Importance of publications

[spoiledscientist]

Hi again

I recently discovered that a paper my supervisor submitted for me was accepted and published in a journal. I didn't mention it because I thought it was refused. I already applied to most of the universities, but mentioned nothing about this paper. I know this might not be an important issue, but can a paper be the difference between acceptance and rejection? In other words, how much more would my application have improved had I foreseen this chain of events and mentioned it?

I did mention another paper but it's a conference paper...

[grae313]

It's a simple and fairly common practice to update an application with new and relevant information, especially since the admissions process is still in the beginning stages. Contact the admissions secretary at each school and ask to submit an updated CV (if you submitted a CV with your application originally). The secretary should simply replace the old CV with the new CV in your file. If you didn't submit a CV, you can submit an updated publication list and this will be added to your file.

[YodaT]

It's ok, just do as grae313 says. I'm sort of in your same boots... I'm gonna be submitting preprints in three months and possibly another one over the summer. So, hopefully they are accepted for publication come December/January. This probably happens more often than you think (updating CVs that is).

My main concern is that one of the graduate school's I'm considering has a deadline before my Fall semester ends. So, hopefully I can send an updated transcript and mention that my GPA marginally improved. I'll be taking two upper-level physics (atomic physics and particle physics), two upper-level math courses (complex analysis and a graph theory/algorithms course), and retaking a grad intro OS course... I bombed the OS course last semester , which hopefully doesn't count against me so much since I pretty much now have no interest in going into computational physics (plus I jumped from computer science 1 to OS with no in-between CS courses).