Prabhakar
O'boy, I'm bummed out by the whole Mastercard/American Express payment bit - anyone know when's the last date for clearing the application fee?
Gotta try and secure a mastercard asap - would appreciate your insight on this brothersharp. Thanks!

I think the instruction said it must be paid within 5 business days of application submission...
Acutually I bought a $200 Vanilla prepaid MasterCard giftcard from a 7eleven store and it seems to work perfectly (so far...), my status at UT was turned to PAID within 60min of making that purchase.
Check MasterCard's website. It is very likely that you can find a similar giftcard somewhere in some convenient store nearby....