ak48

That he even had the gall to ask for this is amazing. Sounds like a terrible person, not to mention landlord. Good advice though on subletting. Check the lease! Make sure the landlord is okay with it, and have clearly defined plans written down with signatures to implement when rents aren't being paid.

I agree with lewin00

If it's unfunded all the way I'd recommend against it. PhD's roughly 5 years, and especially coming off a high paying job you'll feel miserable. But like mentioned above, it's possible to get funding later. have you considered applying again next year with a stronger application to get into better schools/funding situations? If you have a job you can stick with this year it's not a bad option

Did not know that surveys/interviews required IRB approval as well. You learn something each day.

Honestly I think that this is a very poor reason to decide on a graduate school application. You should make the decision based on program fit, potential advisors and location. The minutia of application requirements, even if it does cost you an extra few dollars, should be irrelevant in my opinion. FWIW, I had a few "transfer" credits from summer programs, and because they showed up in my graduating institution transcript (as pass/fail), nobody wanted a separate transcript for the 1-2 classes.

I think I took the GRE in september, after about 2 weeks of book studying (my kaplan book came with computer practice tests). I've historically been a good standardized test taker, so it was fine for me. I also applied to places where I figured GRE wasn't that important anyway.

Gone into finance and made a trillion dollars by age 30.

check the results page on grad cafe: http://www.thegradcafe.com/survey from a quick search there's nothing about harvard seas phd

Haha that's pretty funny.

My gut instinct is to say that they'd appreciate this sort of information when they analyze their own admissions process. "Who are we accepting, and where are they going to? How can we retain better candidates?" sorta deal.

I feel that paying 80+ dollars entitles me to at least an email saying my acceptance status has been made and that I should check the website. Unless they want us to keep paranoid-checking the status online.

Haha for realz.

If it were me, I would wait until I have gotten all my responses, and gone to the visit day of each school where I may have considered going.

Lulz! It's also about 2% as bad as you think it is.

Yeah, I just visited a different school with a much lower EE ranking (although good reputation overall) and they paid for both lodging nights, as well as a reimbursment limit WAY more than I needed for flights and ground transportation. They even paid for a pricy entertainment event in the evening. I guess "lower rankings" need to throw more money at you. I grew up in suburbia and really don't like clubbing/shopping, so I doubt I'll miss TOO much about big city life. Plus, right now I'm in the middle of nowhere so really ANYTHING will be a social upgrade. My one concern is that by the end of the PhD program I'll be in my late 20's, so finding a significant-other/eventually-spouse will admitedly be a non-trivial concern. But I think factoring that into a school decision is probably silly.

Advisor's connections are very important, indeed

Can't say that your GPA is all too encouraging, but I don't know how rigorous your kinds of programs/schools would be. I suppose a low GPA can be overcome with an impressive resume/track record of work/research. Do you have these? I think the best thing to do would be to email potential profs at schools you'd apply to and ask them what your chances are, if it's even worth applying. I'd wait a few weeks because they are still probably involved in admissions recently.

Ironic that the best "endowment-to-student" ratio school can't fund flights/lodging for its admitted students on its visit day, when it should be trying the hardest to convince students to attend!

According to some posters on the results page (take it for what it's worth), UCB doesn't do tier system. Instead they send out all acceptances at once. I haven't checked, but you could run through previous years to see whether that's true or not.

Grinding through Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, even though I think it's terribly overrated. Got Corrections and Freedom by Jonathen Franzien on the list next. In between I'll read some Bradbury and Salinger short stories.

A sounds like a runaway winner to me.

Fuzzy, since you're a grizzled grad student and I am pre-neophyte, you are probably correct about this. However, i've always known it as the opposite: School Prestigious-ness matters a lot more for future academia positions than for industry.

I'm a big fan of visiting admission schools, especially since they are funding all of it. Who knows? Maybe you'll meet an adviser who does exciting work. At worst, you come away with a little more knowledge and perspective about how a certain part of the US looks like and how certain universities operate.

If you don't like science, finance is where burnt-out science/math people go to make giant heaps of money.

Lots of professors I've talked to (Electrical Engineering or Material Science) do research now that is minimally related to their PhD project. One actually told me that his field completely collapsed from roughly 200 experts in the 90's to 2. That professor is still doing fine in a different field.