Sure, Mr. Lonely is absolutely correct! If you are already in US, you must have been invited to PhD open houses. Make sure you go to all the schools you applied to, before you hear from them, or at least to the ones you got accepted into afterwards. Most of them will pay you for your visit and stay during the open house. You will get to meet your adviser, lab co-workers.. get to hear from them what direction they heading towards and last but not the least, what you want to do is really what they are interested in making you do? It makes big difference. A small instance: I applied for Applied Mathematics department at Stanford University, and they instead got me into then SCCM:Computational mathematics department. I was all excited and thought I will definitely go there, since I had clearly mentioned my instead. I only went there on open house to find out, they were just interested in ODE analysis, a project they had going on with US petroleum. So please make sure you see them before you recognize them. Good luck. B. "SAY YESSS to GRAD SCHOOL!""