ss2player

That's MORE than justified, what a terrible, spiteful show.
 
For me:
 
Football
Running
Yoga (at least if they mention chakras)
Dubstep
Salted caramel flavor

"An F, because it's a draft, not a final paper."
 
I agree with Takeru: show them a grading rubric and an example of a well done paper. That plus your comments is more than sufficient and frankly is even doing some of the work for them. (i.e. I'm sure the course material has examples already)

In what may be a surprise to nobody, I'm going to disagree with those preaching about GPA. About myself: I graduated from a liberal arts school with a 3.5 GPA and a 3.4 BCMP GPA. Admittedly, I had 2.5 years of full-time research experience by the time I applied. Counterpoint: my undergraduate research experience consisted of a nine month thesis project. My GRE was a 163/163 for those curious about that.
Now, having had the opportunity to work (and have candid conversations) with a faculty member on the Harvard BBS admissions committee, I'll say my piece. GPA and GRE matter in the screening process. But they don't have to be amazing. The general rule that I've heard for screening applicants is a GPA above 3.5 or 160+/160+ on the GRE. One is forgivable, but missing both won't do. Fortunately, one of these can be rectified somewhat easier than the other (GRE scores are easy to move, GPA not so much). Should people with lower GPAs apply more broadly? Yes. But let's stop saying that GPA is a be all, end all here. It's not. Maybe for some of the less lab oriented sciences (stats, biostats, bioinformatics), GPA is much more important. But for lab-based sciences, programs that are ultimately bench focused, there's a reason that you see a reasonable number of people getting into top tier programs with 3.5 GPAs while a lot of people with 3.8 GPAs or whatever are getting rejected pre-interview. That being said, there are likely some programs that value GPA more than others. The best way, in my opinion, to assess this is to see what the program says about GPA on its website. If the program is showcasing high mean/median GPAs for interviewees/accepted students, then they probably care more about GPA than your average program. If the program, however, is just reporting a range (Stanford Biosciences: 2.88-4.00) or doesn't say much (Harvard DMS: "There is no minimum GPA..."), then they're probably looking at other things a little more closely.
Moving on to other parts of your application, the most consistent piece of advice that I've received is that your letters are by far the most important part of the package. This is the reason why it is critical to have faculty members (if the work was done in an academic setting) or senior supervisors (ideally with a doctoral degree in a non-academic setting) write them. The commentary I've heard is that it's the letters that will make or break getting invited to an interview (hence why it's important to have people that know your work write the letters - what does this mean if your PI doesn't know you that well? Maybe see if a post-doc that does know you well can prepare a draft for your PI to edit/sign). Some of the comments in this thread have been focused on getting people to improve their package. Advising people to find the best letter writers (non-postdoc letter writers) is probably some of the best advice that can be given. It's certainly better than the GPA commentary.
Research experience is probably the other most important factor. There are a fair number of programs that place a premium on having post-bacc research experience - and I think every faculty member knows that working full time in a lab for a year is much different than working full time in the summer/part time during the school year. However, I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of your resume/CV in the process. That is your opportunity to convince the admissions committee that 1) you have significant experience, 2) you can articulate it briefly, and (program dependent) 3) that you have other interests besides science (because guess what - these programs want good scientists, but they also want to foster a great community within the program; half of my interviews spent more time discussing my experience as a college athlete than my research experience). I know that my PI edited my CV 3 or 4 times before I was ready to submit it. Also, it's worth tailoring your CV to certain programs. I applied to programs at JHSPH and UW that were based in schools of public health - as such, I put more emphasis on my experience working abroad on public health related projects in the CVs that I sent to those schools.
Of course, all this being said, if you can't remedy the deficiencies in your application by the time to apply (your GRE isn't 160/160, that third letter hasn't really fallen into place), then it may be time to reevaluate your chances at some of the higher ranked programs. And certainly, in the meantime, you should look at other programs that may not be as highly ranked (though I'm curious as to when BU, Sinai, and UMiami became top tier - they're good, but let's not get carried away). But absolutely don't discount higher ranked programs because of GPA. This is probably the most holistic admissions process you'll ever encounter. That is something to be taken advantage of.

Don't meet with them, nothing productive will happen. You explained your grading, and WORD IS BOND; they need to suck it up and learn to not be such slackers in the future.

Besides agreeing that you sound incredibly snobby and pretentious with this comment (there is no saving yourself now), I think you are forgetting, or maybe just naive to the fact that admissions committees don't only care about your grades. There is a huge push in many of these programs to stop accepting the top 4.0 ivy league students because this limits the diversity and experience of the incoming class. Now many schools are looking for a significant commitment to research (more than just 2 years) and individuals that have had to overcome adversity to get where to where they are.
I'm not saying those top students aren't going to get in, but you have to realize adcoms are also interested in the personality and drive of those they admit. Often times individuals who have dealt with set backs and difficulties along the way are more likely to persevere in a doctoral program. You would be surprised to know how many people don't realize what they are getting themselves in to and end up mastering out because they can't hack it.
There are so many qualified candidates on this forum that come from "state schools" with average GPA's but who are likely to be amazing research scientist. Grades aren't even half the story.

Interesting discussion!
 
@RollRight, I think it's not that people are willing to "bar the doors." The fact is, higher education is currently in a crisis moment. It is, indeed, partially because of a neoliberal/conservative approach - where certain players want to defund and lower public support for education. The problem is, though, that we're dealing with reality. Graduate schools already only accept the best and brightest; the whole point is bringing in people with the most aptitude to do science at a level high enough to lead to new discoveries and improvement of life. And resources are scarce; they are by default limited. There's just not unlimited money, unlimited time, unlimited mentors and classes and all the other resources that are required to bring someone from college graduate to tenure-track professor.
 
Frankly, we are never going to get to a system where we don't have to worry about limited resources.
 
I am in the limited graduate student camp, and not because I want more resources to myself (I'm planning to leave academia anyway). In fact, it's driven by care and frustration for others: I don't think a system in which the vast majority of PhDs spend years floundering is a good one. It's a waste of the top minds of our era. My thoughts were along the same lines as those who suggested two things: 1) making postdocs more of an expense (and the corollary is adding more career steps in STEM fields, particularly), and 2) reducing the amount of contingent labor and adding more non-tenure-track teaching/lecturer positions.
 
I'm in an NIH-funded social science field, and I think that the NIH postdoctoral stipend minimums are far too low. TakeruK is also right in that they don't mandate benefits; most postdocs cover health insurance, but there's no requirement to cover benefits like parental leave, sick time, retirement savings, etc. Furthermore, in discussions with PIs on other message boards (*cough*Chronicle*cough*), it's clear that a lot of PIs view their postdocs as the workhorses of their lab - one PI expressed disdain at the idea that a postdoc would ask for protected time to work on publishing their dissertation material, saying that a postdoc's job is to generate findings for the lab grant. But they want to have their cake and eat it too, as postdocs are paid as "trainees" and ostensibly have a training plan to follow.
 
I think the solution here is 1) make postdocs more work to get, and more expensive, and 2) add other positions in the traditional science lab that do the work a postdoc would do. Postdoctoral positions should be training, but also a step along the career ladder - treated more like junior faculty. They should require extensive, detailed training plans that funding agencies actually check up on, and I think that the starting salary should be at least $60K with full benefits and they should be longer than 2 years so postdocs don't have to hop around like a transient (maybe 3-5 years, depending on the field. In my field 2-3 years of postdoc'ing is plenty, but I know in other STEM fields more time is expected). The corollary is that you increase lab support otherwise. Hire BA- and MA-level research associates to do lower-level tasks that you don't need a PhD to do, like cleaning data or prepping literature reviews. The upside is that this gives those professionals either a chance to increase their own credentials for graduate school and/or an alternative career path to getting a PhD and striking out as a PI. For those tasks that really do require a PhD, hire a research scientist! A staff scientist who's job it actually is to help you churn out papers and projects, and who you are not expected to spend significant amounts of time training. And pay them well.
 
I think a lot of these articles avoid talking about the adjunct problem because few tenure-track or tenured faculty really want to talk about the exploitation of adjuncts, let alone discuss how they are complicit in and/or benefit from that exploitation. Most of the articles/thought pieces coming from that angle are coming from those with less power in academia (adjuncts themselves, graduate students, people who have exited the field). But yes, I agree that the demand side is also the problem. I think accreditation bodies should put hard limits on the percentage of faculty that can be contingent labor, lest a school lose their accreditation. And I agree that collective bargaining could help the situation. More of those positions do need to be turned into professor of the practice/contracted NTT teaching positions (with contracts being longer term - say 3 years to start out, then 5 years, then longer if both parties wish and quality is reached. Or they can be hired like most employees are - at will, but with the understanding that the job is meant to be long-term). And those positions need to pay a decent wage and have full benefits, too. (And yeah, some of them could be done by folks with an MA, particularly ones who are teaching - say, composition or introductory psychology classes.) A side effect might be that graduate students have to do less teaching when they are in PhD programs, which may mean faster times to degree.
 
But yeah, all of these changes will have the effect of reducing the number of PhDs "needed." Yes, some PhDs will always go into industry. Professors need to stop it with the fantasy that all of their students will go onto R1 positions and anything else is failure. I'm not saying that they should become well-versed in helping their students get non-academic jobs - that's what career services is for - but students shouldn't afraid to tell their PIs that they don't want to be a professor lest their PI stop giving them time and resources. It's completely ridiculous and makes the profession look out of touch with reality.
 
But let's be real - I think a majority of people who go into PhD programs start with the notion that they want to be college professors, and professors are treating these programs like training for those kinds of jobs (with the exception of STEM and business fields where there is some industry draw). I'm not saying that there needs to be 1 tenure-track job waiting for every PhD graduate. It shouldn't be a guarantee. But I think right now professors are admitting more graduate students for their own purposes - heightened prestige, more assistants in the lab, more teachers in the classroom - and those are also symptoms of a university structure that's devaluing the work they do and pushing it off to low-paid contingent workers who are unwittingly putting their own selves out of a job.

This is discipline-specific. In one of my areas, there were the same number of PhDs graduating and TT positions every year for almost two decades until about 5 years ago. I can't find a handy link to the data but I do remember being shown the data in the early years of grad school.
 
I wonder though why the focus is on reducing the number of students in programs, rather than encouraging colleges and universities to hire full-time positions rather than relying on adjuncts? Because part of the reason the academic job market is so poor is because there are fewer TT positions as TT/tenured faculty are replaced with adjuncts, VAPs, and (rarely) full-time lecturers. Instead of just focusing on supply, we should also consider demand.
 
That said, I'm in a social science fields where cohorts are much larger than the numbers ExponentialDecay suggests. My incoming cohort was 16 students, with a mix of master's and PhD students in that. Some left with just a masters and some never finished after hitting the ABD stage so there's definitely some attrition there. Still, there's also the fact that many people (including myself) didn't do a PhD with the expectation of getting an academic position. My mother has a PhD and has literally never taught in a college classroom (didn't even do it while in grad school) so I've always known that there are things you can do with a PhD besides be a college professor. Now did I always take the right steps to make those happen while in graduate school? No. If I could go back in time, I would tell younger me to take more quantitative classes (statistics, research design, etc.), possibly some accounting or business classes, and also courses in student affairs. I may now go back to school to get some of that training (though not as part of a formal degree program!) just to facilitate future job opportunities I want to pursue.

eteshoe, I couldn't agree with you more. You've basically said everything I would have. 
 
I'm also in a STEM field, so while I recognize that the situation in humanities very well may be more dire than in STEM, I don't personally see an issue with how many PhD students are admitted. The majority of the students in my department, including myself, are planning to pursue a career track other than academia (thus the poor TT job market is a non-issue). We are doing very interesting science, learning how to be creative and skilled investigators, and have a variety of options for pursuing scientific careers that would be taken away from us if we were more aggressively weeded out of the admissions pool. 
 
I think the solution would be to more diligently educate graduate school hopefuls about their potential career tracks and success statistics before they make the decision to apply to attend, rather than to actually bar them from pursuing the programs if they are qualified for them. 

Coming from the STEM side of things, I don't believe that academic jobs are the only path that students (or young scholars) should be pursuing. In fact, I've never really considered a TT job, the end goal - mostly due to seeing the struggles that my father had to endure when I was growing up (he was in academia but eventually left for industry). I've even read that due to the academic market landscape, a majority of young PhD holders are seeking alternative paths (for example tech, industry, law, policy, etc.) - making the TT path the new "alternative" career line.
 
The suggestion of letting in less students is interesting to me: how would these programs limit the entrance of students? At this point a lot of the top programs in just about every field have a staggering amount of not just good but excellent applicants that are extremely hard to distinguish from one another. What if the next Einstein, scored a bit too low on his GRE? Or didn't articulate himself well enough in his SOP? Or wasn't able to secure a summer research position? I do not envy the profs sitting on Adcomms.
 
I understand the logic of the proposal, but in order to push the bounds of human knowledge (which is what doctoral programs strive to achieve), programs need a good deal of creative thinkers/researchers. Since past research experience is not absolutely indicative of future success, programs have to play the numbers game and let in a decent amount of applicants in order to keep the program running (help PI's with their projects, TA undergrads, etc) and hope (for lack of better phrasing) that the applicants are able to discover some interesting or paradigm shifting phenomena to keep the program well funded and achieve the goal of the doctoral degree. I feel that with less students, these necessary expansions in human knowledge would come about slower or go undiscovered but hey that's just one opinion.
 
I have to disagree with the argument that a PhD is not job training. What is gained from almost every level of the post secondary educational experience, can serve as job training - if not directly, then through the transferable skills and life experience garnered by going through the process. While it would be nice to just spend a few years immersed in the experience, it would be naive to take on such an endeavor as a PhD just to "adopt a new way of thinking" for the sake of it. PhD students/candidates/holders are all humans and unfortunately time is not an endless commodity we're given - so if we have the opportunity to fine tune our scholastic and academic abilities, those new found skills should be put to use better the human experience to some degree through the career line we eventually choose (which is a very subjective notion, but hey). 
 
Overall, I think that academic jobs are not the be all and end all of the PhD degree. In some fields it may be a lot more difficult, but I believe that PhDs may serve a better role in "alternative" career paths. Therefore I do not believe that PhD programs should let in - the admission process is quite cutthroat as it is.
 
I'd be quite interested in hearing how others feel on this topic.

I always say go for the mentorship over the research, which sounds like Lab 1 in this case. I'd talk to PI #1, get them to spell out the funding situation, it may not be as dire as you are led to believe. Plus, you can always apply for fellowships and help the PI with grants. As for co-mentorship, that can be very messy and I'd avoid it unless the PIs involved are super close and already collaborate. If they don't do that now, it's not likely they'll do it for you; grad students just aren't that important.
 
P.S. - If you hear the words "8th-year student" in a STEM lab, and it's MORE THAN ONE, you run. You run far away.

I always say go for the mentorship over the research, which sounds like Lab 1 in this case. I'd talk to PI #1, get them to spell out the funding situation, it may not be as dire as you are led to believe. Plus, you can always apply for fellowships and help the PI with grants. As for co-mentorship, that can be very messy and I'd avoid it unless the PIs involved are super close and already collaborate. If they don't do that now, it's not likely they'll do it for you; grad students just aren't that important.
 
P.S. - If you hear the words "8th-year student" in a STEM lab, and it's MORE THAN ONE, you run. You run far away.

Don't do it.  You're a robot.  Don't have fun.  Publish or perish, concentrate only on your career, and when you're 35 with full tenure you can start dating.

A quick forum search:
 






 
Your welcome. 

I always say go for the mentorship over the research, which sounds like Lab 1 in this case. I'd talk to PI #1, get them to spell out the funding situation, it may not be as dire as you are led to believe. Plus, you can always apply for fellowships and help the PI with grants. As for co-mentorship, that can be very messy and I'd avoid it unless the PIs involved are super close and already collaborate. If they don't do that now, it's not likely they'll do it for you; grad students just aren't that important.
 
P.S. - If you hear the words "8th-year student" in a STEM lab, and it's MORE THAN ONE, you run. You run far away.

I always say go for the mentorship over the research, which sounds like Lab 1 in this case. I'd talk to PI #1, get them to spell out the funding situation, it may not be as dire as you are led to believe. Plus, you can always apply for fellowships and help the PI with grants. As for co-mentorship, that can be very messy and I'd avoid it unless the PIs involved are super close and already collaborate. If they don't do that now, it's not likely they'll do it for you; grad students just aren't that important.
 
P.S. - If you hear the words "8th-year student" in a STEM lab, and it's MORE THAN ONE, you run. You run far away.

I always say go for the mentorship over the research, which sounds like Lab 1 in this case. I'd talk to PI #1, get them to spell out the funding situation, it may not be as dire as you are led to believe. Plus, you can always apply for fellowships and help the PI with grants. As for co-mentorship, that can be very messy and I'd avoid it unless the PIs involved are super close and already collaborate. If they don't do that now, it's not likely they'll do it for you; grad students just aren't that important.
 
P.S. - If you hear the words "8th-year student" in a STEM lab, and it's MORE THAN ONE, you run. You run far away.

People bitching about Caitlyn Jenner. Trans awareness is good.

Do you really need to tell them at all? Unless you want to work with them in the future, I don't think it's necessary. 

*Footnote: I go to a school with >500 faculty, so if your department is small, I can see this may be different. Thank you email?

Wowza, that's really impressive! Can computational labs really pump out data that fast (i.e. ~6 months) for a poster/talk/full publication?
 
I chose the wrong field! 

Lululemon and other branded yoga clothing/accessories: they're outrageously overpriced and misappropriate India's traditional knowledge 
Commercially available homeopathic remedies: just cut it out, we need solid scientific proof before you start making profits
Cinnamon: I don't understand the appeal, at all 
Friends (the TV series): same as above
Spin class: why would anybody spend money on this?

Third.
 
The assumption that the predominantly African-American parts of any town or city are, by default, the Bad Part Of Town. 
 
 
The seemingly automatic inclination to default to chain restaurants rather than supporting local businesses (unless, of course, I want my coffee and people are dithering and asking for frappucinos). 
 
Assumptions that non-standard English implies lack of intelligence. 

Just for the record, having proof that an idea was yours will do you very little good in the long run. 
 
Journals really don't care who originated the idea, it's the first person to get a publishable manuscript in. 
 
It's why many research groups won't present findings at meetings that are unpublished/not close to publication. I've had friends present unpublished data at a conference, have someone snap pictures of their poster, take the idea and push it through to publication first. 
 
An email record can be nice for, say, convincing your PI that you thought of the idea, but in the broader community it really won't do any good. 
 
Sharing ideas is always a calculated risk... Someone might take your work. Someone might take an idea and develop it. Share ideas with the people you trust, and work with good collaborators. Getting scooped happens. It sucks, but you move on.

"An F, because it's a draft, not a final paper."
 
I agree with Takeru: show them a grading rubric and an example of a well done paper. That plus your comments is more than sufficient and frankly is even doing some of the work for them. (i.e. I'm sure the course material has examples already)

Let's not bash non-STEM fields, please! *Someone* has gotta know about the Bobs! 

People in academia have fucked up priorities. I shouldn't be expected to skip important family events.