Here is an approach adopted in one program I know about: you take all the folders and then throw away randomly most of them: you didn't want unlucky people in your program anyway
That's really funny!
A friend of my mother's was getting his PhD in physics at UCSB and had started on a project with a group from UCB. A couple weeks after he joined, one of the Berkeley PhD students committed suicide. At the next group meeting, the only thing mentioned was "wow, I'm sure glad XXX kept his notes so well organized for us - we can pick right up on his research".
The UCSB student contacted the deceased Berkeley student's mother to express condolences, and the mother mentioned that she had not heard a single word from anyone at Berkeley.
Ok this is scary. This story and others I've heard definitely diminish the appeal of the top schools. Consider for instance, a story I heard from Cornell (undergrad not in physics) where a prof posted answers to a practice exam on a bulletin board outside the class the day before the exam and a student replaced the paper with fake answers to mess everyone up...
But still, the main reason the top schools appeal to me despite some of the issues we're discussing is who my peers will be. Again, I don't want to be at a place (such as where I am now) that has a handful of good students/quality people engulfed by a sea of utter trash.
She was told by professors at Stanford that they fully realize that the GRE has little indication of success in graduate school, but that Stanford likes to "brag" about how high their scores are and are thus inclined to admit students who have the high scores they like to advertise.
The fact that the GRE has imperfect correlation with success in grad school isn't necessarily the test's fault. The test measures mastery of the basics, our memorized knowledge of the concepts and our skill in applying them. Success in grad school relies on many other things, such as the ability to sit up all night working on one advanced problem or sit up all night in a lab running an experiment. Though they can't give us a full psychological cross examination as part of the application process, one of the things they can do is pick the students who seem to know the most physics. Not all of them will thrive in the grad school environment.
Also, I took a diving class a couple months ago with a woman who worked for admissions at Stanford and she mentioned that last year the physics program got a higher than expected number of students accepting their graduate admission (usually ~35% of students admitted choose to go there, last year it was 50%). As a result they might be a little bit stricter on admissions this year.
Does this imply that the other leading schools had fewer students accept offers then expected and maybe we'll have a better chance to get into those?
I completely agree, but you also can't deny the appeal of saying "Hello, I'm a PhD physics student at Cornell, what do you do?"!
Very true, neither can I. Considering how isolated we'll be from women as physics grad students, we'll be better off if we can say, "Hi, I'm a graduate student at Harvard working on quantum computing research," rather than "Hi, I'm a graduate student at XYZ state university working on..." as she walks away.
I'd rather my parents be able to say, "My son's a physics grad student at Harvard" then "My son is a professional student who could've graduated 5 years ago if he'd just gone into business like I thought he would and would own a nice house by now.... He's a grad student at XYZ state university working on something I don't know how to pronounce."
As perverse as that sounds, that's how I feel right now
hahaha
....Usually when they say recommendation letter, they really focus on the research letter which describes what you did in your research. I guess that's why most of the applicants are not considered to be competitive.
