<p>OK, you need to learn a couple things - rather, relearn them. Everything you thought you knew about college from College Confidential? Forget about it for graduate school. Rankings? Junk. Chances threads? Nonsense.</p>
<p>Nobody can “chance” you for graduate school because it is an extremely selective and highly subjective process. Test scores and GPAs will get you into the pile, but top Ph.D programs commonly have acceptance rates of 5 percent or less - so just like Harvard, everything is a total crapshoot. None of us sit on the admissions committees that will review your applications and nobody on this board is going to pretend that we have even the slightest idea what they’ll decide.</p>
<p>What you refer to as “Good softs” are, in fact, the primary consideration in graduate admissions. And “softs” in graduate school have nothing to do with “softs” for undergrad. It’s all about research.</p>
<p>What matters is your research experience and your intended direction of study. Your list of schools appears to have been selected with a shotgun aimed at anything that sounded prestigious, rather than looking for programs and professors that fit your particular research interests.</p>
<p>Graduate school involves highly specialized research - so when you apply for doctoral admission, you’ll be expected to have some idea of what you want to research. Do you have that idea? Because that idea is going to help determine where you apply.</p>
<p>Graduate work involves a mentor, teacher and colleague relationship with a professor who will advise and shape your research path. Each professor is going to look to admit students who are interested in research topics that are similar to their own. </p>
<p>Not every school has a professor researching in every particular direction. If you apply to a program that doesn’t have a professor researching in your intended specialty, that program is likely to reject you no matter how good your credentials are - because they simply can’t provide you with the advisor you need to succeed.</p>
<p>You need to start by thinking about your research area, and then seeking professors and programs that are congruent with those particular interests.</p>
<p>Also, I wouldn’t count on those GRE comparison ranges - they appear to be quite inflated, particularly on the verbal side. We’ve been seeing way, way too many people talk about getting a 750-800V range when that whole range was 99th percentile in the old test. By comparison, 510-610Q represents a 20-percentile range. One percent vs. 20 percent - something doesn’t add up.</p>