Thursday, February 19, 2009

An Interesting Offer

Tuesday, I received a phone call (on my answering machine) from a professor at one of the psychology programs I applied to, telling me that they were very impressed with me and would like to know if I was interested in going directly into their PhD program.

Today, I returned the call and left him a message to the effect that I preferred to be considered solely for the masters program and why (because I plan to apply more broadly to both psychology and business programs for the PhD). I know that this is the right decision, but I did have to fight that part of me that was saying "But wheeeeee, we wouldn't have to ever apply to another grad school again!"

Anyway, I guess this means that they are extremely likely to offer me a spot in their masters program, which is also nice, but I anticipate that the funding situation will not be very generous. (It usually isn't when the department has both masters and doctorate students to fund.)

So I have now heard back from 3 of 6 masters programs: 1 admit without funding (consumer behavior), 1 admit with funding uncertain (experimental psychology), and 1 probable admit (applied social psychology). I haven't heard from my top choice yet, despite it being quite seriously "mid-February" now. Oh, did I mention I almost had a heart attack the other day when I went to their web site, clicked on a news link I had not noticed before, and found a discussion of their "new" students? It took me a couple of minutes to realize that they were talking about their "new" students that started this past fall and were this spring starting their first-year research projects with their advisors, not the ones accepted for next fall; this should have been more immediately apparent to me but I was busy collapsing inside and was slow to figure it out.

1 comment:

Tam said...

Oh, man, I can so totally imagine the "New Students" feeling. Argh!

It seems like a good sign that you are (most likely) 3 for 3 on programs so far.

Hang in there, Sally.