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lewin

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Everything posted by lewin

  1. Sorry, it was long enough ago that I don't remember... but in both cases the interview was a weekend where all candidates came at the same time so that suggests everybody was considered together. If it matters, the schools were Northwestern and Dartmouth.
  2. Hard to say without details but the Americans with Disabilities Act requires that public institutions provide reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. My suggestion is to find out your rights under the law so that at least you're equipped when you talk to them again. Accommodating you might not be optional on their part. I'm not saying that you should resort to lawyers immediately, talking reasonably is a better way to start, but it sounds like they're not willing to discuss and have explicitly gone back on their previous statements.
  3. I'm from Canada, applied to some U.S. schools, and was interviewed at two (not this season). One paid for the whole trip, the other offered $350. In my experience I was treated the same as domestic applicants but maybe there were behind-the-scenes discussions (e.g., international student = higher tuition for them to cover?) that I wasn't privy to.
  4. When one googles my name without affiliation, the website for an erotic (but tasteful!) photographer comes up. I hope employers are smart enough to distinguish. But yes, if the POIs aren't searching for you, the grad students are.
  5. Unfortunately wasn't able to make it last summer... going to three other conferences this year and eventually it's just too much travel. (And I'm from the eastern half of Canada.)
  6. Heard of elevator pitches? Be able to answer "What kind of research are you interested in?" in < 20 seconds, for small talk situations. Yes, for academics this question is small talk.
  7. I don't know how much of this was directed my way but the "don't pile on" messages did start after my post so of course that's meaningful Analyzing posters' assumptions, reactions, and, perhaps, misunderstanding of graduate school norms can help them both with the current situation and future situations. Maybe that's being critical, but it could also be more helpful in the long run. Here, when asking about a possibly mistaken grade or inquiring about a grade bump, the OP will have more success (now and later) if he/she doesn't assume: (1) that they know they're doing A(wesome) work; (2) that they deserve an A because they have scholarships, which is irrelevant; (3) that the professor is unprofessional; (4) that the professor is out to get them. Those attitudes--if they are perceived by the professor--can have toxic repercussions for one's reputation and future. #1 and #2 are more likely to come across because professors can sense entitlement from a mile away, and #4 just looks paranoid.
  8. Glad I wasn't the only one who got that impression. 89.90? Probably a coincidence in how everything averaged out. Ended up as a 90? Probably because everything gets rounded up to whole numbers. Says every student ever, but we know that people aren't good at evaluating their own skills. "I can't change grades based on non-academic circumstances," is what I tell the handful of students who tell me this, or variations on it, every time I teach. Have you been feeling a loss of personal control since entering graduate school? That can lead people to see nefarious conspiracies.
  9. A guy in my lab wrote the wrong university name in his first email to our eventual advisor. It was our advisor's running joke/jab at him for three or four years. But he still got in.
  10. Thanks for clarifying, I agree with everybody else that it's invited then. But of course, you your friend could always ask your supervisor to be sure.
  11. I'm having a little trouble following the characters but a professor got invited to a talk and passed it to his/her graduate student? This has happened to me. I wouldn't put it as an invited talk, just a regular talk. Frankly, your friend wasn't the one invited
  12. You're right I should have phrased that better. I'm not saying the OP should treat grad school as a full time job or quit one of the others, but by their own admission they feel like they've "done nothing" this term. The reason for that seems pretty straightforward: Being productive in grad school requires full time+ time and I daresay that's impossible while holding down two jobs. Those jobs could have their own benefits (like your friend's job) but there shouldn't be any illusions that one can do three things without something suffering.
  13. Sometimes, but probably more common if they already know each other. They want to fish for details that might not be in the letter
  14. I had an 8:30am weekly tutorial. Each week there were slightly fewer students and those that arrived did so slightly later until on week 10 the median arrival was 8:45. But I started on time each week and just sucked it up. Now as an adjunct I teach a class that's 2:30-5:30 on Friday afternoons and on any given day only 60% of the class is there because it's clearly the worst timeslot of the week. (I'm honestly blown away on test days when the room is full.) yada yada yada, when you're junior you get crappy time slots. Just part of paying your dues. And a benefit of the bad time slots is that the students who show up are the motivated ones.
  15. Grad school is a full time job. You're not supposed to have outside work so I'm not surprised you're struggling. Of course, I sympathize with needing to eat but think of research as requiring 40+ hours per week, plus your TA, plus your other job. There are only so many hours in a day.
  16. Congrats on the publication! People will disagree on this. I'm personally of the opinion that an application is a snapshot in time and that everybody would love to update their applications a month after the deadline if they could, so updating the official application is a pain in the ass and you shouldn't do it. So I think you should get them the news informally: Tell your letter writers that the paper was accepted so that if they receive a phone call, they can mention it. If you get a phone call from a POI, mention it. If you go for an interview, mention it. This is really subjective and I hope others will weigh in. I think you should also ask your advisor.
  17. There are definitely higher and lower impact conferences within subdisciplines and the criteria are (1) do important people attend? and (2) is it hard to get in? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that by the time you graduate you should have two pages of poster presentations, so the little ones don't really matter for your CV because they fail both the above criteria, though of course they can be good experience while you're learning. I don't bother listing any presentations that were on my home campus anymore. Any way you can submit as a talk? Talks are more prestigious than posters because (1) more people will see you and (2) everyone knows the rejection rate is higher. Exclusivity = prestige is a strong heuristic. Your supervisor could say whether it's strong enough. I know you didn't ask about social but that's all I know, so I'll mention those in case there are lurkers from social. The highest impact conferences are often but not necessarily the larger international conferences. It's not just how many people might see you, but who those people are. You want to go where the important people are. Here are some general impressions... The #1: Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Talks only, no posters. Prestigious because it's small (membership by nomination), all the top people attend, and attendance requires a member sponsor. High rejection rate. You won't attend this as an undergrad and probably not as a graduate student but included for completeness. The standard conference is Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). Talks are prestigious because symposia have a rejection rate of 70% and large audiences attend. Posters are good too because lots of people are there, but the acceptance rate is 90%+ so getting in is kind of expected. SPSP also has lots of preconferences that are great to submit to because there you'l be exposed to people in your specific research area. They're also smaller so you get more attention, and many have possibilities for short grad student talks or data blitz talks (3-5 minutes). In my area, there are also subdiscipline conferences like Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) and International Society for Justice Research (ISJR). Those are good because they're small and you get a chance to meet people who really care about your specific research area (if you're into social justice). Great for networking. Next are regional conferences like Eastern Psychological Association and Midwestern Psychological Association. These can be worthwhile if the conference is near good universities. MPA is really great because it's in Chicago and you get people from Northwestern, Chicago, Ohio State, Michigan, Waterloo, etc., which all have really strong social programs. MPA takes talks and posters. I've never been to EPA but I think they're more oriented towards cognitive/neuro? Last are big, interdisciplinary conferences like Association for Psychological Science (APS), American Psychological Association (APA), and Canadian Psychological Association (CPA). I've never attended APS but there are usually big name speakers and it looks like they attract sexy research so could be worthwhile. APA and CPA are, frankly, dominated by clinical psychologists so they're less interesting for a social person to attend. The CPA preconference is usually really interesting though, and they take posters.
  18. I really encourage anybody in a medicine or mental health area to read this classic article "Why I don't attend case conferences" by Paul Meehl. It's a typology of dumb comments that occur when meetings are too much of the "everybody talks" variety. (Though set aside some time; it's 70+ pages.) I think you're exactly right. Nobody pontificates on gravity just because they have experience dropping objects, yet they do it all the time psychology etc.. When I teach I drill it into students over and over: Many lay theories of human behaviour are wrong and I hope it sticks.
  19. Sharing research interests with multiple faculty members is a good thing, though it doesn't guarantee anything about getting to work with both of them. Just write that you're interested in two main areas and these align with professors X and Y. No need to label them primary and secondary or anything like that. Maybe I'm reading into this but don't use this wording in your statement; if you want to work with somebody in particular you write "I would like to work with...." or "I am interested in working with..." It's usually the program who decides who is your supervisor and they'll say who this when they make the offer. [Exception is some grad programs (e.g., bio?) where you start and do several lab rotations before choosing a supervisor.
  20. One of my supervisors really dislikes it when people work in a bunch of labs. She thinks that undergrads increasingly pursue a strategy of "work in as many labs a possible, get as many lines on m CV as possible" instead of gaining long term, deep experience with one lab, which she views as a better strategy because it'll produce stronger letters. And look what it did for you--publications and presentations galore! Those things typically only result from staying in a single lab long term. So I think you're fine, if not better off.
  21. Ha, you are exactly right, I completely forgot it was American Thanksgiving and that it's a four day holiday for you. My uni has a three-day-long fall break from classes and I assumed this was something similar. My mistake. Even still, if I were going to be out of town or unreachable I would have let my advisors know, even over Christmas. Not in an asking permission kind of way--because it's a major holiday--but maybe a week in advance to say "I'll be away from email from Thursday to Sunday so if you have anything for me to do please send it before then." It like defensive driving -- it heads off problems before they can crop up. Also, juillet's post above is spot on and well said. I do think that it's the academic norm to be on email or lightly working even over holidays, so the advance notice is especially important if one is unreachable. And like she wrote, I would avoid the under contract talk. It's like the employee who won't do something because "that's not in my job description" and gives the impression that one is fussy or prickly. Are you fan of futurerama? It's possible to be technically correct but hurting yourself in the long run.
  22. Especially for a psychology program, where it suggests that somebody wasn't paying attention in social psychology class where they covered the skabillion (estimated) ways that stereotyped groups continue to be discriminated against. "Reverse discrimination" is what's happening in the box on the right. To the original point, I agree with what Generis wrote.
  23. I don't know what the rest of your experiences were but on this one, frankly, I don't think that requesting something on a Wednesday for a Tuesday meeting is too out of line. That's almost a week! It's reasonable for to assume that you would be in town or have access to the material necessary to complete your work. The others have focused on your advisor with good advice, so I'll mention aspects of your own behavior that you could change so that things go more smoothly in the future. First, I would never go out of town without letting my advisor know. Second, I would never assume that break is time off without checking first. Break weeks are for undergrads. Third, you took ~five days to reply to the first email; that's way too long.
  24. haha, that's because if you're a social psychologist who does marketing, then you get a job in a marketing department and get paid 3x as much But seriously, yes, I think what you're saying is harder to find. You may have to look for cross-appointed people (like shana said) or think about more mainstream social psychology topics that could be expanded into marketing applications. Off the top of my head, these are business schools with lots of social psychologists: Northwestern, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Fuqua/Duke, Wharton/Penn, Harvard, Rotman/Toronto.
  25. ^^ This thread was inspired by another thread where somebody said Berkeley psych does this, and possibly Michigan. Screening, not committee members. I agree it's probably not common.
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