This isn't an American perspective, and I know American academia is pretty different to elsewhere (wtf 7 year PhDs!) but over my life I've found that the rules for admissions into various things were usually just rough guidelines that people take way too seriously.<p>For example, I have a Masters degree, but I never finished an undergraduate degree (I dropped out). Similarly, though less bureaucratically, there are plenty of other dropouts working here at Google leading awesome projects, despite the 'must come from a top school or have a PhD' image it has.<p>It's cheesy, but in all such cases, I've seen that the biggest hurdle was getting over the "no you can't because you don't have X", either by trying harder, or by having someone else show you the way (or by dumb luck, in my case).