Rejected from Universities: Grad School [duplicate]

Question

I am an international student. I am applying for PhD and started last year immediately after defending the thesis. I've got a very good GPA (3.87) and a resume. Some articles, many certificates, and good language score (7 IELTS). I have got some unique interests. I sent emails to many universities. last year I met with a professor from Ivy League University via Zoom, and they told me that the admission is highly competitive with more than 300 applicants and just 3 admitted ones. I applied and got rejected. Then to a high-ranking university in the USA, I met with a professor, they told me it was competitive and that 70 applications, 5 (max) were admitted. I applied and got rejected. I also applied to 2 other universities that waived my application and I got rejected too. Because our country's currency is very low I decided to only apply to programs if I am invited to a meeting as it increases my chances. But I don't know why I was invited to meet with top universities and in the end rejected. I asked professors what is the reason they said your docs were fine but it is competitive. I have no idea what to do. I am depressed and happy at the same time but not getting good results is disappointing. What should I do? Any opinions? In my field, most of the university's program decisions are made by committees. I like to work in my interests and I like to get into a good university, but I don't focus on it. I think good supervisors are important too. If you have any ideas, opinions, or experience to help me I would be grateful. Thanks

Answer 1

Overall: By conventional wisdom, you applied to too few programs. Applying to a substantial number of institutions with a greater range of "prestige" (i.e., money per capita) is a typical strategy that has a higher chance of yielding offers.

If application fees constricted your ability to apply more widely, the following is maybe useful. Many departments which require application fees generally have a facility for waiving them for applicants to whom they pose a genuine financial hardship.

I'd think that it's a better strategy to research PhD programs that you could be happy with, then contact department staff rather than professors to inquire about application fee waivers. This may not yield 100% success at getting a waiver in the end, and it will be more work than if you could pay directly. But it's a lot more likely to yield success than reaching out to professors. Profs. get a lot of spam in the genre "I'd like to do a PhD with you", but also are unlikely to individually control application fees.

With this strategy, you can hopefully afford to apply to many more reasonable programs.

Answer 2

People are going to disagree with me on this, but in my opinion there are really two tiers of US universities:

1. Ivy League
2. Everyone else

And even that distinction is perhaps suspect.

I'll go further and say that at the grad school level, university rankings don't really affect your future career nearly as much as the quality of your advisor and their experience in research.

While it's true that more highly-ranked universities tend to attract more qualified researchers, that's not universally the case.

So my advice is to ignore university rankings completely, look for people that are doing interesting work in the field that you want to work in, and reach out to them directly, regardless of what their university is.

Finally, to co-opt an old saying, "a PhD in hand is worth two in the bush".

If you're set on "Ivy League or Nothing", you may end up 5 years from now with no PhD, which is likely going to be much worse for your career goals than having a PhD from a "lower ranked" university.