shadowclaw

Hello everyone, I have a question about listing a grant on a CV. When I did my masters, my advisor wrote a grant to fund my research. The grant came from an office within the university and was competitive, not to mention it was a pretty decent-sized sum of money. In the grant proposal, my advisor is listed as the PI and I am listed under the category of "other participants" (these are the only two categories available on the grant proposal cover sheet). While the body of the grant proposal mainly focuses on the scientific rationale, there is also a line in the objectives/outcomes section that states how the project is an important component of my degree. I am unsure if I should list this on my CV since 1) I am not the PI, and 2) I didn't do the writing. However, I am also inclined to list it on my CV since 1) I am listed by name and department on the grant, and 2) my status as a graduate student and the need for money to complete my degree was an important factor in the decision to give us the grant. So if I can list this on my CV, how would I describe my role? I am certainly not a co-PI, but would I be considered a co-investigator? Is there even a difference between these two terms, because I haven't found consistent results when I tried to google this. From what I read, I fit the description of a co-investigator, since I designed most of the project following some guidelines from my advisor and did all of the work myself. Any thoughts on this?

Ah, working full time. Those were the days. I worked full time hours at a restaurant while in undergrad, usually 40 hours over 6 days, but sometimes I'd have to come in on my day off, too, if someone called off. I also took 20 credits every semester, plus tutored 2 hours per week after the first semester. I also did an internship in the summer between my junior and senior years while working. That being said, I didn't find applying to be too time consuming, but I think it did impact my GRE math score.

My closest friends have been slowly going their own ways since most of them graduated college. We all stayed local for college, but we spread out over the years. One joined the Air Force and moved away, but would try to get together with everyone whenever she came home to visit. We talk on Facebook from to time, and I was able to visit her on my trip from the east coast to the west. But we don't keep very good contact! Another got married after graduating, had some kids, and while she was always a religious person, during college she became more so and after marriage she became a lot more involved with other families in her church and spent way less time with her old friends. I almost never talk to her anymore. Then there's the friend who stabbed everyone in the back at some point during high school or college. Sometimes more than once. Interestingly, she keeps fairly decent contact, but mainly because she's addicted to social media. It isn't very intellectual or deep contact. Mostly fluff. One of my two closest friends worked with me until I started working as a GA in my masters program. After that, we really stopped hanging out because I was so busy and she started a new relationship and job. Plus she lives with a lot of room mates who have been her friends for a while, so she is constantly surrounded by people to talk to and do things with. While I think we will always be close, I'm not sure we'll really stay in good contact now that I'm across the country. My best friend moved away before I did, and we keep in decent contact. She's a bit better at it than I am because I tend to get busy, but she is always there when I need her. All that being said, I've definitely become more isolated in graduate school. I did make a few friends in my masters program, but I lived too far away to be very social with them outside of school and our monthly biology grad student get togethers. My PhD program is so interdisciplinary that I rarely see anyone from my program around campus (although I'm taking two core courses now so I see several of them weekly). I definitely have that zero friend thing going on. On the plus side, I have a husband to be my friend. I would probably lose my mind if he wasn't here. I do often feel bummed out about my friends, though. Mostly I wish I did more things with them when I had the chance. My best friend lives in NC, and I occasionally curse UNC for rejecting me because it's only a few hours away from her. However, she is trying to convince her husband to move out here. She's not crazy about where she lives and I have definitely sold her on the PNW. So maybe in a year, I'll regain a good friend in close proximity. I don't have any real advice. There are lots of ways to meet people at school, but it's hard to develop close relationships when you're busy. It's really disappointing when your friends don't seem to want anything to do with you, but in reality, I think they do still care. They just don't know how to be a part of someone's life when there's distance, and sometimes life gets in the way of being a good communicator. Hang in there. It'll get better. Don't give up on those friends, either. They may surprise you.

Don't underestimate yourself! You can apply to a program outside of your field, but it is a little more difficult. Making contact with POI's and demonstrating your passion and any independent knowledge you've gained in the field can go a long way. Sorry to hear about your advisor. I switched majors several times and I only had a decent advisor for my first major and my final major. There was one who wouldn't even respond to email. For the major I actually ended up in (environmental biology), I was actually assigned a pretty terrible advisor. He rarely responded to emails, didn't meet with students about their schedules, and he screwed a few students over with their grad school applications by forgetting to write their reference letters. So I asked for someone that I knew would be awesome. One of my friends who was in education also got pretty screwed by her advisor. In her program, there are certain prerequisites offered once per year, and her advisor actually told her not to take it, which resulted in her spending an extra year and she couldn't take any major courses for a year.

Thanks for your words of comfort! Luckily (or maybe not luckily), my employment before graduate school was at Pizza Hut, so I'm not taking a pay cut. Although I did take a pay cut for my masters program. My assistantship there had a terrible stipend and I made a few hundred dollars more each month at Pizza Hut. However, my stipend here is actually quite decent, but my rent and utilities are so high that almost all of my stipend goes towards it. I don't understand how a water/sewer bill can be $90 per month for two people. We don't even have a washer and we normally don't shower every day. I've vented before about how expensive this apartment is, especially given its size, condition, and the crappy appliances. On the plus side, we did get a new dishwasher installed today. Hopefully my dishes will actually come out clean now. It turns out I was freaking out for nothing regarding tuition remission. It seems not everyone knows what they are talking about at school. Tuition remission does only cover resident tuition, but there is another policy that says TA's and RA's are charged at resident rates regardless of actual residency status. Phew! Turns out the business office just hasn't bothered to update my charges yet and the person who told me that I was SOL on the difference between resident and non-resident tuition is confused. It's still a financial challenge, though, without my husband at work. In retrospect, there were a few jobs with low pay he should have applied for because we would at least have some income coming in for him. He also worked a seasonal job before Christmas, and the company hasn't paid him for his last week and a half. It's like they dropped off the face of the earth - voicemail is full, no one is at the office, their facebook page was deleted. They owe him close to $1000, and it really screwed us over for Christmas.

There are days when I feel like I should throw in the towel on my PhD program. Sometimes it's because I feel incredibly homesick and I am about as far away from home as I can get without leaving the country. Sometimes it's because my husband is incredibly unhappy here and can't find a job. Sometimes it's because I'm tired of struggling to make ends meet. Today it is because I've realized getting my PhD is going to put me further in debt and I already owe my firstborn to Sallie Mae and AES. When accepting my admission offer, I knew that I'd be taking out loans for this year because my only funding came from a tuition scholarship that only covered resident tuition, but I had high hopes that I could secure a TA position for my remaining years or my advisor would pick up some funding for me along the way. Now that I've managed to secure a TA position for this year, I've found out a few things about tuition remission that fill me with doubts. The tuition remission only covers resident rates, so I still need loans to cover the approximately $3000 gap between resident and non-resident rates each term (that's $9000 a year). Sure, I could use my stipend to pay the difference, but not when my husband is unemployed, and even with a job, it would be hard to live on just one income. I also have to be enrolled in 12 credits as a TA, so it's not like I can try to save money by taking fewer credits. I will also never be eligible for resident tuition unless I was to take a year off from school and work in the state, and even then I might not get it. If my advisor can secure grant money for me, then I don't think I'll have this problem anymore because we could allocate enough funds towards tuition to cover it all, or if that's not allowed for some reason, she could just give me a larger stipend (and as far as I can tell, there are no caps for stipends). However, that's a big if. I wish this information was in a more obvious place on the graduate school's website. The page with info on TA positions just says that the position comes with tuition remission, health insurance, etc. You have to dig deep to find out that tuition remission only covers resident tuition. Had I been aware of this, I don't think I would have come here. There is too much working against me financially. Sigh.

I imagine most (of not all) schools have an office that deals with these sorts of problems. Clearly, going to your program head didn't work and from his response, I'd say he's part of the problem. So you really need to take this farther. No one should be subjected to any kind of sexist or demeaning comments. Maybe if it was an occasional slip on the student's part, it could be overlooked, but clearly the student is having a negative impact on other students. So look into what offices your school has for dealing with student problems like this. You should be able to meet with someone who can listen to your concerns and help facilitate a solution.

The suggestion of a summer camp or park is a good one... those jobs expect you to to be done at the end of the season. You would probably make less at a camp because they would be providing you with housing and food as well as a paycheck (unless it was a day camp). Check out amusement parks, water parks, minigolf places... even places like these that are open year-round will need more people in the summer. Check out concert venues, too - they need people for security, parking, clean up, and selling booze. The work obviously won't be regular, but you can still earn some cash. If you don't mind hard labor, temp agencies are usually looking for people to work in warehouses and factories. They don't often pay well, though (usually only a dollar or two over federal minimum wage), but you can sometimes find higher paying ones. I think the whole "fast food work is crappy" discussion got a little out of hand. The OP's original post didn't sound at all demeaning to fast food workers, so I'm not sure why people were jumping down his throat. Perhaps it was the attitude that he doesn't have to work, so he's not going to make himself suffer in a fast food job? I guess you could take that as being too good for fast food, but I personally saw it as fast food is terrible work and he'd like to avoid it. Fast food work really is pretty lousy to do. You get sweaty and greasy, your clothes (and you) smell weird, customers are abusive, Friday nights are hell on earth, and you get paid peanuts for your misery. What's even worse is being a shift manager in fast food - you make a dollar or so more and have to put up with way more crap than the raise is worth. Personally, I'd have to be threatened with living in a box to return to frying fish and hush puppies.

@Kleio_77 I agree with piglet, you should head out by yourself if you really want to see these things. You'll never get anywhere if you wait on other people. Although I find it odd that no one wants to go to Niagara Falls or NYC! I went to Niagara Falls as a teen (Canadian and US sides) and it was a lot of fun. When I was back in Pennsylvania, I went to NYC every year near Christmas and sometimes other parts of the year, too... that city is never boring. Also, since you are in close proximity to these cities, does your school do any bus trips? My undergrad school had an annual bus trip to the museum of natural history in NYC, and where I did my masters, there was a bus trip to NYC and to Philly about once a month, and it was cheap. If so, you could go and see if you can join a group of people already going. My own vent: I really don't like the quarter system. I'm so not ready to go back to class tomorrow. I really liked having 5 or 6 weeks off between semesters... 3 weeks off seems like so little, especially since I was so busy over the break. Plus I got sick yesterday. There's also only 1 week off between the winter and spring terms, so it's going to feel like a mega semester instead of two quarters. I am also feeling a bit apprehensive about my TA position. Because I was offered one starting in the winter term, I didn't get a day-long training session like the one held in the fall. Instead, I got a two-hour crash course. The business office also hasn't processed my hiring paperwork yet (even though I filled it out the day I signed my contract last term). As a result, I'm not getting my first paycheck on time and I can't be added as a TA to the online system, so I can't see my class list or anything. Sigh.

Over the years, I've personally learned to write an A-grade research paper by emulating what I see in journal articles to the best of my ability. So that's the number one piece of advice I can give you for learning how to do it. Read papers in your field and pay attention to the writing style, and pay particular attention to the introduction and discussion, as these are areas that are easy to fill with unnecessary or extra information. As for what actually goes into a research good paper, here's my two cents as an ecologist. For the introduction, you want to provide a good background to set the stage for your research, but you also don't want it to be sprawling. When reviewing past research, make sure you include relevant papers (and be sure to look for papers that have contradictory results so that your review isn't one-sided), but don't try to cite every paper ever written about the subject and remember to have a critical eye when reviewing. The goal is to briefly summarize past research relevant to your study. Also, keep your audience in mind when writing - if you are writing for a more general audience, you might need a bit more information in order to bring the reader up to speed on different concepts and terms, while a paper targeted for a specialized audience can skip over this kind of information. I've always found methods easy to write, but just make sure you are concise but have all the information necessary to repeat the study, and be sure to describe your statistical analysis well. Results can sometimes be tricky for people to write up, because I've found that my peers often fall into a redundancy trap or want to put information into tables or figures that would better placed in the text. Don't be redundant with information - don't put the same information in two places (see what I did there?). If your data fits nicely into table and makes the most sense in a table, put it there and don't also make a chart that shows the same information just because you think the paper needs a figure. If you can report your results briefly in the text, don't put together a space-taking figure. It seems like common sense, but I've seen too many papers where students put the same data in multiple places or wasted space with a table or figure when they could have reported their results as one line of text. The discussion is another area that can easily become sprawling. You might want to compare every little result of your study to every other study out there, and that's just going to take up too much space. Yes, you want to address all of your results, but you want to spend the most time and space on the results that show us something important. You also want to make sure you explain how your results fit into the big picture and expand our knowledge. Do more than say "this is cool." Say why it's cool, and be critical of both your own research and that of others. Talk about how your results can be applied and why we should care. Write about future directions for the research to go. Review-style papers are a somewhat different beast, but generally follow the same principles. You define a topic that you want to explore, report the results, and discuss. You find out what information is out there and then figure out what questions the research doesn't answer. You point out strengths and weaknesses of the studies and recommend what we need to do to fill in the gaps in the knowledge. I've read some pretty bland literature reviews that regurgitated what was in the studies and didn't treat them with a critical eye. It's one thing to just summarize literature - it's another thing to review it. You need to show some critical thinking, or else your paper will end up like a glorified annotated bibliography.

I'm pretty sure none of your programs will care if you change your name. It's not like you get a new SSN or anything like that which would complicate your application. You will just need to inform them of the name change before they officially enroll you! I don't know how long you actually have to change your name, but if there is a limit, it's certainly longer than between now and the end of the application season. I waited a few months before getting my name changed with the SS office because I was traveling internationally a few weeks after I got married and there wouldn't have been enough time to update my passport. It took about nine or ten months to change my drivers license because I made a mistake on my paperwork when I initially went to change it and I was a lazy bum sending in the corrected form. It was over a year before I updated my credit cards, and some of them are still in my maiden name because they wanted me to mail a copy of my marriage license and I just haven't done it yet. Just a small note about changing your name. If you do change it and then need to send your GRE scores somewhere or take the GRE again, ETS will not let you change the name on your account. It's not really a problem if you're just sending scores, but be sure to email admissions and tell them that scores are coming under your maiden name. Even though your application has a spot for your maiden name, not a single school I applied to was able to match the scores to my application without me emailing them. This is a problem, though, if you want to take the GRE again - you will either need an id with your old name or you will have to make a new account. On a side note, I regret changing my name. I double barreled my last name because I didn't actually want to change it but my husband was kind of upset about it, so I compromised. Now people have a hard time understanding what my last name is, it's somewhat long and cumbersome to write, and I'm annoyed that my bachelor's degree and master's degree have different names on them (but at least only slightly!). Think carefully about what last name you want, because it's a real pain (and expensive) to change your name if you didn't get married, divorced, or widowed.

One of my professors finally put in our final grades yesterday (grades were due about 2 weeks ago). It was the class in which the professors makes very difficult tests that I bombed the midterm in. When final grades were actually due, he gave us all an incomplete and the grade for the work he had graded up to that point, and I had a B. I was completely bummed out about it, because he said that the only thing left to grade for everyone was a paper, and it wasn't worth a particularly large portion of our grade. So I figured the best I would be getting was a B+, and that was if I got a perfect score on the paper. I thought I aced the final and an A on it would have meant a higher grade, so I assumed that I must not have done as well as I thought, which put me into an even worse mood. Turns out that he didn't actually grade all of the finals so my B didn't reflect it. I ended up with an A- for the course, which was amazing because my midterm grade was so awful. He also told me that I did an amazing job in the course and he hoped I would take his spring course. I feel so triumphant now.

Maybe, but maybe not. I know that probably 85% of the students that went on the trips were male. That may have just been an artifact of the ratio of applicants or who got their money in first. What I do know is that the teacher most definitely favored students for other club activities that were most like him - vegans, vegetarians, and really skinny people (not average people, but but students who looked a bit underweight). It's always a good idea to e-mail admissions and confirm that your transcripts and other materials have arrived. Sometimes they are just slow in marking them received on the web portals, but sometimes the transcripts are just floating around. I know that this past application cycle, a lot of my materials were under a slightly different name. I got married while getting my masters, so my GRE scores and undergrad transcripts were under my maiden name, while my masters transcripts were under my married name. Even though I filled in the box on my applications that asks for other names materials may be submitted under, the admissions office at several schools didn't match them up until I e-mailed them about it. So it's very possible that if your school misprinted your name on a transcript, it could be sitting in the admissions office. It's also a good idea to contact your school and confirm that they sent out your transcripts. After being accepted to my masters program, I had to send final transcripts after graduation from undergrad. The transcripts were evidently lost in the mail, because when I e-mailed the registrar, they told me that they mailed my transcripts but never received the receipt confirmation card that they include (I'm not sure if this is a service the post office provides or if they actually include a postcard with the transcripts to be mailed back). So they resent the transcripts for me free of charge. I feel your pain. We are really broke right now because my husband's work screwed up his paycheck and he didn't get paid before we flew home to visit our families for Christmas. So we had no money to buy any gifts, and even if he had gotten paid, the gifts wouldn't have been big, anyway. I ended up buying some things from the craft store and made a variety of ornaments for everyone, which they certainly appreciated. However, everyone was so freaking generous because we just moved out to the west coast for school in September and it's our first apartment and all. My sister and one of my brothers gave us gift cards on top of the gifts they gave us. They each must have spent close to $100. Granted, they can both more than afford to give so much, but I felt soooo bad. My parents also bought us a really nice kitchen mixer and had it shipped to us towards the beginning of the month and it was supposed to be our one big gift. Then come Christmas, they gave us a bunch more stuff plus a few hundred dollars in cash. Which is awful because I owe them some money that we borrowed to help move that isn't fully paid back yet, AND they spent so much money on us while we were visiting - they took us out to dinner three times, my mom took me to get a pedicure, they took us to the movies twice (and bought popcorn and drinks, which costs a small fortune at the theater). I feel immensely blessed to have such a wonderful family, but I feel very guilty not being able to offer anything in return. I'm super jealous that you got to visit Russia! I studied Russian in high school, and juniors and seniors had the opportunity to do an exchange for a few weeks. We would spent three weeks with a Russian family in the fall, and in the spring, a student from our host family would come stay with us for three weeks. There were five spots and as a junior, I was picked to go. Unfortunately, the trip got cancelled that year because 9/11 happened. However, I didn't have to reapply the next year. I had all of that money saved for the trip to the rain forest that I was going to use to pay for the trip to Russia (we had to pay up front for the trip, but then did fundraisers throughout the year to get as much money back as we could), but since I didn't go that year, I ended up buying a car. I got a second job over the summer to help replenish my savings, but the car ended up having a bunch of problems and all my money went into fixing it. So come senior year, I couldn't afford the trip anymore and gave my spot to someone else (who coincidentally was a kid with rich parents who drove a fancy car and didn't work during high school). The worst part of it all was that they were so successful with the fundraisers, that each student only ended up paying $400 towards the $2500 trip. If only we had done fundraising the year before! I was also rather apprehensive each time I went abroad, wondering if people would see me as the fat American and be rotten to me. I had heard stories from other students about going to Italy and waiters refusing to serve them when they found out they were Americans... and these people were thin! I thought perhaps I should try to pretend to be Canadian and hope no one asked for details. However, I felt very welcome wherever I went, although Japan was a little awkward, but mostly because I could speak so little of their language and I was in a fairly rural area where few people spoke English. I did have an interesting conversation with a woman who knew about 5 words in English, and I knew about 3 in Japanese that were relevant to the conversation. It's surprising how well you can communicate using hand movements!

@highborn I really appreciated your vent on body image, gender, and race. While I'm white, I've often wondered if any of the negative or nonexistent responses from POI's were because I am female. As a fellow fat person, I also wonder how my weight factors into things. I've never had a grad school interview in person, so I really can't say my body factored into any admissions decisions. However, it has certainly factored into where I applied. I am overweight, but I'm not crippled by obesity by any means and I love hiking and other outdoor activities. I've had field jobs that required me to do a lot of walking in the woods. Yet when looking for labs, I saw several advertisements for PhD positions that specially started that applicants should be physically fit (because outdoor field work was involved). They didn't say "applicant should be prepared to hike rough terrain" or something like that. I felt like it would be a waste of my time and money to apply to these positions because I don't look fit (and obviously there is much room for improvement), and that these male professors would judge me on my looks and wouldn't give me the opportunity to prove myself. I guess we'll never know. I can say that it did happen to me when I was 14. I was in our school's ecology club and the teacher ran trips to Panama and Ecuador every summer. I had saved up my allowance and Christmas/birthday money for two years and my parents matched my savings. I was so excited when I had enough money. I filled out the paperwork he required, but he never called my parents like he said he would do for all students who applied. They tried calling him, but he never returned their calls. When I asked him about it at meetings, he kind of beat around the bush and said he didn't have time to call them yet. Eventually, a friend who had gone on multiple trips with him (and coincidentally was a size 0 all through high school) asked about it for me, and he told her that he didn't think I could handle hiking in the rain forest and that maybe I could go when I had lost some weight. I ended up not joining the club in subsequent years. I don't want to get into my whole personal history, but I've been burned many, many times for being a girl, being fat, or both. So it's oddly comforting to see others with the same fears and experiences as me. I think I've been lucky in that I haven't experienced too much sexism in the schools I've ended up at, and no one's been terrible to me because of my weight in a while. But I do carry with me a lot of psychological baggage from my younger years when people were vicious or creepy.

I think this is a great discussion at both the undergraduate and graduate level. I think to some degree, high SAT or GRE scores can indicate that someone has had a good education as far as math and reading comprehension go, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to have the motivation or skills necessary to make it through a degree. There's also the problem that some people suck at standardized testing and some people are amazing at it. I have a friend who did amazing on her SATs and got a good scholarship based almost exclusively on those scores, and she ended up dropping out after two years. Clearly, the SAT scores were not a good predictor there. When contacting POIs last application cycle, I was in contact with one who told me everything about my profile was great except for my GRE scores and that I'd never be accepted unless I scored above the 90th percentile on all sections because they just don't want students below that cutoff. That's crap. My ability to sit in a room for several hours and ace a standardized test on math and reading has very little to do with my motivation or ability to do ecological research. In fact, I would argue that the GRE has nothing to do with being able to do research, and that's what graduate school is all about, at least at the PhD level. I also believe that the test disadvantages students in lower economic brackets - they can't afford all of the expensive test prep material or afford to take it again and again until they get the score they want. If high-quality test prep materials were freely available and testing fees were low, I think that would go a long way to making the test more fair. The same can be said about the SAT's... wealthy parents can afford to get SAT tutors and software for their kids, or at the very least, those kids can go to after school SAT prep classes. Many students in lower economic brackets get jobs and don't have time to go to those study sessions. I find it very interesting that the research cited has found such a weak link between GRE scores and success. During the application process, I have seen it stated on several university websites that there is a strong correlation between GRE scores and graduate student success, which is why they place so much weight on them. I wonder where those schools got their information from. Interestingly, the program that I got my masters degree from actually didn't require GRE scores. Perhaps the graduate admissions committee is very enlightened.

I definitely understand that this unexpected turn of events has put you into a bad position. However, I am interested in knowing why this will keep you from doing your internship. From your follow up post, it sounds like you were planning to start your internship sometime at the beginning of the spring semester and doing your last course online while you do your internship. Again, I am making assumptions based on what little I know, but it sounds like you don't need to have graduated to do your internship, so why does it matter if you have to return in the fall? Unless the internship is a lot longer than the typical internship that last 3-4 months, I don't see this as an issue. If I'm wrong, please correct me, but you haven't given us much to work with. Getting back to the graduation issue, taking those two P/NP courses prior to enrollment in your current program is irrelevant. Clearly, it is a graduate school requirement to have no NP's on your record to graduate, not a program-specific policy. So even though you changed programs, you are still held to the same standards because you are at the same school, and you should have been aware of those policies as a graduate student, no matter what program you started in. You also should have consulted your advisor from that first program prior to taking those courses. Eigen is also right that you should stop referring to this policy as a "hidden rule." It's definitely not hidden. This may be part of the reason why your request for a letter was denied. Because you took those courses when you were in a different program, it would make sense for your current program head to write you that letter that says the courses are non-essential. However, if you approached your program head with the attitude that this is some "hidden rule," he/she may have been less inclined to cut you some slack. Furthermore, if you told the program head what you told us - that you took these two classes without any intention of completing the assignments and exams and didn't consult anybody about the wisdom of this - then he/she was probably a bit irked by the situation and felt disinclined to help you. As Eigen said, it would be a lot more helpful if you explained why your letter request was denied. I am purely speculating here.

It is my personal opinion that you are stuck having to retake these classes, and getting a lawyer will be a waste of money and not get you anywhere. A lawyer may even cost more than taking on an additional semester to retake the courses, depending on the cost of your tuition. The information on the university's website is meant to be a quick and informative guide to the university's policies - not a complete rundown of every single detail of every policy. You are held to the policies of the official handbook, not the information posted on the website, which is why a lawyer will get you nowhere. This will sound a bit harsh, but it's really your own fault that you ended up in this situation. You alone are responsible for meeting graduate requirements and ignorance is not an excuse. Yes, graduate handbooks are long and contain a lot of information, but you should be aware of your graduation requirements and how failing a class will impact you. The purpose of taking a course pass/fail isn't so you can sit in a class and do nothing - the purpose is so that you can take a course that is difficult or perhaps outside of your field and not have to worry about your GPA being dragged down if you have trouble with it, but you are still expected to pass. Getting an NP is just as bad as getting an F in a graded course. I also assume you did not communicate your intentions to your advisor or the professors of these courses, or they likely would have advised you to either just sit in on the class (without registering) or actually complete the course requirements so you could pass. Unfortunately, in the event that you did tell them your intentions and they told you it was fine, you still have no recourse because handbooks state specifically that you alone are responsible for meeting graduation requirements. However, it's possible that you could convince your department head to write you that letter on the grounds that your advisor told you it was ok to treat the course as if you were auditing it. However, because you already stated that you cannot get the letter, then I am lead to believe that you did not consult your advisor or anyone else about the matter prior to taking these courses. My suggestion is to relax and learn from your mistake. You might not have to worry about graduate handbooks in the future, but there will certainly be times when you will be expected to be familiar with policies, and this should serve as a lesson to make sure you know those policies well. An extra semester isn't that bad, and it's only two courses. Since you are already familiar with the material, the classes should be a bit easier for you, too.

From my experience, they do slow a bit later in the season, but they definitely don't stop. I've been getting e-mails from two or three school at least once a month year-round for several years. There's probably a link somewhere that I can unsubscribe from their mailing list, but I just always delete the e-mails without reading. It sure was a pain during my application seasons, though!

I don't think there's anything wrong with asking if you need to cover your tattoos or piercings. Generally speaking, if an employer has an issue with these things, they have the regulations specifically outlined in the dress code policy. I'm not sure if any TA positions come with a handbook that would have this information in it, so it would be perfectly appropriate to ask about dress code expectations. If you were getting any other job, I'm sure you would ask about the dress code before your first day if it wasn't specifically told to you... what makes a TA position any different? I also doubt that tattoos and piercings will really be an issue unless you have something highly offensive, but it probably depends on the program. I'm sure some fields are less friendly towards tattoos and piercings than others.

I know as an undergraduate student, a lot of students didn't really take evaluations seriously and as long as they got a decent grade, they just filled in all 5's. Usually the only ones who gave low scores or left comments were those who did poorly. In my masters program, it looked like students took it a little more seriously, although I didn't have any terrible professors, so it's difficult to say if any of my fellow students would have actually given poor reviews to a poor professor. However, I do think that if a professor is a well-known and respected researcher (or maybe just really likable), there is a strong possibility that students will ignore his or her weaknesses and give very positive feedback because most people like to be nice. There's also the possibility that the students filled out the questions with 4's and 5's and decided to provide their criticism purely in the comment section so they could better articulate their issues (I'm assuming all schools have a space for comments). I also think that in small courses, students are unlikely to give honest critiques since it's easier to figure out who's who, which is the reason my current school doesn't do evaluations for classes with fewer than I think six students. My school for my masters program didn't care about that, though. I actually had to do an evaluation for my thesis credits, and I sure as heck wasn't going to put anything other than a 5 on that evaluation, and I also drew a picture of a bird with a speech bubble that said "Dr. X is awesome" on the comment sheet. Personally, I have tried my best to do honest evaluations. If a professor was weak in some area, I didn't hesitate to give them a low score for that question. I've also given a very scathing evaluation or two. I recall one undergraduate course in particular that was online and was very easy. I'm sure most students gave the professor all 5's because it was so easy, but the professor essentially took no part in the course other than interacting with the same two or three students on the message board while ignoring everyone else. It was a huge waste of time of tuition. All we did was read the book (no lectures or outside readings were provided) and write a 2-3 sentence response to a question about the chapter each week (along with responding to another student's response). The exams were a joke and were untimed. You could literally have never read the book and just googled what you needed to know to answer the question each week and found answers to the exam questions. I was ruthless in my evaluation.

This isn't entirely true. If you are willing to forgo most of your social life and make the most of free time between classes and on lunch breaks, you can work full-time hours and take 18ish credits each semester. I worked at Pizza Hut 6 days a week (often this amounted to over 40 hours) and I took between 17 and 20 credits every semester while getting my B.S. in biology. My GPA was around 3.89 for those 3 years. I also was able to do a paid internship over the summer in addition to my hours at Pizza Hut. So it is possible to maintain a job and school stuff... it just sucks really bad and your friends will wonder what happened to you. I must concur with your thoughts on scholarships - they suck! I'm very grateful for the scholarships and grants I received, but I basically had to wait until I was 24 to be able to pay for school without private loans (parents made too much money to qualify for state and federal grants, even though they had a mortgage, car payments, etc and couldn't afford to give me any money towards college). It's pretty crappy that I had 96% gpa in high school and was in the top 15% of my class but couldn't get a good scholarship anywhere. Oh well.

Don't get discouraged! Last cycle, there were ads out on OSNA, TAMU, and Ecolog through March. Sometimes funding becomes available last minute.

When you have two groups, a t-test is appropriate. This should be listed as "independent samples t-test" in SPSS. However, since you have so many variables, it would be better to use a multivariate version of the t-test rather than doing 10 univariate tests. Hotelling's T2 is essentially the multivariate version of the Student's t-test. However, I do not know how to do this in SPSS and I believe it requires using the syntax editor. I'm sure there is a tutorial available on the internet. It is also very easy to do in R.

Thankfully, I haven't encountered a Nigel yet. However, I did have a fellow student in my masters program who liked to monopolize social time and was constantly asking me for help with everything. She was pretty quiet in class, but could be pretty annoying outside of class. I really enjoyed the get-togethers we had in our department, but it was so hard to get a word in and this particular student seemed to always pick where we ate out. Even if I was just talking to her one on one about something, she would constantly cut me off to talk about herself. The worst part was her constant need to ask me questions about things we went over in class... I wish she would have just asked the professor for clarification on things instead of bombarding me when I was trying to do things like study or work on my thesis. After two years of this, I once asked her if she could do a quick favor for me and put some things in the dishwasher so I didn't have to drive an hour to do it, and she told me she was too busy (even though she was literally across the hall from the lab and it takes five minutes to switch out some dishes).

I had a very specific attack plan for this last week of school, and it's quickly going downhill. The very last thing due for any classes is an annotated bibliography due Friday morning. I have a partner for it, and even though it was due more than a week away, my partner started freaking out two days ago and demanded that I finish my half before this weekend. So a good chunk of the time that I had allotted for a project due Monday got devoted to something due Friday. Still, that wasn't so bad. Then today I was offered a TA position for next term... score! My tuition scholarship is great, but I really need a stipend. So naturally I accepted. Only problem is that there is an orientation next week and it's going to be either Monday or Friday depending on everyone's availability... Friday would be amazing, but Monday would really throw everything off. To top everything off, the TA for one of my classes sent me a scan of a paper draft with the professor's comments (which was supposed to be handed back last week). She was so kind to let me know in the e-mail that the comments were basically unreadable but if I zoom in really far I might be able to make them out and the professor is giving the class an extra day to put together our final drafts. I gave myself a headache trying to read the comments.