shadowclaw

I feel like height may be a valid explanation for not experiencing gender troubles. If you're a short female (or perhaps just come across as quiet or reserved), I would think that's it's possible for some students to view you as more vulnerable or weak and may try to push you around. On the other side of the spectrum, if you're a tall female (or someone who is loud and speaks their mind), I think you might be a bit more intimidating. I'm taller than average (5'8" or about 1.73 m to the rest of the world), but I wouldn't say I'm super tall. However, I've been told several times in my life that I am a bit intimidating. My karate sensei when I was in high school told me I had a very intimidating vibe, especially when I crossed my arms while standing. The dean of my college in undergrad told me I looked like a Norse warrior once (guess my height coupled with blonde hair and blue eyes made her think viking). I haven't TAed for too long (two semesters in my masters program, and so far one semester in my PhD program), but I haven't encountered any gender issues so far. Although one time when proctoring an exam, I handed a test to a guy and he told me I handed him the wrong exam - he was expecting one with the right answers on it. I just rolled my eyes and said "yeah right."

That sucks! I would say he's not worth it if he can't support your pursuit of an education by making small sacrifices like being apart for a little while, but that really doesn't make anyone feel better anyway. Just take solace in the thought that in a range of several weeks to a few months, you'll be feeling better and you'll probably look back at this and be grateful that you found out now that the relationship wasn't built to last. I mean, what if you got married and were offered an amazing 2 year post-doc somewhere and he wanted a divorce after a year apart? That's way stickier and would almost certainly be harder after 5+ more years together.

@emmabear at least one of us has a steady job although I'm not sure how the summer will go. My TA position only runs through June unless I was able to get a summer position. Hopefully he'll find something by then!

Babies are gross. Babies are ugly. Photos of babies filling up my Facebook timeline make me cranky. I want to have kids myself and I even feel a bit jealous of my friends who are the position to have kids right now. But they're just so repulsive for the first year or so. I also don't know why you'd want to post photos of your baby's first diaper change. I really don't.

"It shouldn't be hard for my husband to find a job in our new city... there are lots of warehouses and factories in the area." Yeah right. He made a mistake with marijuana a few years ago and now one little misdemeanor is preventing him from getting hired anywhere. Which I can't wrap my head around, because back in our home state, no one gave a hoot about your criminal background unless you did something really heinous. Here, where marijuana is legal, you can't get a job with a misdemeanor for possession of paraphernalia except for minimum wage fast food and seasonal farm work.

That's actually quite amusing!

In my limited experience, you will be told about your residency status in one of the ways: 1) Applications often ask you residency questions to determine your residency status before you've even submitted the application. However, if you've recently become a resident and will be just making any cutoffs for dates by the time you start classes or fall under any special exceptions, the application system may not be set up to accurately determine this. 2) You will get either an email or snail mail letter that lists your residency status. This would come sometime between receiving your acceptance letter and actually starting classes. However, I'm not sure if all schools do this. 3) Once you've confirmed that you will be attending, have sent in all of the nessary paperwork and deposits, and are given access to your school's online student portal (some sort of website where you can register for class, see your bill, etc.), you should be able to see a page that lists your residency status. This should be true no matter what school you attend. However, if you have recently become a resident or meet special requirements, you may have to provide the school with documentation before they will change your status to in-state. I don't believe your FAFSA will list anything about residency on it, just how much you're expected to pay out of pocket for your education and what loans or grants you're eligible for. It will probably be a while before you find out your residency status from the school, so if you really want to know right now, contacting the financial aid or business office it's your best bet, because they will know about all of the rules and regulations and can let you know what to expect.

I'm a TA for an introductory science lab. The students are learning how to conduct an experiment and write a scientific paper in addition to their normal lab activities. They have been doing little pieces related to their project and writing every week. Most recently, they had to submit a draft of their introduction and methods sections of their paper. The lab manual gave some good instructions, a rubric, and a sample paper. I went over key aspects of each in my lecture and did a writing exercise with them. They've also been reading journal articles. Yet the majority of the students received horrific grades primarily for not even trying to follow the instructions. Half the papers had no citations whatsoever, and for those who did, many cited secondary sources like web sites, even though the week before they wrote an article summary of a journal article related to their project with the goal of using it as background in their papers. There was a list of questions for them to answer before writing that was meant to help guide them... Many students just copied all of their answers and pasted them together and called it an introduction, and so many of them didn't submit the questions which were worth a quarter of the grade. I've been pretty happy with TAing so far, but after grading these papers...

Yup, it's Friday and I have 40 papers to grade this weekend on top of working on other things, like a literature review and a project for my core course (but at least they aren't due for a while).

I moved from the east coast to west coast with my husband and cats... not quite the same as moving with kids, but it had its own issues. First off, I had a tough time finding an apartment. Many people were uncomfortable renting to someone from so far away, and many rental companies had policies that required me to see the apartment before I could even apply for it (which didn't work for me). Others wanted me to physically be there to sign the rental agreement within a few days of sending my deposit, which also didn't work because I was apartment hunting a month or two before the move. If you're looking to buy a house or you have time and money to go see places at your destination, then this might not be an issue for you. I had a fairly good experience getting our stuff there. We rented a relocube which fits a surprisingly large amount of stuff. Prices for moving that far are high, so you need to decide what's worth paying to transport and what will be cheaper to buy new/used at your destination. Moving containers seem to be priced similarly to a good sized moving truck, but you don't have to pay for the gas (which can be insane for a cross country move). They are smaller, though. We packed all of our bedroom furniture in the cube (queen bed, 2 dressers, armoire, 2 nightstands), plus a small dining room table. The rest of the space was taken up by something like 60 banana boxes. We bought things like kitchen chairs, a couch, tv stand, etc. used at our destination. Also, if you go with a container like a pod, relocube, etc. shop around and reserve as soon as possible. I originally planned on two uhaul uboxes which ran $1800 for the pair when I priced them in June. When I went to reserve in August, the price went way up - it was $2500 for one. So I went with a relocube which was $2000 and slightly bigger, but it also meant I couldn't bring nearly as much as I wanted. The actual move took us 8 days because we did some sightseeing in the southwest. We crammed our Forrester full of stuff and had a canoe, kayak, and bicycle attached. We got terrible gas mileage (between 12 and 20 mpg) mainly because of the canoe. The cats were surprisingly well behaved, especially in the hotels. Overall, it went very smoothly, except for getting the bike stolen in Reno. Utilities were easy to set up from afar... all of them took credit cards for any deposits and only one wanted a copy of the rental agreement, and the security deposit form was sufficient. One thing to look out for is your mailbox. The city I moved to does those community mailboxes that you might see outside of an apartment complex (with the tiny mailboxes that need a key), except they do it for most if not all of the residents. Which is fine, because they still deliver packages to your door. However, you have to go request the keys from the post office and it takes a week, so if you are expecting any mail delivered to your new address, you won't get it until you get your keys. This was new to me!

Nope. There's a guy who looks to be in his late 40's/early 50's in my program (never asked his age), as well as a woman in her late 30's. I'd say a lot of the students in my program who are graduating with their PhD are around 30 (so they came into the program close to 25), but there are quite a few midway through who are past 30.

I didn't go to Bethlehem too often when I lived in PA, but it's a nice little city. If you're from a big city like Philly, Chicago, etc., then it will seem quite small. There are some great restaurants (my favorite is Brew Works) and shops. It also has a vegan bakery which makes really delicious desserts, even if you're not vegan. There are outdoor street festival type events when it's warm, and on New Year's Eve they drop a giant Peep (like the marshmallow ones) in a similar fashion to the ball in NYC (the Peep factory is in town somewhere). One of the things that makes Bethlehem great is its close proximity to some bigger cities - Allentown is very close and Philly is a little over an hour away. NYC isn't too far, either. There's a great amusement park nearby (Dorney Park) and a cute little zoo just outside of Allentown. If you like hiking and other outdoor activities, there are plenty of state parks and natural areas north of the Allentown-Bethlehem area, and a really great nature preserve next to the zoo. If I remember correctly, it has a lot of mountain biking trails. Unfortunately, I can't tell you much about the politics and culture in town, having not spent a lot of time there. PA as a whole is Democratic, but there are areas that are predominantly Republican.

The manager of our apartment community sent a letter out to everyone telling us that garbage cans are no longer allowed outside of the buildings in view of the street - they need to be in the garage or in our tiny yards. It's to enhance the curb appeal. This is the ugliest apartment community I've ever seen. The houses are painted a hideous shade of brown, the landscaping consists of mulch, mulch, and more mulch, and the yards are surrounded by crumbling cinder block walls. You can't polish this turd.

My dad was like this when I was in undergrad. He'd call me to ask me something as simple as what kind of cereal did I want, and he'd call 5 or 6 times without leaving a message. Then he'd call my job even if I wasn't working to see if I happened to be there. My husband can be this way, too. Once he called me something like 25 times while I was in class and when I finally snuck out to call him back, he just called to tell me he had pink eye.

The head of my program nominated me for a pretty sweet fellowship for next year. The graduate school's website says that as part of the nomination package, all of my transcripts need to be included. However, the program head told me she only included the undergrad transcript from the school that I received my degree (I have 3 others from schools I transferred to/from). I feel like she would know what the graduate school wants since she's been doing this sort of thing for a while, but I'm a bit concerned that my nomination won't be considered without those other transcripts.

So someone I went to school with in undergrad is in South America right now doing an unpaid internship on a forest reserve. It's a seriously cool place to learn about tropical ecology and gain some field skills, not to mention it's beautiful and I always wanted to visit the rainforests of central and South America. When I commented on one of his photos on Facebook that I was super jealous, he told me I should think about going down to do some work. So I actually decided to look up what it was all about and commented back that their schedule was compatible with mine and I'd think about it. Then he messaged me telling me how rough it is and it's basically camping in the jungle, there's no electricity, it's a 3 mile walk to town, the terrain is mountainous, etc., and that I probably wouldn't want to come and might not be able to handle it if I did. Wtf? Why even bother to publicly tell me to come when you really think I'm too wussy/lazy/out of shape to do research in the rainforest?

This is a very interesting topic! For both my undergraduate and graduate programs, my advisor was the opposite gender, so I never had to worry about the possibility of sharing a room with them. However, I did spend a few days doing some museum work with my advisor and one of the undergrads in the lab and we stayed at a hotel. Being the only female, I had a room to myself, but my advisor and the undergrad shared a room, although the hotel was in a former apartment building, so the rooms were actually two rooms (a living room area and a bedroom), so they didn't have to physically share the same room while they slept. As far as I can tell, they had a great time. I also helped one of my committee members with her fieldwork and spent a weekend with the field crew. We planned to camp in tents the whole time, but one of the campgrounds was full except for renting out a cabin, so all of us (3 females and 1 male) stayed in the same one-room cabin. It wasn't even remotely awkward. Now that my advisor is the same gender as I am, the possibility could arise for rooming together. Thinking about it, it probably would be awkward because I don't know her well. I roomed with some undergraduates I barely knew last term for a meeting and it was incredibly weird. I also roomed with another graduate student at a conference when I was in my masters program, and while not really awkward, it was annoying as heck. In a perfect world, I would room alone, because dealing with other people's schedules and sleeping habitats is very taxing. I spent my summer working as the lead field tech doing bird banding and vegetation surveys. We had two pretty big cabins and it worked out so that everyone had their own room unless our bosses came to visit (which wasn't too often). That said, it was a pain to adjust my routine to accommodate three people showering and cooking in my cabin (which was very annoying with limited counter space and a tiny stove). The walls were also thin, and one person would basically have her alarm go off 45 minutes before she actually got out of bed and she would hit snooze over and over again. So I essentially lost 45 minutes of sleep every morning because of her, and sleep was very precious. At least I had a private space to retreat to, though!

Knowing the number of hours your TA position entails would also be helpful! I assume the above posters all listed 20 hour/week positions. My school has a wide variety of positions ranging from 8 - 20 hours per week, so naturally the lower commitment positions (usually a grading position as opposed to actually teaching classes) pay less. My school has a minimum stipend amount based on the number of hours you work... I believe the minimum at my school for a 20 hour per week position is around $1600 + health insurance and tuition (student is responsible for fees). I have a 16 hour per week position in the biology department that pays $1900 per month, plus health insurance, tuition, and all fees.

I agree that you should relax! Just because the class is difficult doesn't mean you're automatically going to get a poor grade. Statistics courses are worth the effort, too... it is a difficult subject that can be really helpful to your career! At the schools I've attended, a 400 level course is graded like an undergraduate course regardless of your status as a graduate student - in other words there are no special expectations of you to do any extra work or a higher level of work than an undergraduate. So it's unlikely that a professor will adjust your grade to reflect that anything less than a B is considered unacceptable (effectively compressing the scale from A - F to A - C). However, at the school I did my masters program (I haven't looked into it at my current school), the requirement that you must get a minimum of a B in all coursework only applied to graduate-level courses (i.e. 500+ level), which reflected the differences between undergraduate and graduate coursework. So you may want to look closely at your program's policies. Something else to consider - the concept that a B is a terrible grade depends entirely on your field and possibly also your school. Humanities tend to follow this pattern, while STEM fields tend to be less so. Granted, consistent B's are not very good no matter what your field is, but STEM fields don't seem to look down on occasional B's. I personally feel no shame in getting a B in a difficult biology course that I didn't have the prerequisites for - and nobody seems to have cared that I got that B, either. The best thing you can do, though, is have a chat with your professor. Maybe he/she will consider grading you differently because you're a graduate student or maybe he/she can at least ease your fears and let you know what to expect over the semester so you can judge if you have the time to devote to the course.

Are you running Skype wired or wireless? The general recommendation is to do Skype interviews wired because wireless connections can be flaky. I know my university has various tables in the library where you can plug in to the network. Do you know of anywhere that you can plug in?

I would probably start by giving advice to 17 year old me and tell myself not to go to one of the most expensive schools in the state just because it happens to be 20 minutes away, has the major I want, and is practically an ivy. Shop around. Actually apply to other schools. Maybe at least visit the damn school before I send in my deposit. Do something to prevent myself from getting tossed into a toxic environment that sent me on a long miserable path that basically wasted 7 years of my life and thousands of dollars in student loans. Not to mention damaged my undergraduate record so much that it was almost impossible to get into good grad program. Maybe I would convince 17 year old me to put off college for a bit, save money, then see the world. Have experiences. Figure out what I really want to do, then go to college. Basically, a redo of my undergraduate experience (which spanned 10 years) would have helped more than anything.

I'm having major writer's block right now. I need to write a pretty short statement of my academic goals for a fellowship application at my school. This shouldn't be difficult, but I'm having trouble writing something that looks good. I also need to go to bed, but I'm just not tired.

My term started at the beginning of the month... we're already in week 3! I definitely could have used a longer break between fall and winter terms. Three weeks wasn't enough. I miss the semester system. Last term was pretty easy in terms of time management, but this term I feel like there is not enough time in the day. I have a TA position which amounts to between 17 and 20 hours per week (although last week was more intensive because I had papers to grade). On top of that, I'm taking 12 credits (the minimum required when on a TAship) and they are a bit more intensive than the 12 credits I took last term. There is a lot more reading and the writing and presenting has started much earlier. For one of my classes, we had to sign up for a presentation during the first class, and I ended up picking a topic for week 2... so I had to devote a lot of time last week to putting it together and I have a presentation today as well for a different class. So that definitely explains why I'm feeling super stressed right now... several assignments due at the same time while I'm still learning how to balance my TA responsibilities. I'm also really feeling the imposter syndrome right now. I'm in the early stages of my research working with my advisor to hone in on a dissertation topic. I felt pretty good about how things were going until she asked me to work on a literature review. She wanted an outline before I started working on it, which at first I didn't understand (how could you outline a paper when you haven't done any research yet?), but after essentially telling her that I had no idea what she wanted from me, she finally told me she just wanted a list of specific questions I was going to research. Which was fine, but we apparently had a miscommunication on the expectations for what exactly she wanted me to do a literature review on, so my outline was completely off the mark and now I feel incompetent and that my advisor must be super disappointed in me!

Thanks, @fuzzylogician! What made me consider listing the grant was that I was listed as an "other participant," and I wasn't really sure what that meant. Asking my advisor is definitely the best route, but for the moment I'm just adding a note to my research experience section that the project was funded. It's interesting that you mention that in a paper, the funding would be listed as "this research was supported by grant #123 awarded to <PI>" in the acknowledgements. I can't think of a single paper I've read in my field that lists the PI as the recipient. Normally, the authors just list the funding source.

Thanks for the input, @rising_star and @TakeruK! You have definitely made it more clear as to what a co-investigator is and how I should approach listing grants on my CV (as in not listing grants I didn't personally take part in writing). I was updating my CV for some applications for internal fellowships at my school, and one of the criteria for judging applicants is grants awarded. So I really wasn't sure of how to approach that grant! I like the idea of adding a note to the research project that it was supported by a grant, though.