shadowclaw

It was -7 degrees Fahrenheit this morning when I left for school. It warmed up to a balmy 2 degrees by the time I got there. The wind chill must have been in the negative double digits again, because my face actually hurt from spending 5 minutes outside walking from my car to my building. Now the forecast is predicting 5 - 8 inches of snow Sunday. There's already a wall of snow bordering thy roads, and I haven't been able to see pavement on my road in God knows when. Why must mother nature continue to dump cold, sloppy weather on me? I really want to be accepted to a school in a warm place.

Guitar tab

Congrats, Rivers!

Loaded gun

I love it when professors don't show up for their hours at the tutoring center. I was slammed with freshman studying for their lab exam, and when my tutoring hours were up, students were still pouring in. 45 minutes later, the professor still wasn't there. I left and headed over to said professor's office, and he was just chilling in his office. I asked if his posted tutoring hours were correct, and he said yes. He just didn't go and hadn't been there at all so far this semester. Sigh.

Cat hair

Random number

Wooden club

I personally enjoy my home time. Studying and reading in library gets annoying as the semester progresses, and when I study in different rooms around the department, people always find me and bother me with questions. Or worse, want to study with me. Ugh, I hate studying with other people. I also get approached by undergrads for tutoring, which is really annoying. It used to happen a lot when I was an undergrad doing peer tutoring... they wouldn't come during my hours but they'd see me working on something in the library and ask for help with their lab reports. Errrg. Basically, I hate being interrupted while studying or reading and I have trouble concentrating with other people are noisy. So I prefer to do that sort of stuff at home. I also prefer to eat at home with my husband, and most of the grad students in my department who have SO's also prefer to go home and eat/hang out with them. The single students, on the other hand, often linger and socialize and go out to eat together. So that's something to think about... if you have a SO (who's living close to you) or you happen to meet someone, you might appreciate the extra space at home. However, if you don't or if you just like socializing with other students, you might not spend as much time at home. Personally, I'm really sick of long commutes, so I might pick a studio for the convenience of being able to walk or bike to school. Especially in a big city, driving might get really annoying really fast.

That's too bad, katsharki3! I feel your pain. My rejections so far have been from schools where there wasn't as good of a research fit, but I was still disappointed that I didn't even make the cut for an interview. I guess I'm waitlisted at UNC... not officially, but the website says if you don't get invited to the interview weekend, you can be waitlisted. Since I haven't been rejected yet, I'm just going to go with that UTK is my top choice, and I'm really bummed that I didn't get an invite to the recruitment weekend (which is coming up in a few days). I don't know if interviews are a requirement, because they have zero information about the weekend on the website and to be honest, I'm scared to e-mail my POI about it. I keep hoping that I'll end up like sfrie and be accepted without an interview. My prospects now seem best so far at OSU and FIU, but will probably come down to funding. Funding at both schools comes from TA positions or presidential fellowships (which I highly doubt I would receive with my dubious undergrad record), or alternatively an external fellowship like the NSF GRFP. I feel like I must be a good enough candidate at most of my remaining schools to not immediately be rejected, but perhaps I am not at the top of the list. Winning the GRFP would probably snag me an immediate admission to most of these programs, so I'm reeeaaally hoping I get it. I'm also hoping that their first choices all pick somewhere else, making an opening for me. I feel like that's a crappy thing to wish for and a crappy way to get into a program, but an acceptance is an acceptance, even if I am the second or third choice.

There isn't much enforcement of the no cell phones/talking at my current university's library, although people are usually pretty good about staying in the designated talking/phone zones (first floor and stairwells). Last semester I did have some person who would play music every time I tried to study. I'm not sure if they were just playing music on their laptop or if they had their headphones turned up really loud. At my undergrad school, however, they were super serious about silence anywhere but the first floor. There were signs everywhere with an e-mail address and cell phone number (for texting) if someone was talking, and they actually took care of it. I remember sitting in a cubby studying for a physics test and someone started whispering to someone else about going for dinner later. In less than 30 seconds, a librarian came over told them both to leave.

One time, I stopped at the store after a waitress shift and I had lots of dollar bills. I think I only bought about $20 worth of food, but I put in each dollar nice and slowly, making sure I smoothed it out before putting it into the bill acceptor. Then I decided to get rid of some pennies for the change part of the total. I felt so evil!

Top gear

I think you'll do fine. I was doing the same thing during undergrad... I worked 6 days (~38 hours) each week at a restaurant and took 20 credits almost every semester (amounted to about 6 classes depending on labs) as well as did a few hours of peer tutoring each week. The time management skills I learned then did translate pretty well in grad school. The biggest difference for me between undergrad and grad school were that instead of trying to remember a bunch of information from books/lectures, I was doing a lot more work on my own time reading papers and writing. So there's a difference in the kind of work that needs to be done outside of class, but time management skills are still important,

Most of the folks in my masters program work part-time jobs. One even has a full-time job, although he doesn't take more than 2 courses at a time. I worked part time last year, since I didn't have funding. I was basically on campus three days per week and I took three courses (9 credits) each semester. I worked the other four days as a waitress. It really wasn't difficult. There was a lot of reading and writing involved with my courses, but it was easy to fit the work into my schedule. My data collection for my thesis was also done over the summer, so that made life easier than someone who had to collect data for their thesis during the semester. Of course, if you aren't doing a thesis-based masters, this doesn't apply to you. This year, I did get funding in the form of a graduate assistantship. Essentially, this means TAing for two lab sections and preparing materials (making solutions, setting up models, etc) for two labs every week. Since this is a 20 hour a week commitment, I quit my waitress job. This actually made my life more hectic, because I had to be on campus five days per week last semester. For most people, this isn't a problem, but I live an hour and fifteen minutes away from school, and all of those hours in the car really add up. Plus my 20 hour GA position really ends up being closer to 25 or 30 hours of work, so I ended up working more as a GA than a waitress (and for less money). This semester, it is a lot more peaceful. I only have one course and I only have to be on campus 3 or 4 days per week, freeing up a lot of time to work on writing my thesis. Getting back to working part-time, one of the GA's works part-time at a grocery store on the weekends. So she is working close to full-time in addition to taking 2 courses and working on her thesis. She has no life. At all. So working part-time is certainly doable, but depending on your responsibilities with a TA position, you might not want to add a part-time job on top of it. You also want to check the wording of your contract. Some funding packages come with the stipulation that you aren't allowed to work outside of the university.

I often feel this way in many situations. For example, the movie theater. I rarely go when a movie just comes out, so the theater never actually fills up. Yet somehow, even though there are lots of seats all over the place, someone will sit right next to me or my husband. It also happens at restaurants where you seat yourself. The place could be pretty much empty except for where I'm sitting, and some loudmouth will sit at the table next to me and annoy the hell out of me while I eat. It even happens at the grocery store. Most of them now have the self-checkouts, and sometimes I'll be scanning my items and someone will walk up behind me and stare at me, and occasionally make noises if I don't go fast enough. I even had this happen when there were three open registers.

Hard cheese

Light load

Decided to buy a pair of jeans today. I was down to two pairs that weren't ripped up or otherwise falling apart. My husband got some jeans, too. I put them all in the wash and we went downstairs to watch a movie. Came back up and discovered my mom put the jeans in the dryer. They were stretchy jeans. The kind that shrink. I always air dry my jeans so I don't have to do yoga in them to make them fit again. The pants are now too small and too short... they fit like skin on sausage. I realize that if the worst thing to happen to me is that my jeans get shrunk, then I have a pretty good life. However, I'm really getting sick of living in my parents' basement. It's the little things like having my clothes shrunk or my food thrown away that drive me nuts. I just want a living space that is entirely ours. I can't wait for when we finally get our own apartment. This All in the Family stuff needs to end. I also have a rash on my arm and the opposite hand. I think it's from washing dishes at school. Beakers, dissecting trays, etc. Back when I worked at various food places, I would get terrible rashes from the dish soap and the sanitizer. I eventually started wearing gloves and the problem went away. I guess I need to start doing that again. I'm also really glad that the lab supervisor forgot to update my prep notes for the two labs I set up for. It's a great feeling when the lab instructors come to the weekly meeting and ask me where materials are and I have no idea what they're taking about.

As TakeruK and CrucialBBQ have said, it's really a choice between you and your parents. The government doesn't know if your parents have been providing you with housing, food, clothing, etc. Even if you really are completely dependent on them, they don't have to claim you if they don't want to. My parents claimed me for two years after I turned 18. During those years, I was definitely dependent on them and they could get the Hope tax credit for those two years. So they claimed me to maximize their tax refund. The American Education Opportunity tax credit didn't exist yet back then, so there wasn't as big of an advantage to keep claiming me after two years. So they stopped claiming me, even though I really was still a dependent. It also depends on who files their tax return first. When I met my future husband, he had just gotten out of the marines and was living with his mom until he found a job and got his own place. She decided that since he lived with her for 3 months (ignoring the fact that he paid for his half of the rent, paid for her cell phone, and let her drive his car to work, among other things), she was going to claim him as a dependent. She also failed to mention this plan to anyone. So he filed his taxes first and got his regular refund. She filed later and was shocked when she got less money and a notice that the person she claimed as a dependent had filed independently. So yeah, who files first matters if you aren't in agreement.

Public education

Air Bud

Hammer time

I have a student like this in my intro bio lab. The lab manual has step by step instructions. The activities are very easy, but perhaps awkward for someone who has never done it before. One student consistently asks me for help before every activity. No, not help. What she wants is for me to explain exactly what to do, step by step, instead of just reading the manual. Worse yet, this student (and many others) typically asks for help with the many of the questions, simply because she didn't bother to read the background info at the beginning of the chapter of the manual. It could be worse. At least I don't have to teach them algebra. I somehow got partnered up with students in labs during undergrad who had no clue about math. Then again, I had to show several students how to make a scatter plot by hand.