Get This Man a Doctor

It’s official

Just got back from visiting the University of Maryland. Maryland never got back to me about my application, and I had assumed they rejected me. I emailed them exactly a week ago asking where they were with my application, and they sent a reply saying they were going to accept me without funding. Which is the grad school equivalent of tying a $15,000 carrot on five year long stick.

Then last Thursday, someone decided not to go to UMD, which opened up a seat for me. So I had to make an emergency trip to Maryland today to go check it out.

One thing that stood out about visiting Maryland over Washington and Oregon was the vast surplus of money they were throwing around. Maryland was able to pay for my lodging and car rental from New York, which believe me was not cheap.

But the best part? And the end of my visit, I got a goodie bag from Maryland containing a t-shirt and a USB flash drive. Okay, now I’ma go download 128MB of… math.

Well, I didn’t really feel comfortable writing about which schools I did and didn’t get into, but this is supposed to be a blog about my experience with grad school. So to remain true to that purpose, I have to make a post about how I am going to be rejected from almost every school I applied to.

The rejections have begun rolling in in the form of emails. It’s kind of ruining my vacation, but at least I’ll finally have some closure. I knew I wasn’t a very strong candidate, but I was secretly hoping that this might be one of those years with little competition. I was clearly wrong.

Out of the ten schools I applied to, my fifth and sixth choices just rejected me. Since they’re pretty much ranked by how competitive their programs are, that only leaves the bottom four.

My biggest fear now is being rejected from all ten schools, which will pretty much end my academic career. I don’t expect that I will be have the strength to apply again, and after another year I will be an even more undesirable candidate.

After some reflection, it was my lack of dedication that led to these rejections. In the three years since graduation I have had to deal with more adversity than I faced in college, and one thing it has elucidated is that I simply did not work hard enough during those four years. I only hope that I have the strength to overcome this failure in the future.

By popular demand, I’ve decided to go through and calculate just how much I spent on applying to graduate school. Well, actually, no one really seems to ask me how much I spent, but every time I think about it I can’t believe how much money I blew on a bunch of forms.

So to review: I applied to ten schools around the country. The one with the least fees was Carnegie Mellon, which charged $0.00 to read my application. The one with the greatest fees was the City University of New York, Graduate Center, which charged me $125.00 to read my application. The mean was $58.50.

The ETS charges $15.00 to report your (required) GRE scores. Per school. Plus a service fee per request. Since I had to submit one school twice, the total amount I paid the ETS was $216.00.

The total amount I spent on shipping is a bit skewed, since I FedExed everything. Most of my applications didn’t come down to the deadline, but I wanted to get everything in as quickly as possible. Total shipping costs: $199.73.

Finally, I spent $148.25 on transcripts, office supplies, books, and miscellany.

So, the grand total I have spent applying to grad schools since October comes to $1148.98. I wonder if I can get a tax write-off…

Since I got all of my ten applications in on January 15, it’s interesting to see how often the different schools contact me. For example, my long shot choice Berkeley sent me one automated email when I submitted my application more than a month ago, and hasn’t sent me anything else since. U Oregon, probably smoking something, has sent me not one but two information packets about their residence halls, and nothing else.

NYU, on the other hand, has sent me a sequence of three confirmation emails, followed by a physical confirmation in the mail, followed by another email from an administrative assistant somewhere, all within two weeks of when I started my application. What’s weird is the experience I’ve had with contacting NYU in the past.

When I moved to New York in 2005, I didn’t have a job lined up, so I tried to set up some interviews for when I got here. One of the places I desperately wanted to work was NYU; since I knew was going to grad school, the free tuition benefit was a pretty sweet perk.

NYU’s HR department has something called the MATCH system. All I remember is that I applied to at least ten jobs through their site and never once received a response. I even stooped to calling someone in the HR department, and, in true stalker fashion, showed up at the IT department, stopped one of the Directors in the hall, and asked him just what had happened to my job applications. You know, now that I think about it, I’m surprised that I’ve never been detained by security.

I kept applying for every job I could find between September of 2004 and May of 2005, and finally got called into an interview at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (which, by the way, is pretty sweet). The guy who interviewed me said that I was a good fit for the job, but that they almost always hired recent NYU graduates. In fact, he claimed they were required to interview a certain number of outside candidates, but they generally never hired them. A kind euphemism for why I didn’t get the job? I sure hope so.

Since then, I have repeatedly sent emails to various people at NYU for a number of reasons. Once, I sent an email to some event coordinator about a graduate school fair they were holding. Then, I sent an email to the Courant Institute asking them to clarify blatantly contradictory information about their application process. Nothing back. I still have no evidence that any person actually saw these emails… I was pretty sure that I had been blacklisted by their mail server as a spammer for the vast number of times I’ve tried to contact someone there.

Now that I’ve paid their $80 application fee, I’m their best bud. Well guess what, NYU. It’s going to take a lot more than that to win back my heart.

* = required question

Residence Halls Buildings Survey (Prospective Resident)

1. I am a:*
(X) Prospective Resident

2. What is your impression of UO residence halls?*
If I ever visit I will go look at them.

3. Not considering room rates or the assignment process, if you could live in any residence hall building on campus, which would you choose?*
( ) Barnhart
( ) Bean
( ) Carson
(X) Earl
( ) Hamilton
( ) Living-Learning Center
( ) Riley
( ) Walton

4. What is it about this building that is attractive to you?*
I like the name Earl.

7. What would make you want to live in the residence halls your first year at the UO?*
Probably a bribe.

8. What would make you want to live in the residence halls for more than one year?*
Yearly bribes.

9. Would residence hall facilities impact your decision to attend a university or college?*
(X) No
( ) Yes

10. Did/do your parents or family members encourage you to live in the residence halls?*
(X) No
( ) Somewhat
( ) Yes

What factors influence the decision to live in the residence halls versus living off campus?
I’m not 18 anymore.

11. Demographics:*
Gender
( ) Female
(X) Male

Age
24

Just when I thought it was over and the four-digit cost for applying to schools was final, I get an email from Carnegie Mellon informing me that they never got the GRE scores I sent back in October. I don’t really know why, but I’m guessing it has to do with the fac tthat the department is “Mathematical Sciences” instead of “Mathematics” and therefore has a code of 20740799 instead of 20740703.

Total cost to get ETS to send another copy: $15. Plus $6 for the phone call. Yippee.

Today I mailed in the last of my ten applications. It is a happy day but I am too worn out to care. A calculation of the total amount of money spent for ten application will follow.

After going to the front door of my delinquent advisor during Thanksgiving, I have sent three mailings, snail and other, to her. I still have no responses. So it looks like I’m back to being totally screwed.

Since I did end up paying huge bunches of money to my school, I kind of feel like they owe me one. So I’m writing a letter to the President asking him to do something, like round up all his other President buddies and get them to admit me anyways. It contains such gems as,

[…] I do know that my Reed education is intended to prepare me for further academic study. I also know it is in Reed’s best interest that its students have all the resources they need to get into any graduate program. Despite my commitment to resolve this issue, my inability to obtain a letter from my thesis advisor will be a serious detriment to my applications.

Will it work? Stay tuned to see.

Today is a crappily glorious day, or a gloriously crappy day depending on how you look at it. Today I gave up any hope of getting into UC Berkeley and submitted my application. I have to say that my essay royally stunk, which is odd because it was adapted from a much awesomer essay that I submitted to U Maryland.

But at least it’s in and I can stop staying awake at night, like I’ve literally been doing for the past week. Happy hour helped a little, but I think it was an illusion caused by the fact that my hostess actually went to bed the same time I did.

I received one of my recommendations. Two to go. I still have not heard back from the professor I chased down, despite sending two emails. Am I willing to fly back to Portland before January 2 when the Berkeley recommendations are due? I’ll have to think about it. I would say that this whole process is driving me nuts, except my job had the privilege of doing that first.