shadowclaw

I feel like I am in a weird place age-wise. I'm a bit older than the traditional grad student. It took me 10 years to get a B.S. and then I got my M.S. two years later. I'm 30 now and in the first year of my PhD program. Thankfully, there actually are a lot of people here in my age bracket since there seems to be a trend in the wildlife and ecology types of programs at this school for students to get their M.S. first, plus a lot of people took time off between undergrad and grad school. So I don't feel old in comparison to my fellow grad students. However, I feel like this may have been a terrible time to start a PhD. I feel like if I had taken a normal amount of time to get my BS and started a PhD program when I was 24, right now I would be in a career and getting myself financially stable and starting a family. Not that I don't love our furry family, but I do want to have kids at some point. On the flip side of that, if I skipped grad school for a while, I could have started working after undergrad, started the family, and then went back for my M.S. and PhD later like many of you are. Instead, I'm going to be 34 when I get my PhD, assuming nothing goes awry. There's going to be a small window open for having kids after that, and I worry. I got married about a year and a half ago, and shortly after the wedding, I told my dad that I was applying to PhD programs. He told me my eggs were getting old. That really bothered me, and it's been bothering me more and more lately. I've thought about the possibility of having a kid towards the end of my PhD program, but I don't know how feasible that would be with me in grad school and my husband working full time. If I wasn't 3000 miles away from my parents and siblings, they would help me out. My sister also took a long time to get her B.S. After she got divorced when her daughter was very young, she decided to go to school, and my parents and I played a huge role in helping to raise my niece while my sister got her nursing degree. Considering that my parents are retiring soon and my sister doesn't work anymore, they are in the perfect position to help me. But they're too far away. So yeah, I feel like starting a PhD at 30 is awkward, but here I am.

I had this very problem on the exam... on one question I didn't use a specific word even though I was describing it correctly, and I lost half the points. Most of the points were lost because one section of the test was set up with a certain scenario with several stakeholders (it was an environmental policy class). The question was to apply the law to these stakeholders to meet a certain goal, and each aspect of the law could only be used on one stakeholder. So basically if the professor thought the part of the law you applied to one stakeholder would have been better suited to another, you lost most of the points for that part of the question. It was very frustrating getting that exam back, but the whole class did pretty poorly . I don't think the inflation is the same across all fields. Based on things I've read here on the cafe, the humanities tend to be the most inflated - essentially if you don't get an A, you're a failure. I've read a few people comment that some funding in certain humanities fields require a 4.0 to continue funding. That's pretty insane if you ask me. STEM fields don't seem to have that same level of inflation, but it's probably field and school dependent. There isn't an expectation of a 4.0, but they do of course expect you to maintain at least a 3.0 (some places higher than that), although consistently getting B's in everything probably isn't a good thing. I also find it interesting that some professors choose to alter their grading scales to ensure enough students get A's, while others don't really care.

If it makes you feel better, back in my masters program, my advisor booked my flight and rental car for my research trip abroad, then told me Monday evening (when I was leaving on Tuesday morning at crack) that he actually only reserved the rental car and didn't pay for it with the travel credit card. I already had to front the money for the field station, gas, and food and didn't have $1000 for a rental car. Actually, I didn't have money for that stuff either, but my bank gave me a loan for it. So my dad had to go to the bank and deposit money into my account (thank God he had it) Tuesday afternoon and then my husband paid off my credit card with it so I could use it to pay for the car since they only accepted credit cards. It was so stupid. It would have been so much easier if graduate students were allowed to use the travel credit card. Even without the rental car, the money I had to front was close to $1000. I don't know why the business office thought that was reasonable... apparently if I had to pay for the flight I would have qualified for financial hardship or something like that and they would have provided funds, but seriously... who has $1000 just laying around? It also didn't help that my advisor did all of the paperwork at the last possible moment (in fact, my travel paperwork wasn't even signed by him until after I left... I have no idea how I managed to get fully reimbursed with all the slip ups!).

Finally making some publication headway! I've been having several issues with getting part of my masters thesis published... I keep getting shot down by editors. I've finally gotten over that hurdle and I can sit back and wait for reviewer comments. However, what's more exciting right now is that a manuscript from my senior project in undergrad just came back from review and I only need to make some small revisions. I had initially pursued publishing it after graduation, but it ended up falling through the cracks when I started my masters program and I didn't really have much time to devote to it until this summer. So excited!

Something else annoying - I have two last names. I didn't want to change my name when I got married, but my husband kind of took that as a big F-you, so I compromised and took both. I didn't hyphenate it either, because I don't care for them in names. I understand that people will be confused and make mistakes at first and use only one name or try to hyphenate it. However, there's a small percentage of people who don't seem to care when I correct them and keep addressing me by the wrong name. My landlord is one example - she only uses my second last name. The graduate coordinator of my masters program really botched my name up... he hyphenated and spelled it wrong on many occasions (but I can forgive him - Polish names are spelled weird).

Another bonus - if you're a Dr. and your partner isn't, your name gets to go first on invitations, greeting cards, etc. So it would be Dr. and Mr. Doe. For some reason I keep reminding my parents of that. Something that always bugged me - why do people address things to Mr. and Mrs. John Smith instead of just Mr. and Mrs. Smith? I don't get the point, unless it's just another archaic way to show that men are more important. I also want to know why some people get cranky when you don't hand write addresses on envelopes. Seriously, the post office would have a much easier time reading it if I print a label. I have terrible handwriting and printing.

Ugh, I got some midterm grades this past week. These two classes took forever to grade the midterms, one of which is my stats class (which I've been getting my grades for painfully slow. The TA takes forever to grade assignments, which is crap because they build off of each other). These two midterms are worth hardly anything for our grades, but I feel so awful about them. I got the lowest grade in the class on the stats midterm, and it was a pretty shitty grade, too. I don't know how it happened. I get perfect or almost perfect grades on the assignments. Even with the crappy grade, I'm still going to get an A, but I'm so mad about it. My other midterm was also crap. My only consolation is that my grade was pretty close to the class average and it's also worth very little. The test was so subjective and the TA told us not to feel too bad about our grades because the professor's tests are normal really difficult. I hate exams like that. Why make a test so hard that your students struggle to get a B?

Time for a financial vent... My husband has been having the worst time ever getting a job. I've vented before about his laziness in this area, but now that he's stepped it up, it just isn't working out. He was offered two jobs back in October, one with higher pay but started in a couple weeks instead of immediately. He ended up accepting the offer for the higher paying one, but when it came time for him to start, the job told him he failed his background check. He got an interview someplace else, and they said they'd call him to discuss the details after running his background check. A week later, they told him no. He eventually went to a temp agency and got hired, worked for a week, and today they called him and told him not to bother going in to work because his background check didn't pan out. I don't understand what the problem is. He has a charge for possession of marijuana paraphernalia back in our home state from a few years ago. Back home, pretty much no warehouse or production job does a background check, and if they do, they only care about felonies. In this state, it seems that every job besides minimum wage fast food jobs do background checks, and they won't hire you if you have a drug misdemeanor. Even though marijuana is legal here and the state is planning to expunge marijuana charges from people's records! The worst part about it is why he has the drug charge. Yeah, he did smoke back then, but the pipe they found wasn't even his and he didn't know it was in his trunk, which is why he told the police officer that he was welcome to look in his trunk when he got pulled over. We literally have $12 in our bank account right now, although there is some money on the way. We've been selling things we don't need on eBay to feed us and pay some bills, because the savings are gone and we have no jobs. I took a shitty funding deal at this school hoping that 1) I could secure a TA position for next year or my advisor's grant applications would pan out, and 2) we could rely on my husband's income and our savings to get us through until next year. Getting funding for next year looks like it won't be a problem, but right now we are broke. We didn't plan on there being so many roadblocks to getting a job. This school was my only acceptance, and the only funding I got was a tuition scholarship. I was on the waitlist for a TA position, and I hadn't planned on coming if I didn't get one. But the program director kept telling me that TA positions weren't finalized yet, and it was getting to the point where if I didn't find an apartment and get things in order, I wouldn't be able to come. I should have said the hell with it, got a job, and applied to places again this application cycle. Instead I decided to take a risk, and it didn't work out. While I love my program, coursework, and advisor, being so broke is really weighing down on me. I guess I'll just have to go get a job myself, even though I know it's not going to be good for me academically.

Well, it's too late in the quarter for it to really matter. I think we only have one more assignment (maybe 2) and then our final project. We also took our midterm two weeks ago, and an assignment from the week before it still isn't graded but the midterm is.

Thanks! We've sent it to another journal and haven't heard anything from the editor yet, so hopefully that's a good sign! I'm taking a very dry multivariate statistics course right now. What we go over in lecture is almost entirely theory I guess you'd say, and a few examples of how we might use various tests. Theory is probably the wrong word, but essentially the professor talks about the nuts and bolts of how the tests work, and spend almost no time showing us how to set up these tests in R. She posts some R notes online to help us with our assignments, but it takes hours and hours for everyone to do these assignments because we have to Google how to do a lot of things in R. I guess I should have believed her when she told us we would be doing a lot of Web searching. To make things more annoying, the TA takes forever to grade anything. Which is a pain, because assignments tend to build off of each other, so if you screw it up on one assignment, you'll probably screw it up on the next because we get no feedback in time. Luckily I've been doing very well on assignments, but all the same, I'd like feedback sooner!

Thanks for your wisdom! I'm feeling a bit better about the whole situation after exchanging some e-mails with my committee. As co-authors, my committee has been involved with the rejections and have offered some suggestions along the way. One has especially been involved with editing the paper and tweaking things for each journal. They have also been pretty surprised the process, and this latest rejection really got under their skin, too. My thesis advisor even went as far as to call the editor a snob in our conversation! It has also been suggested that being a female lead author may be playing a role, at least for the latest rejection. Maybe they know something about this editor that I don't. I have included a cover letter with each submission with a brief synopsis of the paper and what points I really want to hit home. Citing some relevant papers from the journal might be a good strategy, as would generally stating how the paper fits with the journal's aims. I could try resubmitting to the first two journals, but I feel like the editors might already have their minds made up. I still have a few more journals that I'd like to see the paper in, so I think I'll try applying a new strategy with a new journal. I can definitely appreciate that the editors are volunteers (along with the reviewers), so I definitely don't want to knock them in general. I don't even feel much resentment towards the first two editors - they had some good suggestions for other journals and the tone of their rejection letters were polite and encouraging. The third editor outright told me my study was terrible and it might get published in a state journal if I was lucky, then proceeded to list his perceived issues... none of which were actually a problem. In fact, I was following some pretty standard methods. I don't think I'll ever be submitting to that journal again, unless maybe it gets a new editor

I didn't ask for an explanation, but I assume it's because conservation journals are trying to make themselves more "international" and inclusive of the global scientific community, and so want more papers from developing and other underrepresented countries. I've also noticed that for journals with page charges, a lot of them are offering discounts and waivers specifically to researchers from developing countries, which is good and all since they might not have access to same level of funding as developed countries. In the end, though, rejecting papers from some countries because you've met your quota isn't a good practice.

So I'm trying to publish my masters thesis. The methods I used are essentially the same as several ornithology studies that I've read and I've explored a novel bird-plant interaction. My committee was super excited about my results (as was I), and one member in particular has been really helpful with editing the paper for publication and making it as "sexy" as possible. Our top journal choices have all published studies similar to mine (but with different plants), and my committee really thought the paper belonged in any of them and have either published in those journals or reviewed for them. However, I keep hitting a brick wall with the editors. The first editor rejected it without review because he thought the study was too regional, which was frustrating because they've published studies much more regional than mine. The second editor of a general conservation journal rejected saying that it was more appropriate for a more specialized journal and suggested the journal I was first rejected from. Earlier this week, I sent it to an ornithology journal and got a swift rejection on grounds that my study design had problems. I've been getting more and more bummed out with each rejection. One of my committee members suggested that the first two journals rejected it simply because it's a US study and conservation journals are trying to be more international, which is crappy if it's true, but I can mentally deal with that. Those two editors also both commented that it was a sound manuscript and should quickly get published elsewhere without much revision, which was somewhat encouraging. The last rejection really dealt a blow, though, and really made me doubt if the paper was ever going to get published and made me feel like a crappy scientist and like I somehow screwed up my entire masters thesis. I've been mulling it over all day, and I'm starting to feel a bit better about myself. For one thing, the first two editors are experts in my area of specialization, so I should probably weigh their comments a bit more than the third editor who is not. Second, some of the comments the third editor made about why he had issues with study design suggest that he didn't read the methods too carefully. I still feel crappy though, because I haven't even been able to get the paper to the review stage yet. Not sure if I'm looking for advice or what, but I just feel super frustrated with editors right now.

I got another package for the previous tenant about 2 weeks ago, but thankfully it was sent USPS, so it was easy to write "refused" on it and drop it in the parcel bin at the post office I've noticed that when I get catalogs addressed to the previous tenant recently, either someone at the post office or the mailman scratches out the person's name and circles the line that says "or current resident." Not that I returned any catalogs before... I just through them in the recycling bin. I've only been sending back important stuff, like payroll stuff, phone bills, and DMV paperwork. An interesting tip for anyone who gets a UPS package for someone else... it seems that if you aren't there to refuse it when it's originally dropped off, you can't just give it to the UPS guy next time you see him. I tried giving it to one when he delivered something else, but he wouldn't take it because he didn't want to be responsible for it. He told me that he thought I should call UPS so they could send someone specifically for it, but he wasn't really sure. So I gave it to the leasing office to deal with.

The PNW is beautiful! I haven't had as much time as I'd like to go out hiking and exploring, but when I do, there are always a ton of people out and about (and a lot of people wearing outerwear with their school's name on it). If you're outgoing, you could strike up a conversation with a stranger on the trail, at a waterfall, etc., especially if they are wearing your school's name (great ice breaker) or doing something you're really into (maybe you like nature photography and you could strike up a conversation about where some great spots are). I also recommend looking for Facebook groups. If you like rocks, there are a few rockhounding groups devoted to the PNW and its states. The people in the groups seem to like going out on group outings to different places. I imagine there are groups for lots of hobbies in the region. And remember... nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain. Sorry. I had to. It's November, it's rainy, it's getting cold, and that song is awesome. Plus it's true - this will pass and it will get better!

I think you should give it some more time before you do anything. I think a lot of people have some regrets when they choose one school over another, plus living in a new place and being in a new program can take time to get used to. Plus making friends isn't always easy as adults, and two months isn't a very long time! I can also relate to scant graduate offerings. My masters program was a general biology program, so course offerings could be all over the board, from neuroscience to ecology, and there were typically about 5 courses offered each semester. Some semesters I got lucky and all the courses were awesome, during others I was glad I only had to take 6 credits, because the course offerings were terrible. Your PhD program sounds a lot like mine! I'm in an interdisciplinary program that isn't really its own department... it's more like professors from a variety of departments advise students and we take courses in a bunch of other departments. It doesn't really have a home and there's no space set aside for us, unlike the majority of programs that have whole buildings devoted to them. At least I have a mailbox, but it's in a weird place. It's also a bit scattered at times... our director quit in October and no one will step up to be the interim director while the dean searches for a replacement, and our requirements are so loose. We have track sheets with appropriate coursework to take to meet graduation requirements, but it's not considered an exhaustive list and basically any courses within the partner departments will work. There's a lot of uncertainty, but also a lot of freedom and flexibility. I guess you need to have a certain personality to really be comfortable with it. So I don't have a lot of advice. You might just be experiencing the graduate school version of buyer's remorse and you'll be ok in a little while. I recommend trying to find friends outside of your program if you can. You can't force you peers to be friends, but there are lots of people on campus who would probably love to get to know you. Join an intramural team, go to campus events, check out the local music scene... just get out there where there are people! I'm in a similar boat as you... I haven't made friends in my program yet because we haven't had any core courses so far this year and since we're interdisciplinary, everyone is taking classes all over the place and working with advisors in different departments. We do have an email list set up though! Maybe I'll make friends with them, maybe not. But there are lots of other people in my classes that I could befriend, plus a ton of other people I might meet just doing different things.

Feeling grumpy about getting a paper published. It's from my masters work. One of my committee members suggested that we try Peerage of Science, which is supposed to streamline the review process and help eliminate crappy, unhelpful reviews. It was a complete failure, so after wasting about a month and half with that, we switched to the traditional route. However, our top target journals have rejected the paper without review on account that the subject matter doesn't have international appeal/fieldwork was done in too regional of an area. Which would be fine, but they have all been publishing similar types of papers (with different species) with work done in small geographic areas, and honestly my fieldwork spanned a larger area than several studies I've seen published by these journals. Another of my committee members said he thinks that many of the conservation journals are shying away from U.S. papers and that might be the real problem. Grrr.

I doubt that, especially considering that people from a wide variety of fields on here have mentioned how good it looks on a grad school applications. You also can't honestly say that it wouldn't matter... publications are basically the currency of academia. Unless you're planning to do a course-based masters, research is your goal and a publication means your previous research was relevant, novel, and well executed. That's the kind of thing adcomms look for.

As an undergrad, I definitely heard some inappropriate comments from both students and professors, but none were particularly sexist. Definitely sexual, though. Probably the most inappropriate thing I heard was in general chemistry when a guy walked in, took his seat, and declared that after class he was going to the bar to find some girls with daddy issues. The professor asked if he thought before he spoke, to which he replied with a gleeful nope. No wait, I do recall a somewhat sexist comment from undergrad! I overheard a discussion between a professor and a student about whether or not women should serve as infantry in the military, and it was the professor's opinion that women weren't strong enough to carry wounded soldiers out of harm's way so they shouldn't serve in that capacity. I can't think of any instances of sexist comments in grad school at all. One of my professors did tell me a story about when she applied to grad school (which was like seven years ago). She got in contact with a PI who studied elephants, and he straight up told her that women were too small and weak to work with such dangerous animals. I'm probably just lucky that I haven't encountered much sexism since high school (but boy was it blatant there).

Well, I'm not an expert on admissions committees, but I'm pretty sure they won't be very impressed with a letter from your therapist, and I think it would probably do more harm than good. Also, it's not really that helpful if your masters advisor is better known or that you worked with him more recently if his letter isn't strong. However, you really need a letter from your advisor or it will probably raise some red flags with the adcomm. So it's very important that you find a third recommendation that is also strong AND from a professor. Preferably someone who has done research with you.

Gee, this professor kind of sounds like a jerk. From professors I've talked to (plus what I've read here on the forum), all he needs to do is write one form letter and change a few details for each time he submits (plus click a few things on the online form for each school). However, if he doesn't want to spend the extra 10 minutes it takes to modify his letter, upload it, and make a few selections on a form for each of the other schools, then you really are stuck finding a different person for half of your schools. Is this professor your thesis advisor (or are you not doing a thesis)? Your thesis advisor is the person you want most to write your letters, but if you aren't doing one, then I guess this professor is the best choice because you've worked in his lab. So, in that case, I recommend using him for your top 3 choices and finding someone else for the rest. I know you said you have to real backup, but surely you've taken courses with other professors. Did you work on any class research projects that you did really well on? Is there a professor that was really impressed with your work in his/her class? That might be difficult to determine yourself, but if you ask someone in the know (like maybe the program head or even this professor who won't write enough letters) if they have a suggestion for a potential letter writer, they might tell you that somebody had good things to say about you and to seek them out.

I don't actually know how many students are actually in my cohort! We didn't have a program orientation (just attended the campus-wide graduate orientation), and we won't have our core courses until the winter and spring terms. Outside of our core environmental science courses, our program is pretty much open to any coursework in biology, botany, fisheries, wildlife, forestry, zoology, etc. so there isn't a high likelihood of bumping into other members of my program, let alone other newly admitted students. So maybe starting next term, I'll get to hang out with my cohort when I figure out who they are. Looking back to my masters, I met up with the majority of the program's students about once per month, and hung out with a few select people more often... generally ecology people (our program was in general biology, so we had a variety of disciplines represented). It would be nice to do that here, since I moved across the country and don't have any friends here!

I would think that this is field specific, although I don't think I did an actual literature review until I was a junior in my biology program, and that was kind of luck. We had to do literature review papers for two courses - a research methods-type course and in senior seminar. Some students chose to do both of these courses their senior year. Of course, we learned the concept of a literature review much earlier in lower-level courses, but writing up a few paragraphs of review in a lab report is a lot different than writing a 10 page in-depth literature review. Being a former Computer Science, Computer Forensics, Information Technology, English, and Anthropology major, I can report that none of those fields required me to do a literature review as a freshman. I spent a bit more time in the technology majors, and none of them would have required a literature review at any point unless perhaps it was part of the senior seminar courses (but I didn't get that far, so I can't say for sure, but probably not since they weren't research-based programs). In other news, it's midterm! Quarters are so weird coming from a semester system. This past week was week 5 and it's half over! I have 3 midterm exams, which is a bit of an adjustment for me, because I haven't had many midterm exams since my first year in my undergrad program. Most professors I had (both in undergrad and in my masters program) just did several exams at regular intervals instead of doing a midterm and final only. Two of my three exams are online and open book... I've completed one and it was extremely easy. I'll be doing the other tonight I think, unless I want to save it for tomorrow or Tuesday evening. Tomorrow afternoon I have an in-class statistics midterm.

Hmmm, I only count five schools and four transfers. I think you forgot a school in there I was in a somewhat similar situation as you are now. I started off at a super prestigious school near home (that cost a fortune even with my scholarship) majoring in computer science, but after two and a half semesters, I switched my major to English with the hopes of eventually having a writing career. During the two years I was there I had some real trouble dealing with social anxiety and depression, plus I honestly wasn't mentally in the right place for college. I eventually just stopped going to class and I ended up with an academic dismissal (although this was later removed from my record and by the time I applied to grad school it just looked like I transferred). I then went to a small college in the woods to study information technology since I still liked the idea of working with computers. I did insanely well (4.0 both semesters), but decided I wanted to revisit computer science in a program with more flexibility than my original one. Since this school didn't have it, I transferred to a state school away from home where I dormed. Things went well for one semester, then I got a new roommate who drove me nuts as well as new neighbors who were so noisy. I continued to have social anxiety issues and swapped majors a few times, and got my own room for my second year in hopes that it might help... but it didn't. I got so depressed sitting alone in my room all the time. So I transferred back home to my second school, but ended up getting suspended due to my crappy academic performance. So I enrolled in an online program for a semester, which was a terrible idea because I ended up not doing any of the work. I again returned to the state school, this time commuting two days per week. I still did really crappy and I changed my major again... this time to anthropology. I ended up withdrawing and heading back to school number two. At this point, I had been in college for seven years, changed my major 13 times (although several changes were back to previous majors), had attended four different schools, and was on the sixth transfer. My GPA was also ruined. At school one, my GPA was a 1.83, and school two it was a 2.79 I think, school three was a below a 2.5 but I don't recall exactly what it was, and school four was a 0.00. So I boldly went into a brand new major at school two (biology) and despite the 2.79 GPA, I didn't have very many credits. I did phenomenal while I was there... I didn't have a semester below 3.75 and almost all of my grades were A's (with just a handful of B+'s and A-'s). I raised my GPA up to 3.59 and graduated with honors, plus won several departmental awards. I wish I had joined a club while I was there, because a few professors wanted to nominate me for graduate of the year, but I was ineligible due to not being in any clubs. The head of the department also wanted to get me into the honors program, but I was ineligible for that, too, because I needed a GPA of 3.5 and I didn't get there until my last year. He actually tried to convince the registrar to erase my grades from that one crappy semester. I feel warm and fuzzy when I think about that. Anyway, aside from awesome grades, I did some research and and got some pretty amazing letters of recommendation, too. While I ultimately became successful, it has been an uphill battle. I couldn't get into a PhD program straight from undergrad, but I did get into all of the masters programs that I applied to. However, I didn't get offered much funding. While I was funded my second year (plus my research was fully funded), I had to pay for that first year. Interestingly, the school I did my masters at was the third school I went to as an undergrad. Getting into a PhD program wasn't easy, either, but that has a lot to do with ecology and wildlife programs being very competitive due to limited funding. However, I did get into my top-ish choice (still not sure if I would have chosen University of Tennessee if I had received an offer). So yes, you can go to grad school. You should be warned that when you show some potential PI's your transcripts, many of them are going to laugh and if you're lucky they'll gently tell you to apply elsewhere. Some of them will be jerks and will just stop responding to you. Others will be supportive and give you tips on how to improve your profile. Amazing letters of recommendation are really important. My graduate coordinator in my masters program told me that the adcomm really wasn't sure they wanted to let me in, but because my letter writers spoke so highly of me, they decided to take a chance. So you really need to build good relationships with professors, and it's especially helpful if you do some research with them. I also recommend that as you build these relationships, find out if your professors have connections in any programs that you're interested in. If they can introduce you and speak well on your behalf to a PI that they're friends with, that will mean a lot. My final piece of advice: if you can score a publication as an undergrad, that would be amazing and would be a game changer in the application process.