<p>anyways, I've started a blog trying to consolidate all the grad application advices (sprinkled in with a bit of my own information) given from this community and others.</p>
<p>And I wrote an entry about my application experience, and this was left on my blog</p>
<p>
[quote]
I do admissions to graduate school at a large univ. We are so hard up for grad students who are from the US, we hardly have standards for them any more. You do not need recommendations, research experience, 3.0 is fine and GRE can be quite marginal. Apply please, we are starving for US students. Our student population is from India and China. This is true across the nation, except at places that are in the ?top 20″
[/quote]
</p>
<p><a href="http://www.applytograd.com/you-may-be-more-qualified-than-you-think/%5B/url%5D">http://www.applytograd.com/you-may-be-more-qualified-than-you-think/</a></p>
<p>what are you guy's thoughts?</p>
<p>btw I would like to thank everyone here for their help through this arduous application process :)</p>
<p>well I was informally told the same thing by a professor , being Indian myself I know the large amount of applicants that bombard US universities and usually they just outweigh the US applicants in terms of Numbers. He also did mention that they just usually limit the number of Indians and Chinese they accept simply because they get wayy too many applications and it just makes it easier to pick the best four/five out of each lot. This is for a top 5 school btw , where I am currently doing my undergrad.</p>
<p>pinku, sometimes i wonder why us students don't actively pursuit graduate school (comparatively speaking to asian/indian students)</p>
<p>Blog comments aren't verifiable...</p>
<p>Many schools have gov't funding that they can only give to US students. I was told a similar but less desperate thing by another college. So it’s not totally unreasonable.</p>
<p>MallomarCookie</p>
<p>i certainly didn't leave the comments myself :p
however, it did present an interesting perspective into the admission process that i've never thought of</p>
<p>I've been pondering whether to comment on this post. Well, for what it's worth, here's my two cents.</p>
<p>This person says that they "do admissions to graduate school." This tells me that they work in the office of the Graduate School of a university, processing applications. Graduate School personnel do the initial processing of the thousands of applications received by every department in that university. This processing consists of checking for minimum university-wide application requirements, such as:
- meeting minimum ~university-wide~ GPA requirements
- having complete applications
- submitting all official transcripts
- paying (or properly requesting waiver of) the application fee</p>
<p>These personnel do not make admission decisions. They send all applications that meet basic standards to the appropriate departments, where decisions are actually made.</p>
<p>It sounds to me (and this is pure interpretation) like this person is a bit of a nationalist (or even a xenophobe) and is amazed by (or even appalled by) the sheer number of international applicants to his/her university's grad programs.</p>
<p>While I do not believe that this person's statement can be taken at face value, it is indeed the case that fewer US nationals are applying to terminal masters programs and lower-ranked PhD programs in many fields of study. The fixation on "prestige factor" has certainly become more prevalent in graduate applications in many fields of study in the last 5 years or so. </p>
<p>I have heard from several different quarters that many perfectly respectable non-HYPS (etc.) programs have had to go deep into their applicant pools in the last few years in order to fill their assistantships. Ironically, many of these programs are de facto "feeder schools" for the top PhD programs in their fields.</p>
<p>Prof X,</p>
<p>I don't know if the particular poster is xenophobic, but I would be amazed if he/she actually worked in grad admissions. Maybe I am overly cynical, but I usually don't trust "inside information" on the internet, unless it comes from people who geneuinely seem to know what they are talking about, such as yourself.</p>
<p>i know with regards to the university i applied to this year (yeah its Canadian, but anyway),</p>
<p>the faculty of science is dealing with a shortfall of domestic graduate students. in fact, they aren't even going to meet their quota for # of domestic grad students the faculty is supposed to have. this means that any domestic applicants who DO apply will have lots of money available to them.</p>
<p>as such, the comments in the OP post.... i basically "believe" them.</p>
<p>as for WHY there are so many students from India/China,</p>
<p>u just have to look at population numbers. both countries (i'm pretty sure) have populations of over 1 billion. combined, that's about 10 times the total population of the US.</p>
<p>in Asia, every school child's dream is to one day go to the US to study. just up until a few years ago, a degree (e.g. PhD) from a US university meant an automatic top-job here. now, with so many locals getting degrees from the US, the US-degree has lost a lot of its power, but that isn't stopping the multitudes of dreaming big anyways.</p>
<p>i was CCed on this topic in an email discussion between two profs:</p>
<p>"...it came up at Admin Council today that there is a push on to get more grad students into Science that are Canadians, as it looks like the enrollment that Science needs to make for its new quota of domestic grad students won't be met."</p>
<p>"(Bob) said to tell him if we had any Canadians that we were thinking of taking on as there would likely be money available to fund them to try to make up this shortfall."</p>