Hi everyone,
I thought I might want to share my application story with you, be it that you want to apply or applied in the past and saw the same outcome. I am international linguistics undergrad student from Europe who applied to PhD programmes at nine universities across the U.S. The selection was done carefully according to their professors’ interests’ match with mine.
My specs are as follows:
I: a) got the three letters of recommendation from eminent, senior professors;
b) wrote my personal statement and CV as guided by EducationUSA, making sure to attend as many conferences and summer schools prior to writing them as possible and include all of them in an academically coherent whole; the professors that I carefully picked from the websites deal exactly with the topics that I am interested in, which I would have viewed in an interdisciplinary manner; there are even more faculty members that I could have chosen at many of the universities, all of whom have similar research interests to mine. They were adjusted to each university.
c) have had the highest grades in all subjects so far, which equal 4.0 on the American scale;
d) have conducted research in linguistics that is above the expectations for an undergraduate student of linguistics, on which I worked beside my regular classes, all the while it says on the programme websites that the applicant does not need to have a background in linguistics and can submit a term paper or an essay;
e) have scored close to maximum points on TOEFL, which would mean that I am above the score limit and would not have had to sit any additional oral proficiency exams.
The rejections were all unprofessionally curt - compared to how detailed they required that I be - and provided no explanation as to why the rejection happened. When asked to explain, most of them told me that it just happened that I was not chosen as was decided by the professors, even though I am a “highly skilled student” as they described me. Regarding the advice to write to your chosen professors and present yourself, this did not help either. In fact, from some of them I received no reply to my research proposal I laid out in the email self-presentation, while others outright told me not to contact them before the decision. I even had a few tell me that they ‘did not admit new students to their labs the following year due to personal reasons’ or ‘were no longer working with the university that keeps them on their website’ which I suspect played a significant role in the rejections; this was not noted on their - outdated - CVs or websites. None allowed appeals. All in all, I do not have any real feedback as to why they did it. Just to stress: I NEVER EVEN REACHED THE INTERVIEW.
Based on everything that happened in my case, I can only conclude that meeting their own almost impossible requirements - and with huge success - means nothing to the graduate admission boards and that the criteria of the U.S. universities are as accurate in admitting highly skilled students as lottery is. A large volume of applications? - Cap the number of applications, send any sort of useful feedback, do not ask for application fees, give refunds if it was already paid and the payer was not admitted, say openly that the admission process equals that of drawing the lottery winners and most importantly do not give the naïve students false hope that they have any kind of reasonable chance if and no matter how they fulfill your own requirements.
If you were admitted, you were lucky. I wasn’t.
Best,
Guy with shattered dreams