Mindset
Comparing yourself to other applicants
In short
Admissions forums show a self-selected sample: people who were admitted, or who enjoy posting, and almost nobody in the ordinary middle. Comparing your profile against that sample tells you nothing reliable, and the anxiety it produces makes applicants change the wrong things in their files.
Somewhere in the second week of drafting, most applicants find a thread where somebody with your degree and better numbers was rejected, and somebody with worse numbers was admitted with funding.
Both are true. Neither is evidence about you, and the reason is worth understanding, because the conclusions people draw from these threads reliably damage their applications.
The sample is broken in three ways
People who were admitted post more than people who were not. People with unusual outcomes post more than people with ordinary ones. And almost nobody posts the boring middle, which is where most decisions actually sit.
What you are reading is therefore the tails of a distribution with the body removed. Any inference about where you stand, drawn from that, is unreliable in a direction you cannot estimate.
The context you are never shown
A profile is a list of numbers. A decision is made on a file. Nothing in the post tells you whether that applicant had a supervisor already interested, a research match nobody else in the pool had, a reference from someone the committee knows, or a statement that made a genuinely specific argument.
Those are frequently the deciding variables and they are invisible in every comparison you will ever read.
What the anxiety makes people do
This is the part that costs admissions. Applicants who have spent a week on forums start editing toward an imagined average: adding achievements that are not theirs to claim, inflating a role, broadening the programme list until the fit paragraph is generic enough to fit all of it.
Each of those makes the file worse in exactly the way committees notice, and it happens because the comparison created a target that was never real.
What to measure instead
Two things, both internal. Whether every claim in your file has evidence under it that you could defend if asked, and whether your fit paragraph could have been written about any other department. Those are the only two variables you control, and they are the two that separate files in the middle of the pile.
If both are true, the file is as strong as you can make it this cycle, and the rest is capacity and cohort, which no amount of reading will change.
A reasonable use for the forums
Facts, not calibration. Deadlines, portal quirks, whether a department has funding this year, how long a particular consulate is taking: forums are genuinely good for these and they are hard to find elsewhere.
The moment a thread moves from information to comparison, it stops being useful to you and starts being useful to somebody's anxiety, possibly the poster's.
Related questions
Is there a profile that gets admitted?
No, and the belief that there is causes most of the damage. Committees build cohorts, which means they are choosing a set rather than ranking individuals, and a file that is redundant with three others already admitted can lose to a weaker one that is not.
Should I apply if my numbers are below the average?
Published averages are averages, meaning half the admitted cohort sat below them. Where you clear the stated minimum and the fit argument is genuinely strong, applying is reasonable. Where you are below the stated minimum, the honest answer is that the statement will not fix it.
How many programmes should I apply to?
Enough to cover variance, few enough that every fit paragraph is real. In practice that is usually four to eight. Beyond that the research thins out and the fit paragraphs start becoming interchangeable, which is self-defeating.