selecttext

yes of course, e-mail them immediately and inform them that you are considering other offers!!!

i'd suggest not bankrupting yourself over a PhD which may not drastically improve your life-time earnings.

you would continue exploring general questions using model systems?

School A. New faculty can be tricky. There is no guarantee that you will have lots of 1 on 1 time, I wouldn't count on it. I don't see any advantage to school B.

I was referring to a hypothetical hiring committee

"Hi, my name is ... I have not heard back and I would like to inquire on the status of my application" A perfectly normal request

be careful of renting an apartment online in toronto or anywhere else for that matter. do not send anyone money over the internet - there are tons of scammers.

it doesn't matter if some professors do not think it will harm your future chances. What matters is that some do care!

Does UBC come with a tuition waiver? They have a graduate support initiative for PhD students. At Calgary you will pay ~$7000 out of your stipend for tuition so you won't necessarily make out much better than at UBC provided that your tuition is covered.

Definitely rescind school B. In the grand scheme, no one will really care. This isn't willy nilly, it's a big deal.

if you intend to pursue an academic career, imagine yourself on a hiring committee and picture some of the superficial criteria that you might use to distinguish between equal candidates...

oh right, good friday - i am totally not a christian sort

according to the canada post website, there is no delivery only on april 1 so there is delivery tomorrow

are the reasons why you shouldn't stay. i am surprised that the PI hasn't suggested you go elsewhere...

I bet 99% of people will receive their letters on Tuesday, if they were in fact sent on Monday or Tuesday. This would be keeping with the tradition of April notifications. So no need to hurry home today !

( didn't read the message before mine)

some fellowship and scholarship applications will allow you to even list declined awards

This year, she claims she hasn't received anything from the graduate awards office and I have asked around in other departments, none of which received anything - so it's to the mail I wait but for some reason I am not hopeful this year.

it depends on the department. in my experience, the school of graduate studies sends notification to the chair or secretary of departments with applicants and some will notify supervisors or the students directly. as you know, people are often quite busy and some aren't good with email.

that's no different than doing an msc and then a phd

The department has to find different ways to pay you. The most common is by TAship and RAship. Fellowships reduce the number of TA and RA hours you have to work - it's free money. It will likely come as part of your salary. Tuition waiver and whatnot may or may not be separate from your stipend. My tuition waiver is paid by inflating my stipend. Different schools do this differently and you should contact the graduate secretary

You can eat well, live in a clean apartment and still afford beer

have you ever been on google scholar? if you search for your POIs by initials and last name, most of their bibliography will come up with a pretty good estimate of the number of times the papers were cited. Use this metric as a back of the envelope way of comparing the professors. Check out the number of citations and the frequency with which they have been publishing in the last 5-10 years. You want someone who is currently active. As for the number of times cited, it is really good and not common at all for a paper to have >100 citations in the last 10 years. Also look to see if they publish in top journals. Nature and Science are two to look for. You can figure out how good the journals are in google by typing "JOURNALNAMEHERE" "IMPACT FACTOR". Impact factors >4 are a good sign >8 even better. Of course most of this is arbitrary but it's a pretty quick and dirty way to make an impression. It is also possible in some search databases to get the professors' H-score , which is a metric combining all of the above. I think that web of science will generate one??? I know that google scholar does for authors that signed up for them to.

Graduate school is unlike any other job in that the outcome of some years of experience significantly increases your lifetime earning potential. Whereas I agree that graduate students are too often treated as an infinite source of free labour, the sorts of stipends on which one could build a nest egg are limited - in fact many people pay for graduate school! As you know in Canada, $21k + tuition remission is extremely rare, yet there are somehow thousands of graduate students still. I would love a $30 000 stipend but it's not going to happen, and a $21 600 + tuition remission, in my opinion, is a generous offer. My latter comment was indeed valid because the poster was exclaiming that his stipend is not enough to live on in California, which is not the case.

The only criterion you need to concern yourself with are number of publications, quality of journals published in and number of citations. If you want to know if the professor is a jackoff, talk to his current and former graduate students.