Over the past few weeks, I've been very impressed with the way that American universities try to get their best talent. As of now, I have had 6 PhD offers, and for several times I've had people call me me up to try and convince me to go there. The only universities which haven't called were Chicago and Stanford; with Chicago someone from the faculty did email me personally, and they set a few of their graduate students to email me to answer my queries and convince me. Stanford takes 60 students for their Physics department (which was what I applied to there, instead of astrophysics/astronomy in other places), and it's not surprising that that they can contact such a crowd except for the most exceptional students (and my application wouldn't stand out as far as pure physics is concerned).

Their financial muscle is very obvious as well, from the fact that all of them offered to pay enough travel expenses for me to fly over for a look if I wanted to. I will be flying over to a couple of East Coast universities to take a look, but even the Californian universities are offering for pay for me to go over to visit, which is tempting if not for the fact that it's going to be in the midst of my pre-finals cramming.