Mid-March, 10 CS PhD applications, 1 rejection, and silence from everyone else. Is this basically all bad news? Excruciating.

I applied to 10 CS PhD programs this cycle.

So far I’ve gotten 1 rejection, and the other 9 have been completely silent. Since it’s already mid-March, I’m starting to feel like silence basically means rejection, or maybe waitlist at best.

To make things worse, I recently found out that because of my mandatory military service obligation timeline, I may have to defer by one semester anyway. That honestly hit me pretty hard and made this whole cycle feel even more discouraging.

So now I’m already feeling like the cycle is over.

For people who’ve been through CS PhD admissions, is this amount of silence by mid-March usually a bad sign? Do you think I should plan for gap year and the next round of admission cycle?