On the other side a PhD my husband never was able to get in a lot of the issues of bigtory never got better. There's nothing like dedicating 4-7 years of your life to something to only find you can't get in for various reason, its psychological torture.

In your case I can tell that particular wicked little school is somewhere in EEurope, Asia or California right off the bat since many programs don't care that much on age, on fit you're absolutely right you are out. Consider yourself lucky in two ways, 1 your labor won't be used to make horrors beyond our mere mortal conceptions and 1.5 you should always be on strike as an information worker in the west, they don't need a single scientist or engineer more unless there's an 'eternal science of MLism' in there as far as the non imperial world is concerned since all your craft ends up hurting more than helping, and 2 that shit's gonna end up in the ocean any minute now when the big one finally hits another cut to the west.