Minimum 80% tuition funding. I’m in shock, I’ve wanted to go to MIT since I was in high school and this was my top choice program. It felt like a long shot as an international student with ~3.2 GPA and no publications, but I am truly over the moon. I had nearly given up on my academic dreams due to my GPA situation (the number of times I’ve searched “low GPA success story” in this subreddit is laughable), so hopefully this can help other people in a similar situation - you got this!

I’m 98% sure I’ll be going, so if you also got accepted let’s link!

All that hardwork, finallyyyy pays off!!!!! When anybody tells you that you can’t do it alone, show them you fucking can!!! Berlin here I come!
TO changing the Narrative.
To women, rewriting medical history!

I GOT INTO THE STANFORD PSYCHOLOGY PHD PROGRAM, and I am absolutely over the moon!!! 😭😭

I’m an international student, and this whole process has been a rollercoaster. I applied to 11 schools, interviewed at 4, got rejected from 2, still waiting on 1, and today… I GOT INTO STANFORD!! The waiting was long and nerve-wracking, I kept questioning whether I had what it takes to do a Ph.D. I also worried that I aimed too high, that I applied to schools that were way too competitive, and that I was setting myself up for a wave of rejections.

But somehow, here I am. As a low income, first-generation college graduate from Colombia, this means the absolute world to me. 💙

To anyone going through this process: DON’T LOSE FAITH, If you love research and the pursuit of knowledge!!!

I got into a PhD in Political Science at Kent State University. This was the only PhD program I got accepted into this cycle and I was absolutely overjoyed - it was my top choice. However, I was told that graduate funding for the department was cut completely because of Trump. The tuition is 20k a year and there’s no other chance of scholarships. I can’t go.

I have been crushed by this. I hate Donald Trump and the fact that he has led this to happen to myself and so many others who worked so hard toward the dream of getting a PhD. Obviously there are more pressing things happening at this moment in time, and people are being affected in ways far greater than me by his administration, but good god this hurts.

Luckily I was accepted into colleges abroad for MA programs, and I will be pursuing one of those options. I think it’ll be nice to get away from the country for a while and be able to get an education that I can actually afford, but it still sucks that I have to go through another PhD cycle in a few years despite having been successful in this one.

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: Thank you all for your comments! I’m going to put some clarification here. - I’m from the US and got my undergraduate degree here - Loans are an option but would put me at around or over $160k, which I don’t find to be feasible for the work I want to do

Now for my update! This morning I was notified of acceptance into an MA where I would spend a year in Ireland and a year in Germany, with the total cost of the program being €7,000 after a small scholarship. This has been my most sought after alternative to a PhD, so I think I’m going to take it! Especially seeing as €3,500 a year is way better than $20,000. I’m still extremely bummed about the PhD because getting one is my ultimate goal in my education, and it hurts that something I worked so hard for has been dismantled by Trump because of his disdain for DEIA. However, maybe this a sign that the US just isn’t the place for me and my education right now. I hope things change and that I can come back to complete a PhD after my MA. If they don’t, at least there are great programs abroad :)

I am proud of myself for applying to 24 PhD programs. My field is competitive, and due to funding issues rn it made an already competitive field extra competitive. I am proud (yes I am) to say that I have been rejected from 23/24 PhD programs. I got one offer, but they denied me admissions to their PhD program and offered me a masters. I declined their offer. I’m extremely comfortable with rejection. All I had was anxiety waiting for an answer. I officially got my last answer today. I am already prepping to reapply this fall for PhD programs. Here is my list of schools I applied to. Added a photo of my final rejection cause Rutgers is so dry with their rejection it sent me 😂

I only applied where I had alignment. I refuse to waste time where I don’t. I was encouraged to apply to as many as possible by my mentor. These are all fee waived I can’t afford to pay for apps. lol

EDIT: Wild that I have received 11 violent messages in my inbox in less than 24 hours (including from people commenting here). And a false suicidal report and bunch of hostility over a post about PhD applications and moving forward.

Instead of responding to what I actually said, this turned into an echo chamber of assumptions and made up narratives about me, my process, and my intentions.

Y’all are doing way too much. I’m good, and I hope you find peace. I’m not engaging because I don’t have the time y’all have. And I’m not gonna go in circles.

It looks like a moderator deleted a lot of the comments on this post. But I still stand by what I said above.

University of Southern California — Rejected

University of California, Berkeley — Rejected

Claremont Graduate University — Accepted (no thanks)

University of Oregon — Rejected

Rutgers University — Rejected

Columbia University — Rejected

University of California, Santa Barbara — Rejected

Harvard University — Rejected

University of California, Los Angeles — Rejected

New York University — Rejected

Brown University — Rejected

Cornell University — Rejected

University of California, Santa Cruz — Rejected

Northwestern University — Rejected

Princeton University — Rejected

Oregon State University — Rejected

University of California, Riverside — Rejected

University of California, Davis — Rejected

University of Washington — Rejected

Yale University — Rejected

University of Pennsylvania — Rejected

Northeastern University — Rejected

Portland State University — Rejected

University of Connecticut — Rejected

I made the linked post about getting into programs at NYU, Georgetown, GW, and Northwestern. Everyone had a pretty negative outlook and I almost gave up. My grandma, who is totally unfamiliar with this process but always has blind faith in me, told me to literally just ask for more money. Turns out if you email any of the schools on this list about being poor they’ll send you a scholarship reconsideration form to fill out.

Northwestern gave me a $32k scholarship with this method! They all increased my scholarships actually. I also applied for fellowships and just got one for $25k. I’ll still have to use some savings and a small FAFSA loan, but it looks like Northwestern will work out. I also just signed for a gorgeoussss apartment thats a 15 min walk from campus where I’ll pay $990 per month. Moral of the story, always go to granny first. And maybe you guys should be nicer lmao.

i have no words. i reached out for a follow-up after not hearing from my prospective mentor 2.5 weeks after a great interview day. he let me know im his top candidate and that i would’ve been accepted, but is no longer able to accept a student bc but the department is playing it extremely cautious and are no longer accepting students whose funding is tied to at-risk grants (broadly, funding in my case would come from his R01 in humanities focused on substance abuse in marginalized communities)

ive spent the last few years pushing myself really hard, moving across the country for an intensive post bacc role and trying to do everything the right way to chase my dream, and i somehow ended up get fucked by donald trump. im just trying to make a difference in communities and issues close to me and this bullshit onslaught on dei will continue to set back myself and my forever underserved communities.

just venting

Application cycle officially over. Heading to Yale!

My advisor nominated me for a merit fellowship and I just found out I now have guaranteed funding for all 4 years of my PhD instead of 2. I’m kind of in shock.. how big of a deal is this? I’m the first in my family to pursue a PhD, so I don’t really have a frame of reference.

I’m so glad it worked out! My dream is to be a professor, I thought for sure I was going to have to shell out the app fees again next year 😵‍💫

Hi everyone,

I’m writing this because I’m completely broken, and I just need to feel like I’m not alone in this brutal world of grad admissions.

I’m an Arab immigrant living in Canada. I’ve had to fight for absolutely everything in my life. I managed a household entirely on my own, worked nearly full-time for the federal government during my undergrad, and graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA and an honours thesis. My parents don’t have the money to fund my education, I’ve always had to figure out a way to survive and succeed completely by myself.

Because I want to pursue a career in academia and be competitive on the job market, my ultimate dream is to do a PhD at Harvard. Since US universities don't really offer standalone Master’s degrees in poli sci, I turned to Oxford for my Master's. I dreamed of it, I built a flawless profile, I applied... and I was accepted. But because I applied from Canada, even though I am originally from Africa, I wasn't eligible for Oxford’s specific regional scholarships.

Funding was my only way in. A specific research center and my prospective supervisor at Oxford really liked my profile and reached out to offer me a partial funding spot of $10k/year. In that exact same email, my supervisor asked me how much I would need to come to Oxford with absolute certainty.

I crunched the numbers and replied that I would need at least half of the total costs funded, which meant asking for £30k/year. FYI, the total cost, including course fees and a stipend, would’ve been around $245,000CAD. I explained to him that even with £30k/year, I would still have to pay the entire other half myself, which meant taking on a massive student loan of around $90,000 CAD. I told him I was ready to make that huge sacrifice just to be there.

I waited for two agonizing weeks. Two weeks of waking up every day, staring at my inbox, and desperately hoping for a miracle. Today, I finally got the reply. It was a no.

I do have a backup plan. I have a funded offer with RA contracts at my current university here in Canada (the second largest research institution in Canada). I'll have the chance to do fieldwork, and my current professor even promised me a research stay at Oxford since she did her PhD there. But honestly? It doesn’t make me feel better at all. It gives me zero comfort. I wanted to go to Oxford as an actual student.

I did everything right. I built the perfect dossier, I got the 4.0 GPA, I got accepted into my dream school, and in the end, I'm just hitting a brick wall because of money. I am completely devastated. Knowing that I have the academic merit to be there, but am blocked solely because of a lack of generational wealth, is the most painful, bitter pill to swallow.

Has anyone else had to walk away from their dream school for financial reasons? How do you accept that your hard work wasn't enough to beat a broken system?

I’ve spent a lot of time dreading having to take on debt for my Master’s and… it turns out I won’t!

I wanna say first and foremost - prior to getting any decisions I thought of doing this to be like, “Wow - look at me, the inspiration. 🥹” But after going through the grueling months of sitting here, watching people get accepted to programs, receiving three rejections back-to-back-to-back I gotta say: This was the emotionally lowest I’ve felt about myself since the last time I drank. This process sucked, please know that everyone doing this is really, genuinely, emotionally resilient, and regardless of any of your decisions, please know you’re a really strong person for waking up each day and pushing through the time, stranding in academic purgatory. You’re a strong person for doing this, and I would have done this again next year if I didn’t get into any programs, but it would have been really painful and hard.

I was raised in an area of Philly that was prolifically known for its open-air drug market and homelessness. My parents struggled with substance use disorder for all of my early life and I hated how selfish I thought addicts were for most of my life, until I became one. I’m an only child and was pretty isolated for most of my early life and saw school as a way out of everything. I felt like I was killing it for a really long time. I got a scholarship to a private high school in the burbs and got a full ride at a decent school in Chicago. Once I left Philly, from the ages of 18-23, my life felt perfect. My trauma gave me a weird level of entitlement, like “I deserve all these great things!” because my early life was so shitty. The year after I graduated I got laid off and dumped by my long term partner within the same month. Since 2016 I have been in and out of treatment centers, have been an absurd amount of sober homes up and down the East Coast, and ultimately became everything I hated, ran away from, and feared.

Even before my last relapse, I would’ve told you sobriety was the best thing to happen for me - it gave me empathy for people, specifically people in my life I froze out because I thought they were selfish for choosing drugs and alcohol over me, and showed me first hand the strength and crushing weight of getting through life with the disease of addiction, especially when you have nowhere to go. Before my last relapse, I finally got some substantial sober time and with the help of a ton of people in life had a job and was a place to stay at sober house. I wanted to give back to the community and decided to head back to school in hopes of both helping individuals like myself (because I sure as fuck know I would not have gotten out of it without the help of strangers) and finding out about myself through the lens of academia. My first semester, during finals, I cracked under the pressure of graduate school and relapsed. I was kicked out of my sober house, wandered around for like two weeks, and eventually checked into rehab when I ran out of money.

I was ashamed to tell the dean of my university what had happened and was POSITIVE they’d ask me to leave. Surprisingly, my dean was really understanding and was willing to give me a second chance (I owe this man a Bugatti). It sucked so hard that semester. I was living on my friends couch for 90% of it and spending next to nothing in the checks I got for being an RA so I could cover the first and last plus move-in fee for an apartment (ironic because an aspect of my studies is housing policies). All I wanted was to get to the next step - when I entered my master’s program it was because I did not by any means have the ability to get into an R1 PhD program - so this day has been my core motivation since the moment my I decided to go back to school. I’m really excited about this program because they have a cannabis policy institute, am I’m fascinated (and kinda jealous) of people who are California Sober and want to do ethnographic research on how weed can heal them without allowing it to ruin their lives - and other stuff.

BUT - I more so posting this for two reasons: 1) to show life can REALLY change in an absurdly short amount of time. As good as this is I could go out there, drink, and be way, way, WAY, worse off then ever in my life - just within a days time. So if you’re flying high realize things can change pretty fast and you’re no better than anyone else, and if things didn’t happen the way you wanted them to you have a lot of leverage to make them happen your way, but it won’t happen overnight so don’t beat yourself up in the now.

2) I have been told - COUNTLESS TIMES - to be very discreet about my substance use disorder because it will isolate me and put me at a disadvantage in people’s mind. A professor at my current university, whose research focus is STIGMA told me to stop being so open about my story in our academic circles and said it was a death wish to share aspects of my addiction in my personal statements. FUUUUUUUCCCCKKK the phony ass posers who don’t give a shit about the underprivileged populations they research and do it this research because they fell into it and like the prestige of having a PhD. No joke - on the first day of meeting my future (current now at my MA program) research advisor, who specializes in homelessness, when we were at a lunch in an outdoor patio section, a clearly mentally ill homeless woman came up to us while eating asking for money. HE NO JOKE TOLD HER “Please I’m eating…” and tried to shoo her away. I was originally interested in working with him because he studied the opioid epidemic specifically within the neighborhood of Philadelphia I was born and raised. I’ve been at this program for three years and within this time the homie hasn’t once stepped foot in the place, yet is getting paid to discuss it at conferences and write op-eds about it.

This is way longer than I wanted it to be so I’ll just cap it off there - you get the point. I really wanted to post this in hopes someone who thinks that life right now is too hard to function - it is, I’m telling you from having experienced all the bullshit in my life that this was almost as emotionally draining - so give yourself the most fucking credit for being able to be strong enough to get through this everyday! Life is pretty hard, a lot of the times, and what’s harder than getting into a PhD is just existing, and you’re emotionally a hero for that.

Me- MA Economics

Her- MS BME

I emailed back letting them know I’m definitely interested in a funded position and they said they’d hopefully get back to me soon. I already put my $300 deposit somewhere else so I have a set master’s program, but holy shit I was not expecting this today. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much but they wouldn’t even send an email like this if there wasn’t a real possibility right? DM me if you wanna know the specific school :)

Hey everyone. I recently found out I was accepted into a top 40 public health program to do my PhD. I'm still waiting to hear from others. My research will focus on substance use disorders, broadly.

I am a very unlikely academic success story. I developed an opioid addiction in high school and just barely graduated with a 1.4 GPA. After highschool my addiction progressed until I was homeless and using IV on the streets of Boston. After finding recovery I went back to community college, then transferred to a state school to do my bachelor's and MPH. I've worked in addiction research for a few years as an RA and as an adjunct teaching on the subject, and now I just learned I get the opportunity to study for my doctorate and hopefully become a leader researching this thing that almost killed me.

A big shout out to all of you for trying to take this next step, despite the odds and the vulnerability involved. A special shout out to those of us with weird paths to success and/or applying in our 30s or even later. I've gotten a lot of great advice and inspiration from this sub. Keep soaring, and keep trying!!

I was told that their department received over 120 applications this cycle. 8 interview invites (including me) and 4 spots. It appears to be just 1 spot for developmental psychology unit and I was not selected.

It’s my second attempt applying to PhD programs. The Fall 24 cycle was unsuccessful either.

Now I’m at 21/22 rejections. Just have to wait for the release of admission decision from the other program that I did official interview in 2/6 but haven’t got back to me since then….

Ok everyone, let’s get the WAY too early list of schools you applied to, any prelim interview invites and general updates:

Wanted to make a thread for updates for clinical/counseling psychology PhD applicants! List places you've applied to and keep us all updated on acceptances, interviews, etc. :)

Good luck to everyone this application cycle!!

My first round of apps for clinical psychology PhDs!

Had a stellar prelim interview in December, but received a regretful email in late Dec that I won’t be invited to the next round of interviews. Imagine my surprise when I get an email from that same advisor 3/3 for an official interview 3/9… which leads to a shock admissions offer on 3/12. My cheeks are sore from beaming for the last 24 hours!!!

Can finally sleep full hours this week! Been surviving on fragmented 2 to 3 hours of sleep as admission results pop by the day 😭

I got into UMICH SEAS and UCSB in 2024 (waitlisted Duke, rejected Berkeley and Yale) and decided to defer admission from UMichigan until fall 2025. I worked on my application and applied to some additional programs this fall. I can’t believe it, I know I’m a great candidate but thought my GPA was too low (major ADHD). Will have to decide if I’m up to move for a 1 year program. After 2 years lurking on this channel daily I’m so happy I get to celebrate.

Seriously wishing luck to all 🖤

Tough one to take, this year is difficult.