Welcome to the Rat Race

My mom's crazy friend who I regularly chat with (and is good fun) has a son who is now applying for pre-med to the top undergrad schools. According to her, there is a bubble of applicants who are the kids of the baby boomers and there are just simply too much of them; it's not going to burst till 2009 and already last year there were stories of the top schools turning away 4.0 and 2400 SAT combos.

Yikes.

And what does this have to do with me?

I am entering the rat race as well - again, this time the Ph.d edition. Ladies and gentlemen on your marks! Get set!

Go!!! And write that personal statement!!!

Oh, heaven help me. I just got off the phone of one of the schools that I am eyeing because I had applied to them before in the Master's edition two years ago; they deleted my application after a year so I have to start from scratch. No prob. The lady was nice and she even remembered me.

What threw me off the loop was this tip she told me: said school only accepts TWO PEOPLE usually into the History Ph.d-East Asia track. What I can do if I really, really, really want this school is to also apply for the Master's...again. And it would be very likely - not guaranteed - that I could get into the Ph.d two years down the line, but there won't be funding because duh it's a masters program and the master's kids feed the Ph.d kids (but they don't really know that most of the time)....the more I think about it, the more I don't want to do that - apply to both, that is. There is also the matter of me paying duplicate application fees and I am already applying to 9 other schools (but one is hopefully free - one that I was accepted to and deferred).

Ugh...now I am very scared. VERY.VERY.SCARED.

There are about 20 students per year at most of the programs I am looking at and obviously there is more than one track in the department.

I want to crawl into a hole right now.