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mop

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Everything posted by mop

  1. Academaze: Finding Your Way through the American Research University
  2. I'm a grad student living in carrboro and I'll just chime in on the rent prices going up is a very real thing. Many of the people in apartments in carrboro/chapel hill are students and move in/out in the summer. There is just a very high demand in one short period of time. Might be slightly too early though for August, around here people only required to give- 2 months notice for moving out so more places might be opening up soon. The best advice is to find a place on/near a bus route, look them up near any apartment you are interested in, its how pretty much everyone gets to campus. Chapel Hill transit busses are free in Carrboro/Chapel Hill. (link below) Triangle transit from Durham charges a fee. http://www.townofchapelhill.org/town-hall/departments-services/transit/routes-schedules
  3. I'm on an external fellowship (not on my PI's grant money) and just get at 1098T and get paid by a "refund receipt" at my school, as if I overpaid on a bill or something its weird. It is a very sneaky way to do a direct deposit to my bank. No withholding at all, no W-2 and no contributing to Roth IRA and I need to file estimated taxes quarterly. Before I got award I used to be on my Pi's grant and did get a W-2. Grad students not on fellowships (RA/TA) get normal W-2s and withholding, which is probably >90% of my program.
  4. If you are citing in a resume/CV it is common to use asterisks or underlines or something to mark equal authors in the author list.
  5. Generally speaking any type of personal story along the lines of "when I was little I had a toy microscope......" or "person X had disease Y and I want to cure it......" "in 7th grade we did a dissection...." etc etc will not make you stand out from the crowd of other applicants, because the other applicants will have similar stories. Everyone applying is clearly motivated to be a scientist, and talking to PIs at my program these types of SOPs are a dime a dozen, they just waste space. You are applying, they know you are interested in the subject and want to be a grad student
  6. There isn't a biosensor monopoly that you think there is (my lab just got a grant to make a bunch of new ones). Also remember that you are not forced to do the research in your plan, your graduate work can be on something completely different.
  7. You should list it on a CV, and mention a sentence or two that you are published elsewhere in your application, it will only help. You don't need a paragraph explaining all the details of the experiments, and I don't think it is likely many profs will read it thoroughly, don't sweat it.
  8. I'll point out that in the biomedical sciences, the particular bit of science you work on as a PhD student absolutely does not dictate your future career, it is relatively common to change fields into another branch of biology for your postdoc.
  9. In biomedical sciences in general it is common to enter without a masters, I don't know if that is true for marine sciences. If you have the research experience necessary to get into a PhD program it will save you the two years of tuition which is always great
  10. The F31 is a very different fellowship than the NSF GRFP. If you are not currently a graduate student in a lab you shouldn't be applying yet for an F31, you need an advisor and preliminary data to prove your proposed project is feasible, and preferentially be completely finished with all your classes by the start of the fellowship. Typically grad students don't apply till they are in their 2nd year or later when they have enough data (at least in my program).
  11. At my biomed lab based program, grades are High Pass/Pass/Low Pass/Fail, and a common saying around here is "P is for PhD" meaning do just enough work in class to pass (around a B in a normal grading system) and learn what you need to learn, and don't spend double the amount of time studying a week to improve the grade by 10% to get a High Pass (A equivalent). The extra 10-15 hours is better spent in lab doing experiments or reading about your specific thesis topic to help you graduate sooner. That is, lab time >>> class time.
  12. The Word plugin for mendely to cite papers is very easy to use in my experience. Can select many types of citation styles or create your own custom citation format, and then inserting a citation in text automatically adds the article to a bibliography at the end. If you want to change the citation style after writing (say to change the journal you submit to) it just takes a few clicks and then everything is automatically reformatted.
  13. mop

    Choosing Mentor

    For biology bench labs typical times are 5.5-6 years or so, 7 is rare, 8 is mindboggling to me.
  14. You can look on the awarded list to see how many their are per area of study
  15. It is true that there are rankings ahead of time at some schools, and for a topped ranked person to have a poor interview and still get in compared to a lower ranked person to have have a poor interview, which would likely be rejected
  16. I think more might go out as people reject
  17. Nope there is still one more weekend, the committees are waiting to send out acceptances until they can compare all the interviewees (though some acceptances have gone out to the very top ones)
  18. I would agree with this, PIs at my school tend to say a famous lab is much more important for a post-doc than a grad student
  19. I'll just chime in and say rotate earlier, I got an offer for my thesis lab in 2nd rotation, spot might not have been open if it was the third..
  20. . I'm in a molecular biology lab and this is very true for my lab as well. Some things are done in certain ways just because it was the first way it worked and everyone in the lab is too afraid of the technique not working to make changes to the protocol. No one wants to troubleshoot a new protocol When you read papers and don't understand the background science look up the cited work and read those as well, working backwards until you have a good foundation. More importantly, talk to other people about papers. If you don't understand a figure i.e. why they need some control, why take samples at 4hour intervals vs every 1hour or whatever the question is can be much faster to ask someone else than to struggle on your own for hours. Talking about papers you understand completely is also good, it will help you remember it for the long term. It doesn't have to be with your labmates either, if there are labs that do similar work around you can talk to them too. It took me about a year to get comfortable with the background science of my lab, but I found talking to a senior grad student about papers sped up my understanding of the field.
  21. Ted you should also Ted you should realize all UC/CSU admissions have outlawed any affirmative action from Prop. 209 passed over a decade ago.
  22. A sequel is being filmed right now, I can't wait
  23. I would agree with everything bsharpe mentions, and point out that schools can be very different in person than on paper. The interviews are just as much a chance for you to interview the program as it is the other way around. If you have not interviewed yet, I would recommend waiting till you do interview at both before worrying about choosing between the two. If you have any specific questions about UNC feel free to ask here or PM me.
  24. Don't do this. it should be a natural conversation,and you should know your own work well enough not to need figures as a crutch. You are not there to show off a bunch of figures like you are presenting at a conference or something.
  25. Things like 10 years till graduation are a bit exagerated, but many of the advisor interaction ones can be spot on I've certainly had this conversation before and will likely have it again http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1746
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