shadowclaw

Looks like I will be attending OSU this fall! My funding info won't come until summer, so it's still a bit up in the air. I'm looking forward to it, though. I've heard so many great things about Corvallis and the PNW.

Your department might also already have power point poster templates made up with the school logo and at the correct dimensions for their printer. You can also find a variety of templates on the internet that you can personalize.

I agree that you should have both. The format of your actual written thesis may not be suitable for publication, but you should write up a manuscript from it and submit. Depending on your school, your thesis might have to be in a manuscript format anyway. That's what my school does.

I applied to a different department at OSU, but it also didn't ask for a CV. I submitted one anyway.

I'd say that based on the small sample size of schools I've looked at, a lot of masters programs offer TA positions with lower stipends and partial tuition coverage (though some offer full tuition coverage). For example, mine pays $3500 per semester plus covers 6 credits. So last semester, I was registered for 6 credits, do tuition was covered. This semester, it was 9 credits, so I had to pay for 3 out of pocket. I think almost all of the PhD TA positions I've seen cover full tuition and often include health insurance or partially paid health insurance. Plus the stipend. I've seen stipends ranging from $15,000 to $27,000. Stipends tend to be based on the cost of living of the area, but can sometimes really only cover the basic necessities (forget about having a car payment). It ultimately does depends on the school, though.

I feel some of your pain. My biostatistics class was supposed to be taught using R, but the professor decided SAS was a better idea. I'm doing fine in the class because I understand programming (used to be a computer science major), but a lot of people are struggling. Aside from the fact that I will never use SAS again, the class is also teaching the most basic stats ever. I haven't learned anything that I didn't already learn as an undergrad. But I've vented about that already. I just hope that when I take stat classes in my PhD program I don't have to sit through a semester of review.

I think your GPA is a bit low, but since you have a decent amount of research experience plus industry experience, that might make up for it. On the other hand, I just took a look at the chemistry program's website and it says they invite accepted students to a recruitment weekend in mid-March. If you weren't invited to that weekend, then it is unlikely you will be accepted. However, I don't know when you applied, so if it was late in the application season, you might have applied too late to be invited and you still may have a shot.

Now that I have an acceptance to a PhD program, I thought I'd share my story from start to finish so you all can have some hope I started my undergraduate career in 2003 at a very good university majoring in computer science. While my first semester went well, by the end of the second I started having some real issues with social anxiety, depression, and personal relationships and my GPA dropped below a 3.0. Things only got worse my second year, and I flat out failed everything because I stopped going to class (and as a result was dismissed from the school). So I went to much smaller, less known school that decided to give me a shot and tried to get my associates in IT. I got a 4.0 during both semesters I was there, partially because I had some friends there to help me through my problems and partially because I handled my anxiety better. However, I decided to give computer science a try again, so I had to transfer to a different school, since this one didn't offer it. At school # 3, I ended up double majoring in computer science and computer forensics. I did very well my first semester, but my second semester was mediocre, because I was getting A's in some classes and F's in others (basically I flunked classes with attendance policies). I switched my major to English because I thought I might be more likely to suffer through my anxiety symptoms and go to class if I was taking courses I was more interested in. It didn't work, and I continued to fail classes that had attendance policies. During my fourth semester, I withdrew. I went back to college # 2 and enrolled in a B.S. program in IT this time, but I still couldn't make it work. I failed everything yet again and was suspended. So I did a semester online at school # 4, which was a terrible idea because I had zero motivation to do the work when it was 100% online. After that debacle, I went back to school # 3 and tried computer forensics again. The only thing I passed was an archaeology course I took as an elective (which I absolutely loved!) and I ended up changing my major to anthropology at the end of the semester. The next semester actually went great, but I decided I wasn't going to be able to make a career out of archaeology, at least not with all of the crap in my academic history, which my advisor at the time told me would prevent me from getting into graduate school. So I went back to school # 2 (by this time it was 2010) and decided to go into a completely new direction that I had zero coursework in - biology! Since I had been suspended the previous semester I was there, I had to do a student success program, which involved weekly meetings with someone in the student success center and I had to go to the library for a certain number of hours every week to study and have a librarian sign off on it. I was also required to get tutoring in at least one subject, but I managed to get out of that because I was getting A's on all of my tests. So the success program actually did help keep me on track, and my professors were actually quite supportive of me (which I didn't really have before). Plus I really enjoyed my science classes, which were basically all I was taking because most of my gen ed requirements had long been satisfied. By the time I finished, my GPA at school # 2 was 3.59 and my major GPA was about 3.89. GPA for school # 1 was 1.79, # 3 was 2.28, and # 4 was 0.00. Across the board, my GPA was 2.80. I initially applied to PhD programs my senior year (and my overall GPA was about 2.65 at this point, and my GPA at school # 2 was 3.52) and was rejected from all of them. I don't even think they looked beyond my overall GPA. My GRE scores were also V160, Q155, AW4.5. I did, however, get accepted to 3 masters programs. Two were unfunded, and one was partially funded (and a very good school). I went with one of the unfunded options, because it was close to enough to home to commute, it was cheaper than the partially funded program, and the thesis project was awesome. The graduate coordinator told me that it was my LOR's that got me in, because they were very hesitant with my horrid undergraduate performance. I did well in my classes, worked on a few projects other than my thesis that led to conference presentations, did some pretty awesome work on my thesis, and submitted a manuscript to a journal. By the time this application season rolled around, I had a lot of research experience under my belt, plus the conferences and submitted paper. I also won several awards along the way, including the outstanding graduate award for my major at my undergraduate school. My masters GPA was 3.72 at application time, and I picked out three really good writers for my LOR's (graduate PI, undergraduate advisor/PI, and an undergraduate professor that I did a lot of work with). I was rejected pretty fast by three really good programs and got waitlisted at two others. However, I finally got accepted at Oregon State University. So you can do it if you put the work in. You might have to do a masters degree to get there (and do it unfunded), but if you can prove that you can be a successful graduate student (and get some professors to sing your praises in LOR's), you can get into a PhD program.

Nuts, didn't get it. My reviews were E/E, VG/F, and VG/F. Evidently my last two reviews thought I should include youth involvement in my research plan. Darn those broader impacts!

It's up!

I've been working on my thesis all night. and it's almost done, which is really good for me. This last section was really difficult to write (it has some crazy statistics and it took a long time to analyze and write up). I'm sure my advisor will be pleased when I e-mail it to him tomorrow.

They measure it from when you begin taking courses and they include "off" time, not just actual months spent in class. So for me, I started my program in the fall 2013 semester, so my 12 month mark was in late August of 2014, making me eligible as of August 1. Since you started in the winter term, if classes started in January of 2014, then you would reach 12 months in January 2015. Thus, you will be ineligible next year, because as of August 1, 2015, you will have completed more than 12 months. However, should you not go for a PhD immediately after your masters, you will become eligible again 2 years after graduating, as long as you don't take any coursework.

About two hours left!

Ditto!

Yeah, I'm working on writing my thesis while periodically checking the cafe. Chances are I'll still be awake at 2:00 my mind will be too busy to fall asleep. I'm really hoping the universe continues to treat me well today. I got an official acceptance to a program I really want to attend, so it would be an awesome conclusion to today if I got it. C'mon, universe!

I never really thought about how this could be a crap shoot until the other day. I was reading through last year's thread, and someone got something like VG/VG, E/VG, and F/F... and that F/F came from someone who focused on one single sentence that they didn't like. I now feel like this is going to end up like the review process for a paper I submitted... one reviewer gave me some great constructive comments, the other person didn't even read the paper and their comments made no sense.

Thanks! I'm super excited about OSU, but I still need to find out about funding. The NSF GRFP notifications are likely going out tonight. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for myself and everyone else on here applying for it. I noticed in another thread that katsharki was accepted to UNF. Congrats!

A few pages back, someone mentioned that the number of awards per discipline is proportional to the number of applicants in the discipline. I recall reading that on a website, too. I'm not sure how specific it is, though. That is, the number of awards for life sciences in general may be proportional, or the subfields like ecology, molecular biology, etc. may be proportional.

Haha I was totally looking up awardees with my last name yesterday. I didn't try with my first and middle initials, though.

Wow, I've only heard of someone running their car into someone's apartment once before, and it was an accident. The driveway was icy and the person didn't understand how to drive on ice and plowed into the side of the building. This, however, takes the cake. If it makes you feel better, my friend's house almost burned down several years ago because the neighbor's girlfriend found out he was cheating on her, so she threw all of his stuff out the window and set it on fire (and this was in the city, so the houses were really close to together). I continue to be amazed by this girl in my program. She has finally indicated to me that she might not get into the program she is waitlisted for this fall. However, she believes that her application will carry over for spring admissions when she will get off the waitlist. She has also been telling everybody she sees that she's been accepted to this program and is working out the details of when she's start.

Perhaps! I told the graduate school to withdraw my application from the second department (I don't think I was going to be admitted anyway) and I got an e-mail back saying I was official admitted now. My official letter will arrive via e-mail later today.

As an undergrad, I never really encountered any attitudes of rivalry between soft and hard sciences. Maybe it's because it was a small school, maybe everyone was just enlightened. I don't know. I certainly felt at times that my major (environmental biology) was superior to say elementary education or even math education. However, this wasn't because I viewed the education field as less important. It was more like I was aware of the requirements for many of the education programs and they seemed very... easy. Even the math education students really only needed the equivalent of a minor in math, which did not require a lot of upper-level courses and for the most part, their math education ended with Calculus II. I guess I just feel like someone teaching math should know more. I did, however, see some of the rivalry within the hard sciences. Our school was small, so we had a natural sciences department that encompassed several biology tracks (general, forensic, environmental, wildlife, etc), geology, environmental resource management, public health, physical therapy, and pre-med. I might be forgetting something. There was definitely a great divide between the different types of majors. The medical-oriented majors thought they were better than the environmental/wildlife majors and geology majors. Just about everyone in biology thought they had a harder curriculum than geology majors, and geology and ERM (which was interdisciplinary) majors thought everyone else couldn't do math. As a graduate student, I definitely have seen a little bit of the hard vs soft sciences thing going on. A girl in my program is into neuroscience and occasionally tutors psychology majors. So now and then she goes on about how psychology majors don't know anything. Same thing with the speech-pathology masters students. They have their own special A&P course, so this girl will go on and on about how it's only science course they ever have to take, which isn't really true, since they probably took several courses as undergrads.

Woo hoo! I'm officially accepted by Oregon State! I had applied to 2 programs there, so someone in the graduate school emailed me this morning asking if I wanted to be admitted to the program that accepted me (and withdraw my application to the other) or wait to hear from the other one. So I withdrew my second application and she let me know that I was officially admitted! My official letter with details will come this afternoon.

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At last, I heard from the graduate school. It still technically wasn't an acceptance, but I had applied to 2 programs (one of which I haven't heard from), and the graduate school needed to know if I wanted to withdraw my application from the second department, because they couldn't go forward with official admission until I selected one program to be admitted to.