In the least neurotic way possible !!! I know I have okay stats but I thought I had pretty good ECs and a good story yet aside from rejections it's been crickets for months 😀 I'm incredibly happy with UTSW, and I probs should have been prepared for it, but I'm just surprised by the lack of responses (aside from rejections) from so many schools, especially from places where I felt like I was a really good mission fit.

I will say I only had a semester of research under my belt when I submitted my primaries but I'm doing full time research in my gap year and sent updates to a lot of my schools in October saying that I had a project I'd started leading and that I submitted 2 abstracts to big conferences. My PI also sent a rec letter in November and I sent another round of updates last week saying that I co authored a manuscript that was recently submitted to a journal, one of my abstracts was accepted, and that I have a paper that I'm currently getting PI revisions on and still nothing. I did bring up some more charged topics in some of my secondaries like reproductive justice and sociodemographic gaps in research but it related to my ECs.

Idk, this isn't to sound ungrateful at all and I don't want it to come off as tone deaf, it's just that both admit and chatgpt had me expecting a more lively cycle ig and just needed to get it off my chest