTED! I also was accepted at Princeton since my last post. Still waiting on Stanford but I could care less about them now

School: Georgia Tech
Major: Mechanical engineering and minor in computer science

GPA 3.90 (most of my curriculum over now) Major GPA also 3.90

By the time applications come:
-2 semesters (and counting) in one lab (on design and modeling)
-2 semesters in another (on fuzzy systems and control, a bit of mathematical modeling)
-1 semester (2 years ago) in another (on material science..hated it lol)
...all labs in georgia tech, under the guidance of a professor

LOR's :
1)Professor of the first lab (Associate prof graduated from CMU) I will be applying to CMU because I want to focus on an area that requires the integration of cs and ME
2) Professor of the second lab (Prof graduated from Berkeley)
3) Professor who taught me fluids..We got to know each other in a more personal level (Prof graduated from Stanford)

The first two were also professors of one of my classes, so they will touch on both aspects

Awards: Presidential Undergrad research award (nothing big, just a stipend for my research, but an award nonetheless)

Pubs and Presentations: Again nothing big, I presented my work to couple of labs in tech. Nothing at a conference or anything. Planning to present during an event in spring but this will be after the application so... (this isn't that big too, its just an undergrad symposium at Georgia tech)
Seeing if I can publish a paper by this winter or at least making a thesis..but unlikely

However, I did write a research paper using my CS minor on a ME discipline: Parallelizing a genetic algorithm to train a neural network..didn't get it published or anything

GRE: 800 Q, 450 V

Other: Tutor for core classes and ME classes for 3 years, vice president of ASME chapter in Tech, program coordinator of a club called Student movement (service), Freshman Seminar Class team leader

Differential Equations TA.

MIT - waiting
Stanford - waiting
Caltech - waiting
Berkeley - waiting
Princeton - REJECT
Cornell - waiting
Michigan - waiting

Gatech - accepted since i was an undergrad here

Kinda getting scared now...what do you guys think about my chances in the rest of the universities. Did any ME get a decision..do you guys have an idea when this can be expected

I'm an undergrad Civil Engineering major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and I applied PhD in Civil Engineering (Structural Concentration) to 8 schools:

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - ACCEPTED*
Georgia Tech - still waiting
Cornell - still waiting
MIT - still waiting
Lehigh - still waiting
Drexel - still waiting
Columbia - REJECTED
University of Wisconsin-Madison - still waiting

*the Civil Engineering dept at UIUC doesn't accept people into the PhD program unless they have an MS degree, so I got into the MS program but I can continue to a PhD if i've shown the potential to my understanding

Hey, I applied to UIUC too for Civil Engineering (structural concentration) and just got an email regarding admissions. What's this business about "recommended for admission"? That doesn't mean we're officially accepted does it?

Is everyone reporting official acceptances or emails about "recommended for admission" (which I'm not getting my hopes up for actual acceptance yet)? And can anyone tell me what I should expect from other schools? Emails regarding "recommendation for admission" or legitimate hard copy letters in the mail?

I find UIUC's system (or any involving a recommendation for admission) so bizarre and unexpected! I was totally expecting an official and clear cut yes or no answer in the mail!

Does anybody know how schools deal with sending letters to students Do they do it all in once or send them one at a time? Maybe the send the rejections together, then the acceptance letters together? Is that how it works? Because....

From Princeton:
My friend and I got a rejection email practically at the same instant.

From MIT:
The same friend got a rejection email but I didn't.

Both of us are mechanical engineering...

Does this mean anything??

it just means that you havent been rejected yet. probably still holding out on your application to see how many people will accept/reject and then make a decision a bit later. from my understanding they send out sure admits first, then sure rejections, and then keep a few around to feel out how big of class they will be getting.

They do it as they make their decisions unlike in undergrad where it all goes out at the same time. Instant rejects and instant admits will go out first and everyone in the middle is kept in limbo until the admits reply. Funding is limited so they can't afford to go over the class limit by even one person.

So, if you have not heard from schools, that is not necessarily a bad thing. I've only heard from 1/9 schools...

I am a Mechanical Engineer from GaTech with an overall 3.6 GPA (3.7 major GPA), 1 publication, 2 years of undergraduate research in a fluids lab, 1 year with the Georgia Tech motorsports team and a 6 month internship with Siemens.

Two of the three professors who wrote my LOR are well known in fluid and thermal sciences and the third LOR was written by the vice provost at Tech.

GRE Q: 750, V500, AW4.5

I applied to PhD in ME at the following schools

MIT (still waiting)
Berkeley (still waiting)
Caltech (still waiting)
Stanford (still waiting)
Gatech (ACCEPTED)

I saw that MIT has already sent a bunch of acceptances already, but apparently not all decisions have been made.

@Jonbauer and @Ouroboros313

So they keep the ones that are not sure admits and sure rejects...that's a fair call...do you have any estimate of how much they finally reject??

Hopefully it's not like the undergraduate 'waiting list,' where like maybe less than 10% get called back for admission

Do top universities call you for interviews first...or do they wait till you are accepted and then call you to their campus?

God, admissions is so agonizing..

It depends on the department. Some do interviews, some do the campus visit before acceptance, and some do it after. The campus visit is one of the reasons they want to send out acceptances early to the strong applicants, the ones who they'll have to compete with other schools for. To illustrate, neither MIT nor Stanford asked for an interview but Caltech is hosting their campus visit before decisions.

As for acceptance stats, it really differs from year to year based on funding. The time to finish PhD's vary a lot, so the number graduating changes year to year. Some years no one graduates, some years dozens graduate. The more people that graduate the more funding opens up for new students. In addition to that, the department or professors may get big grants that let them take on more students than usual.

My letter form UIUC said the same thing "recommended for admission." I assumed that I was accepted into the program, especially since I heard back in just a month after the deadline. (other schools are taking longer). Now I'm worried, I hope I got in, lol. But in my email, there was a link to a site with two buttons saying 'ACCEPT' and 'REJECT', so I think I got in. Would they send an email with that link if it was a maybe?