No GRE. Strong LORs. One of the professor who promised to write a LOR for me happened to be promoted to be the department chair a year ago hahaha.

Your application for graduate study for the Fall 2025 Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Computer Science program in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been carefully considered by our Graduate Admissions Committee. We regret to inform you that the committee is not recommending you for admission to this graduate program. Please note that the school policy is not to communicate the individual reasons for its decision. We hope that this decision will not discourage you from pursuing your future academic and career goals.

Waitlisted, notified via email. This is my top choice, please decline the offer if you do not plan to attend. Thank you!

3 year TA experience, 1 internship at a startup, no pubs

Applied to DD rejected from Msc and DD both I don't know what they wanted from me from top 10 colleges in India 8.9/10, Two research internships with DRDO and ISRO, Worked as a UG Research scholar for over 2 years 4 Published research papers in area to which I applied too [One in Nature Yes Nature other in springer IEEE and Wiley] and two were under review already have 10 citations Extraordinary LOR's Maybe they wanted Nobel prize winners, Anyway I was going to reject because I would have to do master's with 5/6 to transfer to PhD from masters in DD program, I got accepted in Chinese Academy of Science PHD

2 first-author pubs 2 y exp as DS 4 hackathons winner

T30 CS, 1.5 years FT exp at elite startup, 2 research, 1 AWS intern, ran competitive programming club, 2 TA. 3 strong LoR (1 academic, 2 work), SOP should've been very good.

Interviewed with professor

No email I just logged into portal and checked