University of Colorado Boulder Graduate School Admission Results

6 years industry research experience, 2 years academic research experience, 1 publication (3rd author), 1 conference presentation (march meeting) My to-be PI and the admissions chair emailed me on March 12 saying that I was on a 50 person waitlist. The chair said there were financial concerns and were cutting admissions (combination of high admission rate last year and federal funding). I followed up on 4/14 in the morning and heard from the chair around 10 pm MDT that I will not be admitted. I'm very disappointed because my PI and I had been working together for over 6 months developing a research plan. We got along well and I was excited to work on the project.

Email to check portal.

Human geography track

moved from Computer science

Mentioned they sent out about 50% of the number of acceptances compared to last year because of federal funding uncertainty and larger than usual class last year. email extract: "You are one of about 50 students who has neither been admitted nor denied admission to the CU Boulder physics Ph.D. program. Last year, we ended up with a very large incoming class of 80 students compared to our target of 60. Last year we admitted 248 students. To compensate for last year and to be conservative given the uncertainty in federal funding, we have admitted only 123 out of 1224 applications. In a normal year, nearly all of you would be admitted to our program. Unfortunately, this is not a normal year. The reason that we have kept your application active is in case it seems that our entering class will be even smaller than our target. If that were to occur, we may be able to admit a handful of you."

Mentioned they sent less than 50% of the number of acceptances compared to last year. Cited "federal funding uncertainty" and a larger than usual class compared to last year as the main reasons. email extract: "You are one of about 50 students who has neither been admitted nor denied admission to the CU Boulder physics Ph.D. program. Last year, we ended up with a very large incoming class of 80 students compared to our target of 60. Last year we admitted 248 students. To compensate for last year and to be conservative given the uncertainty in federal funding, we have admitted only 123 out of 1224 applications. In a normal year, nearly all of you would be admitted to our program. Unfortunately, this is not a normal year. The reason that we have kept your application active is in case it seems that our entering class will be even smaller than our target. If that were to occur, we may be able to admit a handful of you."

Got this email today. AMO-EX and Boulder is my #1 choice, so if anyone got accepted and not planning on attending, please decline the offer. I’m sorry I have not sent this email earlier. I wanted to give you an update on your status. You are one of about 50 students who has neither been admitted nor denied admission to the CU Boulder physics Ph.D. program. Last year, we ended up with a very large incoming class of 80 students compared to our target of 60. Last year we admitted 248 students. To compensate for last year and to be conservative given the uncertainty in federal funding, we have admitted only 123 out of 1224 applications. In a normal year, nearly all of you would be admitted to our program. Unfortunately, this is not a normal year. The reason that we have kept your application active is in case it seems that our entering class will be even smaller than our target. If that were to occur, we may be able to admit a handful of you. In summary, it is very unlikely that you will be admitted to the CU physics Ph.D. program. You should definitely make plans based on not receiving an offer from us. A few of you (out of 50) may end up receiving an offer. We plan to finalize our admissions by April 11.