[Dingus]

Here are my updates:
(Thanks again Yousuf, for creating this thread for me. )

I applied to a total of eleven programs for the doctoral track in Cancer Epidemiology. Out of them, I know the results of 8 and have not heard from 3 yet.

These are in the order I received them:
1. JHU - Gave me an MS admit. I had applied for admission to the Ph.D track.
2. Univ. of Rochester - Ph.D. with a fellowship. (interview)
3. Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison - Ph.D. with an assistantship. (interview)
4. SUNY, Buffalo - Ph.D. with an assistantship.
5. MSU - Ph.D. with a possible fellowship. (email exchange of views)
6. UNC - Chapel Hill - Ding.
7. UMBC - Baltimore - Ding.
8. NYU - Ph.D. with an assistantship. (interview)

Pending and looking bleak.
1. Emory.
2. USC.
3. SUNY - Albany.

Some lessons I learned along the way are:

The BIGGEST lesson.
The best thing I ever did throughout this application mania was:
I joined Testmagic!!
and
I made friends with you all!

I can say with enormous confidence that this was the single LARGEST factor that helped me in EACH and EVERY stage!

The Mundane.
1. October is the last possible month you can take your GRE and TOEFL if you want to apply on time and comfortably.
2. Corresponding with the Grad Secretaries before you apply and asking them whether you meet the eligibility criteria and generally being on good terms with them is important.
3. ALWAYS use crisp short polite letters, because the long ones get ignored.
4. Coordinating with the professors who are going to give you their recommendations should NOT be taken lightly. At times, hanging around and making sure that they hand over their letters to you on time pays off, instead of leaving them to their own schedules. Professors are also busy people and so respecting their appointments and the time which they generously give you is very crucial.
5. Choosing a good express courier is important. Both FedEx and DHL are abominable leviathans who do not think twice before losing people's application packets. So, since no other alternatives exist for international students, they better start praying really hard and posting their packets with PLENTY (=month) of time to spare before the deadline.
6. Keeping up the communications with the grad secretaries is equally important. Though you can't count on them all the time, many of them are really good people at heart and will tell you the necessary things. ALWAYS keep on thanking them no matter what.

ETS:
7. ETS is a freak. There is no other way to express their behaviour. Their TOEFL services suck. So prayers might help more than any precautions. Check out my thread here for further insights. No more comments.

Research interests and the SOP:
8. It definitely pays to have very well-focussed research interests. Also, if you sincerely believe and love the subject you want to specialise in, it helps even more because your honesty then comes through in your SOP and in your entire application process.
9. They read the SOP. Be sure about that. In fact, the future advisors who may be alloted to you are the ones you mention in your SOP.
10. It also pays to have the SOP proof-read by a person NOT in your field apart from the usual suspects (advisors, profs, peers in the same field, family). This is because it checks effectively whether your SOP has that very important element--clarity in thought. People in the same field often take things for granted. So, even it you construct a great looking SOP, it may not be clear somewhere and you may not even know about it, because you may have made some assumptions about what the people reading your SOP might know beforehand. My SOP was proofread very thoroughly by Econ and let me tell you what an awesome difference that made. My JHU SOP was an overnight affair - yes, I admit I just spent 5 hours writing it and uploaded it! Then Econ stepped in and fine-tuned it so much, it got me all the great admits! So I OWE it to him BIG time.

Writing to Profs:
1. I wrote to some of the profs who were researching within my interest area. My experiences have been quite mixed. In some cases, I got no replies at all. In some cases, the profs put in a recommendation for me with the grad chair. In yet other cases, the profs got personally interested and made sure that I got a great admit! So summing up, in my field, writing to profs does produce results overall.
2. Make sure that your letters are honest and don't project yourself as the the world's greatest whiz-kid. This should come naturally if you are very very keenly interested in the field and are dead sure that its the Ph.D. way or the highway.
3. Good spelling, punctuation, brevity and grammar also go a long way to ensure that the letter gets read.

Possible general hypotheses:
--If the program calls you or arranges an interview and if you don't blow it totally, you can be 95% sure that you are going to get a good admit.
--If you don't hear for a VERY long time (with the exception of some universities) and the grad sec is evasive and does not answer your queries about whether you got admitted or not, then they have probably snail-mailed the ding.
--Persistent queries annoy people a lot.

Possible theories about the Dings.
1. UNC - Maybe I just wasn't upto the mark or they had no room (They have over 120 doctoral students in the department already working in somewhat similar research fields.)
2. UMBC - This was my mistake. My SOP was not focussed. I didn't identify a future advisor and my research-interests were mismatched. I goofed in my groundwork and got dinged. Served me right.
3. JHU - MS (with no aid) - This wasn't technically a ding. But without aid, I can't possibly go unless I become an overnight Bill Gates. The advisor I identified in my SOP left for another full-time position and became an adjunct just this year. (In January) This was a disaster because my research interests didn't really match with anyone else upto a T there. Plus there was the aspect of a non-Econ proofread SOP .
Their reason = inadequate work-experience. I refuse to believe this, as it is not true. If they had clarified it as inadequate US-work experience, I could have accepted it as a plausible reason, since I am an international applicant. But they did not specify that anywhere, and so their reason falls flat on its face.
4. The other bleak-lookers: Mismatched interests/Shoddy groundwork/Didn't identify advisors. = Deserve the silence and/or the coming ding.

Bottomline: The dings were sour grapes (as in the fable).

That's about it for now. I am deciding which offer I will accept. All of them have some merits or the other and I have been assigned a fabulous advisor in each, so they are all pretty much equal. I plan to post my profile after my final decision. If I missed out something, please let me know, so I can fill in the gaps.