Playing the Waiting Game

Submitting applications is hard. It can feel oppressively final, like your entire future is resting on this one bundle of papers. Graduate school is an important step in a person’s life, but it’s not the only step and certainly won’t be the final step. Get your applications submitted, but start planning for the immediate future. You are facing months of waiting, and many people cite this waiting period as the hardest part of the whole process. I tell students to plan out some things to do post-submission to keep you occupied. If you’ve been working really hard on applications, they will have taken up a lot of your time, and it’s important to think about ways to fill that time productively.

In the times that I’ve been job hunting on the academic market, I would routinely spend 3-4 hours per day on writing cover letters and making adjustments to my CV. Once I had signed a letter of offer and accepted a position, my schedule felt immediately hollow and empty. I had worked so hard on applications that they became my primary point of interest for several semesters. It’s helpful to find things to do in this aftermath. Rediscover hobbies, read for fun, hang out with friends, take an affordable road trip, or dive back into your studies as your finish your degree.

The important thing to do here is to not get wrapped up in the application game. There are websites out there that allow users to crowd source application updates in forums, so a user will post when they’ve been waitlisted, accepted, rejected, etc. Some people end up compulsively checking these websites and stressing out because they haven’t heard news. It’s near worthless to keep track of this stuff, and the reason so many students do is because they don’t understand the complexity of admissions decsions.

Let’s say 100 applicants apply to a program, and the committee has 20 slots for students. Of those 100, usually (in my experience) 30 of those will not be qualified. That means they are lacking some important pre-reqs, haven’t made enough progress in their degree, or submitted very unusual/weak/spammy materials. That means 70 total applications. Professors will start working through this list and arguing with each other until a short-list of 20 candidates is made. Those 20 are probably the most qualified, and most likely applied to multiple schools. Many of them will be admitted to more than 1 program. It’s highly likely that many of those 20 (and a good bit of others on the list) will accept funded slots at other schools, so that initial list of 20 fractures. People will be wait-listed, accepted, rejected, etc. in a disorganized mess. Trying to track that mess is a waste of time and effort.

Further still, sites like the gradcafe (while very useful) can easily begin taking up too much time. The tone of those forums can become toxic, and it can also encourage too much speculative thinking. There are many ways to spend this waiting period, and I would suggest pursuing any of those methods over frantically refreshing the gradcafe.

Interpreting Results

You can ultimately get a few responses from schools, and understanding those responses is important. You can get accepted, which is the best-case scenario. That means you are in the short list of candidates. You can get wait listed, which means you were not in the top list of candidates, but they still consider you an acceptable applicant to the program. If other, accepted students drop from consideration, you will get moved up. Many programs rank their wait lists, which means you might be first on the list or last, so getting wait listed isn’t any sort of a guarantee of anything. Some students end up searching frantically for information about what a wait list means, but I ultimately urge people to consider it a rejection. If they end up accepting you later, cool. If not, it’s also fine. A rejection is most straight forward. You were not considered a good fit for the program. Move on. You may also be accepted without funding. There are some graduate programs out there (particularly professional programs like MBAs, law schools, med schools) that do not fund students. If it is considered normal in your field to not receive funding, then disregard this next advice. There are some unscrupulous schools that will accept students without funding in order to rake in cash from desperate applicants. An acceptance without funding from a program like this is, in essence, a rejection.

Accepting with Grace

If you’ve been accepted to a program, then congratulations! Your work is now just beginning. You should absolutely celebrate this news, but do so carefully. The next sections of this text focus on a topic that is rarely discussed: not receiving an offer of admission to a school. In my own life as a professor, I see many students that are accepted launch themselves into celebration, and it can be easy to let ego inflate. Celebrate, but within reason. Keep in mind that your friends and classmates may have received 10-20 rejections over the past several weeks. I rarely see faculty members celebrating wildly when an article is published or a book proposal is accepted. The good news is tempered by dozens of rejections that constantly stream through our inboxes. Practice some humility now. You will experience rejection soon enough.

Many programs will assign a window in which you must accept or reject their offer. In many cases, the window is quite soon. They aren’t trying to be cruel, but are likely trying to get their wait list sorted out. It will be time to make a decision, and it’s important to note that the decision is imperfect. It’s often the case that a top choice program hasn’t issued an acceptance or rejection and a student is facing deadlines to accept for other campuses. It seems unfair, but it’s a product of the chaos that is graduate applications. You can contact the program coordinator for your top choices and explain that you have other offers, but this might not work. The school may not yet know who’s in the top list, so they might not have an answer. Ultimately, you have to take the plunge at this point and accept the best offer you’ve been given. It can be helpful to talk through these options with a trusted professor. They can probably help you sort the details of each offer and make a good decision.

I Didn’t Get In

This next section of text covers (what I think) is the most under-covered aspect of applying to graduate programs: failure. If you’ve been accepted to your dream program, I urge you to read on. The coping practices that I outline here are broadly applicable to academic work. I also think it’s important for students that experience success to understand the struggle their fellow students may be going through.

Decompress

The first thing I tell students that didn’t get into their preferred programs is that this is very common. It may not seem very common, and social media is part of the culprit there. If you know other people applying for grad school, you might end up seeing a never-ending parade of posts explaining “I DID IT. I’M GOING TO GRAD SCHOOL.” Tons of students don’t make it into their graduate programs every year, but they rarely post the same kind of content on social media. This can become isolating, depressing, and lead prospective students to a feeling of hopelessness. There are plenty of successful people that didn’t gain entrance to their graduate programs of choice. There are some things to consider and strategies to pursue if you didn’t make your way into a preferred program.

People often feel compelled to immediately dive back into revising documents, finding people to read them, and extending their program research. This is understandable because it’s familiar. It’s easy to slide back into the process, but often not very helpful. This process will take another year of sporadic work, and it’s very important that you take a break from your materials and this process. A year is a very long time. I’ve known many people that didn’t make it into graduate school and then ultimately found a great job and decided against another round of applications. If you are graduating soon, you will need to find work, and that should be your primary focus. Most applicants find the second round easier than the first, so it’s entirely possible to do it while working full time. You also need time away from your materials. Revision has a declining effectiveness when you are too close to the documents. Some space will help you spot problems, evolve in your thinking, and conduct a stronger revision. When a student doesn’t make it into any programs, I usually tell them to leave everything alone until next fall. You’ve earned some time away.

Processing Failure

This might be the first time you’ve failed at something really important. The students I work with that are bound for graduate school are usually really good at doing school. They have 4.0s, have won a ton of scholarship money, and have never had to experience academic failure. This can be foundation-shattering and cause you to question core aspects of your identity. I can’t over-state the usefulness of mental health professionals during this period. If you are graduating, you are probably seeing students getting jobs and moving on to the next phase of their lives. Grad school rejections can feel paralyzing in that way, and it’s important to have an impartial listener. Talking about these rejections with friend that isn’t going to graduate school might be frustrating. They may not understand the time and effort you put into applications, and they might under-estimate the emotional toll of the whole process. If you are still enrolled at your school, talk to counseling services. If you aren’t enrolled, you can still contact them and ask for referrals. Each school I’ve worked at had some sort of arrangement with local counseling professionals that were available for no or low cost.

Understanding What Happened

It is possible to do everything right and still fail. You may have completed an excellent letter and CV. You may have a strong GPA and good test scores. You may have outstanding letters of recommendation from respected scholars in your field. You can have all of these things and still not get an offer for study. The first question on everyone’s mind is ‘what the hell happened?” In the previous chapter, I explained the absolute mess of selecting candidates and issuing offers. The process is rife with problems, and it’s impossible to know exactly what happened in those meetings.

Applicants don’t see the drama or process of picking students. Professors are often striking deals, negotiating, or repaying favors during this process. Typically, each professor gets a certain number of students to work. In STEM fields, professors will have a certain number of slots for students that can work in their labs. Humanities professors don’t have labs, but there will be a generally accepted number of students per professor specialization. This to ensure that one professor isn’t potentially directing 50 theses in the coming year. These numbers-based realities mean that you could still have been an excellent candidate, but had the back of luck of too many people in one specialization applying at the same time you did. There could be any number of purely political reasons that you were not selected. The important thing is that you won’t know the specifics of why you were not picked for a graduate program, so it’s better to not dwell on those. You will never know the specifics of why you were not admitted. 

Students are sometimes compelled to demand answers from a program by emailing a program director for feedback on their application. If you plan on submitting to this school again, this is a very bad idea. That program may have considered you an excellent candidate only to discover a bunch of pushy, borderline rude emails demanding feedback on an application. This is not normal. Programs typically do not offer individual feedback to applicants on their materials. That really isn’t their job, and it’s best not to ask. Don’t sour a good application. You won’t change the results, so it’s best to move on to things you can control.

Re-thinking Graduate School

I have known several people that decided against graduate school after dealing with a series of hard rejections. Academia and graduate school feature rejection as a central process. Academics are rejected from conferences and journals constantly. Grad students are rejected from the same avenues in addition to thesis/dissertation committees/exams. There’s no way around this. Academic work in general features lots of failure. I always describe the work as a roller coaster. Most jobs that I’ve held outside of academia were more or less a straight line. There were no triumphant victories and there were not crushing defeats. While failure is a major part of academia, extreme success also happens, like getting a manuscript accepted to a good journal. The other complicating layer is that academic work is fairly solitary, so you are going to experience the extremes of good and bad on your own. We have to deal with the ups and downs, and some people decide this pattern of work isn’t a good fit for them, which is completely fine. Better to understand this now than to trudge through years of graduate education. There isn’t anything wrong with deciding to not pursue graduate school. I’m going to write this again in another way, because it’s very important to consider: There isn’t anything wrong with you because you decided not to go to graduate school. Full stop.

Once More Unto the Breech

If you decide to give the application cycle another go, there are some concrete steps to take that can improve your chances. First, you might need to fill in some gaps or improve your GPA. Many graduate programs will have pre-reqs, but some times they are listed as optional with the chance to take them after being admitted. Not having all pre-reqs complete might set you back in applications, but also set you back once you start a program. It might be worth taking these courses to improve your odds, but that will cost quite a bit of money. If your GPA is low-ish, you may need to re-take some courses to boost it. There aren’t too many ways around this issue. You might also need to re-take the GRE. Several students don’t do well on the test during the first attempt, but then may not have enough time/money to take the test again. Re-taking the test will give you substantially more time to study. You should also find a professor that can help you de-brief, some one to diagnose major problems in your letter and application. You now have some time to work through these problems, and it can be easier to address those issues when you are not facing an impending deadline.

Adjusting your Aim

It’s not uncommon for students to shoot too high on their first round of applications. Admission into a top program in your field might not be tenable given your academic background, and that isn’t the end of the world. You might need to slide your scale back a bit and apply at a lower-tier. Many students wrongfully assume that elite universities will have the best programs. That’s usually the case, but there are many public schools with excellent graduate programs. Now is the appropriate time to research and re-calibrate.

Scaling down the total number of apps can help as well. I’ve encountered many students with the shotgun approach; they wanted to send out 25 applications to good schools. This method is expensive and difficult. We have a finite amount of time to work on these applications, and attempting 25 invariably means the quality will suffer. It might be a better strategy to hone in on the programs you really want to attend and then commit to producing the best possible materials for those programs rather than shooting for comprehensive list.

How Many Cycles is Enough?

A new application cycle often brings a renewed sense of optimism and purpose to candidates that failed to earn entrance to a program during their first run. While that optimism and energy is a good thing, you should also keep an eye on the future. Competition for slots in graduate school is very intense, and, as we’ve seen, you can only control a small sliver of that process. Don’t turn down or discount opportunities at this stage. If a decent job offer comes your way, take it. Most academics know a few people that never exited the application phase, even after 5 or 6 cycles. If you don’t make it in after two/three cycles, it’s time to move on. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon all hope of every attending graduate school, but it does mean that you need some space. Plenty of people choose to enter graduate school later in their lives. For some, that means their late twenties. For others, that means their late fifties. These decisions aren’t inherently right or wrong, and, most of the time, returning students are doing so because some experience compelled them to. It’s important to pause your ambitions for graduate school and embrace other opportunities so that those compelling experiences can happen to you.