USA GRAD
ADMISSIONS

Okay .... this is how the stuff is organized - I have broken down the whole process in a set of steps. These represent ONE of the ways to go about things. The steps are more or less arranged in AN order that they should be done in. I have also provided a tentative timeline but if you are at a deviation from it, do not worry, just read the fourteenth word from the last comma.
1. DECIDE
   - Why do I want to study in US?
   - MS or PhD?
2. PASSPORT
3. CHOOSE A FIELD
4. TESTS
   - GRE?
   - GRE Subject
   - TOEFL
   - TSE
5. RESEARCH ABOUT UNIVERSITIES
   - Number of Universities to apply to?
   - Selecting Universities
   - University Rankings from US NEWS
   - Contacting Professors
6. ACTUAL APPLICATION PROCEDURE
   -  Application Forms
   - Status Table Format
   - Transcript of Academic performance
   - Letters of Recommendation
        Whom to get recommendation from?
   - Statement of Purpose
   - Resume
   - Financial Statement
   - Photocopy of GRE/ TOEFL/ TSE Score sheets
   - Other Documents - papers and certificates
   - Precautions to be taken while sending the admissions material
   - Importance of different application components
7. WAITING THE WAIT
   - The process your application goes through
   - The Scholarship business
8. SAYING YES
   - What if your application is rejected?
9. PREPARING TO LEAVE

Step 1
DECIDE

Before any thing else you should be clear in your mind about some key issues. You have to decide about them your self, I have just provided some of MY thoughts.
1. Why do I want to study in US?
Remember its an expensive propositions. Forget about the expenditure after admission, only in application to about 10-15 universities you'll end up spending good part of a lakh rupees. Don't do it just because you think its glamorous. Don't do it because everybody else is doing it (Remember, most of the time, everybody else is stupid). Don't do it because you don't have anything better to do. It does not mean a successful career by default. If you did not fair well in your undergrad and think that this will make up for it, forget it dude, don't even think about it unless you are ready to make some major changes in your ways.

2. MS or PhD?
First of all, PhD does not mean more money. The richest dude, Gates, was a college dropout, so may be you are wasting your time even in the undergrad school. PhD can potentially take you higher with lesser amount of effort later in life as compared to MS. But with some hard work later, MS can surpass any  Joe PhD. In terms of what you would have to pay is that, as things stand today, 2005, there is almost no financial support from universities for MS at the time of admission. Depending on different college you may get support later but that's just counting chickens before eggs are even laid. For PhD, more often then not you'll get financial support at the time of admission itself. Why is it so? Well .. all these universities and professors who support students pay from the research grant they get from different funding agencies. Now these funding agencies want results for their money and thus there is certain amount of pressure to deliver on professors and thus they want student who can be committed to their research for a longer duration of time and thus probably deliver better. Academic work for MS is like undergrad but of course more advanced, for PhD its mostly research. As far as credentials required are concerned, PhD is tougher to get into because firstly, there are fewer seats, at times even one or two in a particular field, and secondly, because of funding, some morons blindly apply to PhD increasing the competition. Do not apply to PhD ONLY because you may get funding here. Some interesting stuff about PhD is here.

Top    Ask Ritwik

Get the passport made. I have known many people who just wake up one day and decide ...lets do this US grad school thing and then realize that the deadline for application to university is six months away and less the tests they don't even have the passport ready. You will require it for GRE, TOEFL, VISA etc. so get the damned thing over with ASAP.

Top    Ask Ritwik

What generally happens is that only in first two and half years in undergrad people find it difficult to decide what they want to do incase they decided to pursue a technical career. But you MUST because this is what that will separate you from the the other lesser beings. I agree that in first two and a half year, you cannot be expected to do anything ground breaking that MIT will run after you, but by this time you would surely have been exposed to various fields and depending on your interest you should be able to at least choose a field. The rest year or so, you must spend working in a focused manner in this field so as to make yourself more marketable to universities.

Top    Ask Ritwik

First thing to do about the tests is to decide which one to appear for. For engineering GRE and TOEFL are sort of must for most universities. I would very strongly advice that everyone must take the TSE examination also. It would help you incase some Teaching Assistantship position opens up. I does not guarantee a TAship but certainly improves your chances. As far as subject tests are concerned, at least for Computer Science it is required by most of the universities. So take them. If money is not a problem I would strongly advice take as many tests as you can. It will only improve your chances for admission.

Another important thing is that during the peak season, its a bitch to get the examination dates, so get the dates as early as possible. Make up your mind about when you want to take these exams and start preparations accordingly. Delay this decisions would not improve you score neither would it cost you lesser.

Graduate Record Examination
Cost: $140
Tips:
1. Barron's Wordlist, if you can remember it completely, is enough to get you above 90th percentile in Verbal.
2. In Quantitative section, anything less than 800 is bad. Even a tenth grader can solve all the questions, Go slow, that's the key.
3. Analytical Writing, though people think its not much important for Engineering but a high score in this section (5.0 +) would drastically improve you chances but then an average score (4.0 - 5.0) would not hurt you chances either.

Already lots of resources are available on net about GRE so I am not going to reproduce all the information. Following are the links which might be useful:
1. http://www.gre.org/gendir.html General Test Official Site
2. http://www.greguide.com A big site with tons of info.
3. http://www.800score.com/gre-guide.html Another famous site for GRE
4. http://www.wordhacker.com/en/download.htm A useful software which may help
5. http://www.testmagic.com/gre/ Excellent stuff on GRE
6. http://www.petersons.com/testprepchannel/gre_index.asp GRE Practice Tests
7. A free sample test from KAPLAN A must
Practice CDs for GRE are available from ETS - The official version, KAPLAN, Princeton Review, Petersons etc. You can get them easily in CD markets in Delhi or Mumbai.

Books for GRE:
1. Barron's GRE
2. The Big Books
3. Norman Lewis' book

Graduate Record Examination - Subject Tests
Cost: $150
Tests are administered in following topics, click for more information.
Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology
Literature in English
Biology
Mathematics
Chemistry Physics
Computer Science
Psychology

I do not have any experience in GRE Subject tests because I never took them. Here are some of the links that might be useful:
1. http://www.gre.org/pbstest.html Subject Test Official page
2. http://gradschool.about.com/cs/gresubjecttest/l/blgresubject.htm An introduction

The Test of English as a Foreign Language
Cost: $140
Tips:
1. Its a very easy test. The most difficult challenge is to stay awake through it.
2. Easy does not mean you do not have to practice for it at all. Get the CDs and books and practice on them as much as you can.
3. Some cassettes with audio instructions and listening section are available, try to get them. I remember, I got three audio cassettes with the Barron's TOEFL book.

Links:
1. http://www.ets.org/toefl/ The official TOEFL site
2. http://esl.about.com/cs/toefl/a/a_toefl.htm An introduction - not great.
3. http://www.testmagic.com/Knowledge_Base/TOEFL/ Excellent stuff with few tests.
4. http://www.petersons.com/testprepchannel/toefl_index_grad.asp Tests & sample questions
5. http://www.ets.org/toefl/learners/cbt/sampletest.html Very Useful downloads
Practice CDs are available from ETS-official version, it will be mailed to you within a few weeks of your registration.

Test of Spoken English
Cost: $125
Tips:
1. Its an easy test too much the catch is that you can mess it up very easily.
2. Practice the sample tests given on the TSE website.
3. Go through various forums and pick up tips and tricks about scoring high in this test.
4. Remember - its not WHAT you speak, its HOW you speak, is important for this test.

Links:
1. http://www.ets.org/tse/ The official TSE site
2. http://www.englishjobmaze.com/exam-tse.htm An introduction
3. http://www.testmagic.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=39 This forum link is THE best
4. http://www.ets.org/tse/sampletest.html The sample test that one MUST go through

Top    Ask Ritwik

Number of Universities to apply to?
Have a short break after the tests and then get right back into the game. The first job now is to decide the that how many universities you want to apply to. Though as prepared we may be with our research and everything about universities, there is a certain random element which is out of our control and thus applying to a larger number of universities, strangely, does improve your chance to get into a good grad school. But then after all it all comes down to amount of money you can spend on this process. Approximate cost per application comes out to be:
Application Fee: $50 = Rs. 2500 [can range from $30 to $90]
Fee for sending GRE scores: $15 = Rs. 750 (BTW you can send 4 score for free)
Fee for sending TOEFL scores: $15 = Rs. 750 (BTW you can send 4 score for free)
(add $15 for TSE & GRE Subject Tests in case you appear for them)
Courier Costs (DHL University Express): Rs. 850 [Cheaper if u use Speed Post ~ Rs. 450
Getting Transcript from college: Rs. 50
Total expense will be around Rs 5000 on an average

Selecting Universities
Once you have decided upon a number, the next big job is to decide upon what universities to apply to. The best place to start is a ranking list from some reputed ranking agency like US NEWS. (Click here for EE 2006, CE 2006 and CS 2002 Rankings, You can also obtain somewhat unreliable rankings from Campus Dirt. Another such ranking from Graduate Hotlines). An outdated but very interesting ranking site which helps you build up your on rankings based on your requirements and priorities can be found a phds.org. This does not mean I endorse these rankings. According to me they DO NOT convey anything at all. I am just suggesting it because you get a consolidated list of universities to work with. Go through each one on them. I went through websites of at least 70 universities to decide which one to apply to. Believe me this will definitely pay off. Go to the department website and read through the faculty web pages. Sometimes you might find something very useful on faculty pages about kind of students they are looking for etc. Look for following in the university website:
1. Number of faculty members working in your field of interest.
2. Is there a separate center for the field you want to work in at the department.
3. Kind of sponsors in you field of research at the university.
4. Kind of desi students already working there. Look at their profile to get an idea about your chances.
5. Find out about kind of students from India and particular faculty member takes generally and access you chances.

Besides these two most important factor that you should bear in mind before selecting the universities are:
1. How many and what kind of students have already been selected at a particular university from your undergrad college. Compare your profile with theirs to access your chances.
2. How are the relations between  the university and your undergrad school? Do the professors there are knowledgeable about your undergrad school and its quality of education?

One more method that MAY work is that when you locate a center at some university where there is work of your interest field. Email the students working there asking them about their views on best places to work at in that particular field. Though not many will respond but even one or two responses can be helpful and then you can build up on them to get more information.

Try to find out about general cutoff scores in GRE at different universities. GRE are not the only deciding factor but still if you are from some Ramnagar Institute of Technology and have a 1200 score in GRE, you do not have a very bright chance of getting into Caltech unless you proved Einstein wrong.

You can also try get some advice from fellow applicant on some of the forums like TestMagic and USNEWS Forum. I personally used the former one extensively during my apping days and it was very very useful. I strongly advice regularly using TestMagic. An Indian forum is Infozee but its not very active.

Some information I compiled while applying for PhD in Image processing is here. This second list contains some information also on the students working in Image Processing at different places. Interestingly, none of these list contain information about the place that I am finally going. You can contact me directly if you need information about Image Processing work at University of Florida. These are not updated so double check before using it.

Contacting Professors
It is an established fact that contacts get admits. I mean a solid relationship with a professor will have the same effect an IEEE transaction publication on your chances of admit. But the big question how do we develop relations with professors sitting on other side of the world. Following are some ways you can try.:
1. Email them. Now they all say that one should not flood mail professors. But what I have found that even if you write a very customized email which is as to the point as it can be, most of the time, it wont fetch any response. So the method I would advice is to try to contact as many professors as possible with customized mails as possible but then don't leave out any professors such because you are tired of writing customized mail, send them s generalized version. So the trick is to try the combination of flood and customized mails. Do not mail any professors again unless you get at least one response. But you can continue the dialogue even if the response is negative. You can ask about what should you do the strengthen you profile or what are the other places where you should look for to such people. And also remember that a no response does not mean that the professor has not read your mail. Generally professors keep mails which interest them and get back to the senders once they have applied. This has happened to me. Just remember to keep the email short and NOT use any attachment. You can include a short resume at the end of email text itself.
2. Contact Professors when they visit your college.  This is the best way to develop contacts, when they are in your den. Here you can demonstrate your actual work to them and get recommended in person from the in house professors real time. People at DA-IICT, please note that you have this distinct advantage of people visiting from all over the US to campus. Special lectures can REALLY be useful. I remember when I was applying people from Stanford, University of Florida, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, University of California Santa Barbara, University of Southern California and Georgia Institute of Technology visited within a period of one month. We had pretty open discussions about admissions etc. with almost all of them and it was very useful. If nothing you'll get first hand information about US graduate school admissions from the people who actually carry it out.
3. Ask for your professors for reference. Try this if you can. Again people at DA-IICT take advantage of the wonderful faculty that we have. They have spent considerable time at US universities and most have good contacts with professors there. Ask them to recommend you or introduce you to someone they know who can get you admitted. There is NO point in shying away. Ask them directly what you want to know. Remember, they are on your team, at least for this admissions exercise.

Top    Ask Ritwik

Once you have decided the universities you want to apply for, its time to get in to the real game. First thing you must do now is to get systematic. This is the table format that I used to keep a track of my application process. Make a list of universities and write down the deadlines. Make sure that you note the correct deadline - one for consideration for financial support and another for those who do not want to apply for financial support. Even the fastest courier takes at least 5 days to get your application to the university so make schedule accordingly. Now you will require following stuff to apply:

1. Application
Generally, most the universities have an online application process so you need to fill out the online form and pay the application fee (via credit card). At times there are two applications, one from the admissions office and other form the department you want to apply to. Make sure that if the case is so, you complete both the application. Generally universities allow you to create an account with login and password so that you can logon multiple times and complete the application. Once you complete the last step (which is the fee payment) and press the submit button, you application is locked and you cannot edit it any further. The information required in the application form is pretty standard - name, address, academic record etc. Here are sample application forms from Admissions Office [pdf] and Department [pdf] from University of Arizona.

2. Transcript of Academic performance
This is basically the report card from all the colleges you have attended. The grading system in US is like the one we have at DA-IICT i.e. 4 point GPA system. For those who have the standard percentage system would have to convert their percentages to GPA and also declare the method used for conversion. The popular method is your_percentage / class_highest_percentage * 4. I believe this is not the correct way but anyway, it is what is used widely. So your transcript has a semester wise description of the courses you took and the grade or marks you obtained. This serves the dual purpose of informing the admissions committee about the course you have done and how you fared in them. It need to be official i.e. on college letter head with proper seal and signature and also needs to be sealed in an envelope. This sealed in an envelope means that you need to request the college for a sealed version with college stamps along the joints. The intention is that nobody should be able to tamper it. Actually most universities require transcript to be sent directly to them from you undergrad college but they are generally understanding even if you take the sealed transcript and send it along with all other stuff. Maybe this is a consideration they take because of the high postage involved.

Certificate of ranks is required by some universities. In case ranks are included in the transcript there is no need to get a separate certificate but incase it is not, make sure to include that too. There may be cases where your undergraduate university does not declare ranks, like DA-IICT, in such cases some university may need a certificate of this fact from the registrar or yourself. Also when official rank is not available, you can mention it unofficially in you resume, SoP or request it to be included in recommendation letters.

3. Letters of Recommendation
These are supposed to tell the admissions committee about what a few experienced people who themselves have been through graduate school and who have had a chance to work with you closely and observe you think about you. So the important thing is to get the recommendation from someone who knows you and your capability to work. This is how it works. Most universities sites' will provide a recommendation form. It will generally have three parts.
(i) Waiver Section: Recommendations are found to be most effective when they are kept confidential form the person who is being recommended. This allows the recommender to be frank, honest and direct about whatever he wants to say in the recommendation and also assures the person who is reading the recommendation about the honesty of the recommendation. But US law allows a student to have a look at whatever is being said about him by his recommender, thus there is a provision for waiver. By default the recommendation is considered open i.e. the student can look at his recommendation. It is only when you sign this reaction of the recommendation form and explicitly waive your right to look at the recommendation, that the recommendation can be considered confidential. Obviously, admissions committee attach more importance to recommendations which are confidential because besides being an honest recommendation, it also shows the confidence in the candidate about his recommenders. So my advice would be to sign the waiver form and let the recommendation be confidential.
(ii) Objective Evaluation Section: This section of the recommendation letter has direct questions about the ability of the student like where would you rank this student etc.
(iii) Subjective Description Section: This is the section where it is indicated that recommender can write whatever he wants about the candidate and in fact this is the most important section which tells the admissions committee most about the candidate.

Whom to get recommendation from:
1. Some one who has know you for at least a year and worked closely with you as a teacher or project guide.
2. DO NOT get recommendation from anyone who asks you to write your own recommendation. This only means he is either not smart enough or is too lazy. This is also mean this guy has no integrity. Would you really want to get such a person to recommend you.
3. DO NOT get recommendation from some hot shot person unless he really knows you well. Generally what happens is that people go for internship and then try to get recommendation from the director if that place instead if their immediate mentor. This will not be very useful because as he would not know you well and thus would not sound convincing in the letter.
4. Remember, a hot shot recommender is useful only when someone in US, who is going to read the recommendation and make the admissions decision actually knows about that hot shot person and which is very unlikely, so my advise would be that do not run after these "hot shot" fellows and get recommendation from someone who really knows you
5. And most importantly, the strongest letters of recommendation are from people who (a) know your work and (b) know what is expected at a major research university.

So if you know in advance that you would be applying to US for MS, start developing contacts with people you might be interested in getting recommended from. Further, professors are notorious about delaying the completion of recommendation forms, so five them enough time to fill them up, 15 days at least and keep periodically reminding them of the it.

Number of recommendations is generally indicated as at least 3 by most universities but it wont do any harm if you put in an extra one or two. When you are submitting 4-5 recommendation make sure that they are not telling the same thing. Let one or two come from persons who can focus on non-technical aspects of your abilities.

What should be there in good recommendation is also well documented around the net but I am not putting is here because it is for those who write the recommendations. Just hope that they know about this stuff.

Some universities have online recommendation forms but these sections are the same. A sample paper based recommendation forms is here [pdf]. Its from University of California, Santa Barbara.

After popular demand I have decided to put some dummy LORs here. I would recommend against reading or using them. These are not my LoRs as I never got to see them.

4. Statement of Purpose
One of the most important section of you application is the statement of purpose or personal statement. This is a channel through which you can talk to the admissions committee and tell them why they should admit you. People believe that one should write very hi-fi flowery language in the SoP which is completely wrong. It needs to be a true representation of your abilities and for that no flowery language will do any good. Write it in a straight forward manner. I do not want to elaborate much about SoP here because it is very well documented around the net. Here are few links which might be useful:
1. http://www.statementofpurpose.com/ Name says it all
2. http://www.infozee.com/application-issues/essays-sop.htm Some sample essays
3. http://www2.sjsu.edu/faculty/gcallaghan/graduate/winningstatement.htm Useful stuff
4. http://www.accepted.com/grad/personalstatement.aspx The Do's and Don'ts
5. http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~whuang/other/purposeadvice.html A very interesting account by a professor at RPI with some advice to faculty also.
6. http://www.greguide.com/sop.html Even this one is pretty decent
7. http://essayedge.com/ This is paid ... if you can pay.
8. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Flats/5353/classes/purpose.html Another guide but for Psychology
9. http://info.gradsch.wisc.edu/admin/admissions/purpose.html An official account as to what it should be. This is what a typical university expects.

Do no worry to much about the font type, font size and length etc as long as these are within limits of what's "normal". I personally used Times New Roman, 10 pt size and wrote two complete pages. One important advice, DO NOT read any body else's SoP before you write yours because once you have read other's SoP, there is no way you can maintain the originality in your own.

Take sufficient time to complete it. Start at least a month before SoP would actually be required. Go through revisions. I came up with 4 different versions before settling for a final one.

6. Resume
Some of the universities also ask for applicant's resume. It is yet another channel for communication but this can only be used for factual description. In fact resume, when used cleverly in conjunction with SoP, provides you a chance to improve your SoP. The way to do this is that you mention every factual detail about you academic or otherwise life that you would like the admissions committee to know in the resume. Now when writing the SoP do not duplicate any information you mentioned in the resume and this will give you more space for talking about boring factual details. You can tell admissions committee about the inside stories about those facts in the SoP. Again, like SoP, there is tons of resources available for Resume on net. Following links may help too:
1. http://www.resume-help.org/college_admissions_resume_example.htm
2.http://www.ishaglobal.com/info/Admission_College_Resume_Sample.htm I am not sure whether this is free or not.
3. http://gradschool.about.com/od/curriculumvita/ This is useful.
4. http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/resumes.shtml Very useful.
You can check out my resume on About me page. I do not know how far they conform to the guidelines mentioned in above links.

7. Financial Statement
This is a very important part of your application and without this, even if you are given admission, you cannot be issues an I20 (eye- twenty) which means you cannot get a visa. There is a government regulation for US universities that before issuing I20 they must ascertain that the student demonstrate to have financial capability to pay at least one year cost of living. Towards this requirement, students are required to send a bank statement indicating that you or the persons who is sponsoring has XXXX amount of money enough to cover the first year expenses. This is not mandatory for admission and can be submitted after you have been admitted, but you wont get I20 without it. Its better to send is with rest of your application as later it may delay you visa process.

8. Photocopy of GRE/TOEFL/TSE Score sheets
Some universities mention that they wont except photocopied scorecards and must be sent original scores through ETS. Without any respect for what they say, you must invariably include a photocopy of your scorecards with your admission material. Reason being that ETS is notorious for delays in delivering of score or not delivering them at all and thus in such situations the admissions committee can at least proceed with the photocopies and you can sort things out with ETS in the meantime.

9. Other Documents - papers and certificates
You can also include your papers or some certificate if the university explicitly asks for it. The best way to show such stuff is to put these papers, reports etc. on a website and include the URL in the resume. I sent my paper to universities which allowed, I HOPE it helped my application.

Precautions to be taken while sending the admissions material:
1. For addresses and names on various envelopes use printed labels.
2. Make sure to indicate your name, email address and identification number (if any) on each and every document that you send out.
3. Use a binder clip to group all the recommendation letters together.
4. Write a short and crisp forwarding letter. Make sure to include each and every piece of paper that you are sending in the letter. A sample is here.
5. Arrange the material inside the envelope in a plastic bag (to protect stuff from water) in the order mentioned in the forwarding letter.
6. Do not include any document other than asked for by the university. Nothing pisses the overworked clerk at the university than thinking about what to do with extra documents. Photocopies of scores is an exception to this rule.

Importance of different components of your application
What I am going to mention here is based on my personal experience and my discussions with some people involved in the actual process. The most important thing, interestingly, is a hypothetical product, your_GPA x reputation_of_your_undergrad_school. As the reputation of your undergrad school is something which you cannot exactly quantify, but still you at least have a good idea about it in your own country. Further, the reputation of your school is somewhat beyond your control so that makes your GPA very important, or rather the most important thing. This is so because your GPA tells the admissions committee about your cumulative evaluation over four year by eminent faculty members who themselves have been through grad school. Next to GPA comes publications if any, in scholarly journals or conference proceedings. Here the reputation of the journal or the conference is of utmost importance. In fact if you have really decent publication it can even make up for your GPA. These publication are given so much importance because grad school is basically about research and publications are a proof of your expertise in research. Keep in mind that doing mere internships at fancy labs and center would not help much unless you can corroborate that experience with publications. The GRE and TOEFL scores are only marginally important and are generally used only for cutoff purpose in initial stages of the process. The recommendations become important based on two things - who wrote it and what he wrote. Now the fact is that very few manage to get recommendations from Noble laureate or Turing award winners so generally the person recommending you would not be known to the person reading the recommendation so what is written in the recommendation becomes more important. It should ideally not just be about your grades and you being the favorite student. Yours SoP is as important as you make it. Its a little lower in the order of importance list because, things like GPA and GRE scores are required to be sufficiently high so that committee even reads your SoP. But once your other credentials are strong enough that committee gets to your SoP, it becomes the most important component because through this you can talk to committee and make them look at you beyond some numbers on your resume.

Top    Ask Ritwik

Step 7
WAITING THE WAIT

After you have applied and till you get your responses

Once the university receives your application, it will send you an acknowledgement email. It will contain information about whether you application is complete or not or incase something is missing, they'll ask you to send it. Keep this email very securely as it may contain identification information for your application which can potentially be misused.

This is practically the worst part of this whole process because you cannot do anything but wait. You try to get your mind on other things but the anxiety about the results never leave you. The way I handled this was to talk this stuff with other people in a similar situation. Besides my friends with whom I can physically talk to, I became a very active member of TestMagic forum. Here I found hundreds of people from all around the world in the same situation as me. You can discuss almost anything related to admissions on this forum and the best part is that unlike other forums, here you get very accurate and genuine answers. Besides you also get to know about other universities which have declared their results etc.

Generally universities indicate a tentative date for declaration of admissions decisions but they seldom stick to them. After a week or so of this deadline if you have still not received any information about your application status (via email or on online status page), you can start mailing the graduate assistant who is responsible for admissions. You can get his/her email from the website or in the acknowledgement email. If you have not heard from a university then you should try to check it out with others on forums like TestMagic and try and find out whether this is the case with all applicants to that university or yours is a special case. An abnormally long delay may signal towards your application being waitlisted where the university is waiting for someone else to respond before they intimate you about the decision on your application. This is not a good news but certainly not a bad one either.

Let me use this place to describe to you approximately what is the process your application goes through:
First your application packets are opened and contents are put  in sort of trays. Then the first round of elimination is based on GRE, TOEFL and GPA. This is when the first round of rejection letters are sent out. The applications that make through this check are then treated differently based on MS or PhD application. For MS, at most places, the decision is collectively made by admissions committee. They read through the SoPs and recommendations and discuss to make the decisions. Here also people with high GPA and reputed school are preferred. For PhD applications, applications are sorted out based on field of interest and kept for faculty members for review. Faculty member peruse through the applications and those which interests them they take them with themselves (maybe to study the stuff over the weekend or something) and then they recommend those applications which they find suitable and committee makes some final checks etc and generally approves a recommended application.

The Scholarship Business
There are four kind of scholarships:
Fellowships: These are the best sort of scholarship. You are recognized as a fellow i.e. the university wants you to come at work at the university. Your fee is waived and you are given stipend in addition. You are just expected to concentrate on work. These are generally handed out by university or department and you are not found to any professor.
Research Assistantship: These are the next best thing. Here a professor funds you (tuition waiver + stipend) and you are supposed to work for him.
Teaching Assistantship: These include funding but you would have to teach undergrads to earn those funds. These are not rated so high because teaching takes away too much of time and not everyone likes teaching.
Graduate Assistants: These involve variable amount of funding but involves carrying out various jobs in the university like grading papers etc.
Partial Tuition Waiver: Something is better than nothing

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Step 8
SAYING YES

Once you've been selected

This is the tricky part, one you have offered the admission, university requires you to accept the offer with in certain timeframe and generally the problem is that you have not heard from all the universities that you have applied to and thus you are in a pickle. I was in this situation and was very very confused. Before that I must mention that there is a body called Council of Graduate Schools which indicates that every university must allow the an applicant till April 15th to respond to the admission offer and after that the offer can be considered withdrawn automatically. But all university do not stick to this.  Anyway, I discussed my problem with a number of people and the most important thing that I was told that I should make a hard decision, choose and offer and stick to it. And I did the same. I said yes to an offer even though almost 50% of my applications were pending. I would advice you to do the same, I know its hard but its the right thing to do. If you think that you can play around with more than one offer by saying multiple yes then forget it because one you say yes to a university it is legally binding and you cannot join any other university unless you gat a written release from the first university, which can be a pain.

What if your application rejected?
The thing to remember is that they have only rejected your application (a set of document) and not you. I got a lot of rejections, in fact my first three decisions were rejections (fortunately after these better things followed). And sure it feels bad. But you must hold on. Even in rejection you should try to communicate with the university and try to find out the reason for rejection. I tried this and managed to get the reason from at least one university. This will help you improve you application to other universities and may be next time.

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Step 9
PREPARING TO LEAVE

Once you have selected a place to go

As I prepare this write up, I am in this phase so do not have any first hand experience right now. I will update this section in a few days. Basically now you would have to do the following:
1. Complete a lot of paperwork with the university. After you accept the offer and produce the financial certificate, the university will issue you a document called I20. It is a very important document and will be required for visa and even at the time of immigration checks.
2. Get visa (oh yeah ... I got to  prepare a write up on this)
3. Purchase stuff to take to US. Here is one such list.
4. Get to know US. An attempt towards this.

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