Post
by butsurigakusha » Fri Mar 28, 2008 12:53 am
I think there are several possibilities as to what is wrong with my application. For one, it is possible that schools don't put nearly as much weight on PGRE as we tend to think. And even then, it might be that they don't care very much if one student has 990 and another has 850. I think there might be some theoretical score above which it makes no difference. Second, my two years of research experience produced a lot less in terms of results than they should have. I am not saying that there is a certain amount in general that someone should be able to produce in that amount of time, but given my circumstances, with the project I was working on, I probably should have published something, like, a year ago. Not any ground breaking research, but publishable results nonetheless. Plus, my adviser was also the instructor for a class I took last fall, and senioritis had already started its course, and my adviser definitely noticed my lackluster performance. I think he still wrote me a good letter, but I he is not one to embellish, and so his letter probably express a ton of confidence in my work ethic and enthusiasm. And my other recommendors were just other professors that knew me, but who hadn't worked with me that much.
The other possible problem is my grades. My GPA doesn't reflect the terrible grades I got my freshman year and later retook, because old grades aren't used to calculate GPA at my school. However, the grades still appear on the my transcript. Although my grades improved a lot since then, there is still the possibility that they might be a concern to some. I didn't have any good explanation as to why I failed several classes that year, so I didn't mention it at all in my SOP.
Considering that the schools I got rejected by are extremely competitive, I am not too surprised that I got rejected by a few. However, I was quite surprised about UCSB. If someone had told me beforehand that I would get accepted to Berkeley but not UCSB, I would have thought they were crazy.