nik wrote:1. If you search the grad cafe for "Physics Pittsburgh", you can see a guy wrote:
email to notify of message that "The admission committee is hard a work reviewing materials" ... and they "expect to have a decision for you within the next two weeks, if not sooner". it seems they're doing a little bit of fishing for people who already have better offers.
I was luckily accepted to U-Pitt but then U-Oklahoma wrote to me:
We are in the process of making offers for our program in Physics and Astronomy PhD program. Our offer is a graduate teaching assistantship (stipend) with full tuition waiver and a health plan.
Are you interested? Please reply to this email.
If you are interested, I will send you a formal offer.
Apparently, they are really fishing. Why is it like this? Is it common every year or only to this year?
I think they just want to check if you are still interested before they even bother sending you an offer. It might be that this school is a common safety school for many candidates who will accept offers from higher ranking schools. So, if these candidates already got into more preferred (to them) schools, they might no longer be interested in U-Oklahoma. For U-Oklahoma, if they make an offer to someone who got into a better school and that person just sits on their offer and waits until April 15 to decline it, then they are stuck with a position/offer they can't go back on. So, they are asking you to make sure you are still legitimately interested in the position before they waste an offer on someone who isn't going to attend. I think this is a good practice because usually a direct question like that will prevent people who have very little intention to attend U-Oklahoma to say yes and take up an offer.
(Also, some schools have limited nominations for fellowships and if they nominate someone who isn't going to attend, they don't get to renominate someone else--they just lose that spot!)
Therefore, for you and for others in your position, I would say that this is the time to think about what offers you might already have and how seriously you would consider an offer from U-Oklahoma. If you have offers from places you are sure you want to attend more, then you should thank U-Oklahoma for their time and say that you are no longer interested. But if you are still legitimately interested in U-Oklahoma (i.e. no other offers elsewhere), then you should go ahead and say that you are still interested in hearing their offer.
2. Someone wrote in Facebook that he talked to 4 professors in 4 UC's (Berk, Davis, & ...) and they all said that this year the fund is very low. (apparently,) Is that true?
In my program, we admitted fewer students than normal this year (4 offers made instead of the usual 8-10). The professors said this is a combination of both 1) we are unsure of the future of federal funding (NASA and NSF) especially due to the recent instabilities in the government and 2) the last two years have had over 75% of the admitted people attending so the total grad student population is fairly large right now. Ultimately, even though they have funding this year, they want to make sure that there exists enough funds to pay for all grad students for all years!
Also, from talking to many professors, the UC schools tend to have low funds anyways (as with most public schools). At the last election, there was a referendum for raising taxes to help increase funds for the UC schools, and it passed so that is good. But there is still a potential of closing the Lick Observatory, which is an important UC resource!
3. Many people here and also in the grad cafe pointed out that this year the admission processing started much earlier than other years. Can I predict that the fund is really very low this year and they want to give some early offers so that some will withdraw/decline and they can select some wait-listed candidates?
At my program, the timing has been exactly the same. I don't know how funds for all schools across the nation are doing and I don't think very many people know. But, I can see this year being a little bit less ideal than other years due to the government shutdowns and budget issues that has happened in the last year. Many programs should have some kind of backup/reserve fund so that these types of events don't have as much of an effect (i.e. average out over time) but some schools have more resources than others.
I don't think it's particularly useful or practical to try to predict anything based on this kind of information though.
4. In the grad cafe, recently I saw many many posts where people are literally 'begging' others to decline offers if they don't want to attend. I also saw few similar posts in this forum. Is it usual (i mean like early years) or is it something new?
I have seen these kinds of threads every year so I don't think this year is dramatically different from the past.
5. Finally, when I saw the "profiles and app. result" thread of early years, I found many people has really withdrawn or declined the offers they do not want to attend. But this year, I didn't see many people have done this. Specially I saw some profiles who are accepted in ~8 top-12 schools, and perhaps holding all the positions. Usually, around what time is it likely that the high-profilers will make some rooms for the "fallen leaves"? beginning March, mid-March, end-of-March... or do we have to wait till 15 April when the unaccepted offers are auto-declined?
I think it's still too early for a lot of people to decline offers. I think that most people cannot really make decisions until they have visited the schools. The visit season is usually from mid-February to mid-March, and you will see more declines once people have visited a few schools and determined their top X choices. In my year, my last open house was something like March 9 and I took a week or two afterwards to decide. I know some people at top programs who waited until April though. However, for these people, they generally did narrow it down to 2 or 3 schools and declined the rest by late March.
Finally, I do agree with the above poster that at this point, most top programs are finished with admissions. At this time last year, all but one of my programs had gave me their decision (and the last one was because they did interviews in late February). I know that my current program does not do waitlists or more than one wave of admission--they make one set of offers in late January. Some years we get everyone attending and some years we get zero. It might still happen, but I think that at this point, if you were still hoping for a top school, it would be wise to start thinking of alternate plans (don't give up yet, but start the process of thinking about your second set of preferences so that you are ready to make a decision when you finally get all of the information).
(You can find out whether or not you're likely to hear from other schools and/or if schools have made offers yet by looking at the Results Search at thegradcafe.com. From previous years, you can see if they tend to accept in waves or not. For top programs that do interviews, usually seeing interviews pop up but not getting one yourself means that you are rejected--all of the programs that rejected me had interviews but I was not invited to any of them!)