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lewin

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Everything posted by lewin

  1. I gave you a +1 for the frank introspection about the popular appeal of your own work
  2. I went through this too but, thankfully, managed to hold it together enough so that my work didn't noticeably suffer. So, my sympathy is with you. You'll need to tell everybody eventually because, realistically, it's your new life situation now and there'll be things like department parties where people will ask where spouse is, or you'll be applying for jobs abroad and people will ask, "Is spouse okay with that?" But no need to rush. Frankly, I think a vague answer or white lie in a social situation is fine if it gives you time roll it out slowly. But given that it's affecting your work, my advice is to approach your advisor and say that the split is unfortunately requiring a lot of your time right now and ask for their understanding and flexibility. Then promise you'll be back on track soon. You don't need to say that it's requiring time because you're a blubbering mess--though of course it's fine if you are--just keep it to the vaguer, more professional wording.
  3. I have some ambivalence about all this. One the one hand, I think I'd be comfortable with senior graduate students being tasked with, e.g., cutting out the bottom 20% of applicants. It doesn't take a genius to weed out the candidates with 2.8 GPA's, 65th percentile GREs, and letters that say "So-and-so was in my third-year lecture class. He scored above average." Consider it the desk rejection for grad school. Really, somebody at the faculty of graduate studies could do this. That said, I'm would be uncomfortable arriving at a program knowing that other students had read my reference letters. There does seem to be an expectation of privacy on the part of both letter writers and applicants, where they assume their materials are going to professors. I also don't that typical graduate students have the expertise to assess candidates more in the middle (to quote George Costanza, "in the meaty part of the curve"). Last, to be clear, I have no problem with students on admissions committees. This is strictly about students screening out applicants as a first stage of the process.
  4. So frankly, having no research or volunteer experience does make you an underqualified candidate. (i.e., it's not about 'seeming' that way, it's the reality.) There's only so much you can do to hide that fact. You might be able to make up for this with stellar grades, gre's, and letters , but I think you should realistically be prepared to get rejected this year. Do what you can to get those experiences this year so that you can try again with a stronger application next season.
  5. I had the same thought and was NOT kidding.
  6. In my field if a student graduated with their PhD dissertation finished and no other publications they would not get a job. You need these side pubs to have a good CV. But I would never sneak one past my advisor; they're all things that we worked on together even when I was the lead. Is this a possibility? As a junior person you might be overemphasizing your chances of a solo publication and a more senior collaborator could do wonders. (I don't know your field and how authorship usually goes...)
  7. Lots of great advice above. Another drawback of this is that some fields are very specialized. What if the same reviewer gets asked by both journals? There's a significant non-zero chance of that happening and it could really blow up in your face.
  8. I just want to pop in to defend the social sciences and dispute this implication that people in the "hard" sciences are smarter so going there would solve the problem. Group discussions give people the opportunity to open their mouths and possibly look like idiots. You might think that hard science students are more worthy of your time, but it could just be that in lecture-based classes they're not being given similar chances to demonstrate that many are, indeed, also morons. [Assuming they're actually morons and we don't have an unskilled and unaware situation going on here...] My practical advice is that if your advisor relationship is fine, stick with it and focus your outside-of-class time on the students whose contributions you enjoy. Grad school is more about the research than the classes anyway.
  9. It's been a while since I've seen this article so repost: Kisses of Death in the Grad School Application Process.
  10. Ha, the slightest hint of an insider scoop is like blood in the water to the sharks here. Frankly I find it weird that the students take first pass. Must be some Berkeley hippie collectivist crap
  11. The people I know who only apply to 3-5 schools seem to do so because they're from Ontario and are scared to move too far away from home
  12. ha, multiply the price/litre by 4 to get the approx price/gallon. Of course there's still the exchange rate..... But assume you paid 1.5 to 2x as much. Filling up gas in the U.S. as close as possible to the border before crossing back is a proud Canadian tradition. BTW, I'm mostly joking about the u's. Anything I write for publication is in APA style so we use American spelling.
  13. I think the top Canadian programs look for the same things as top American programs. As noor said, research is important: Most programs follow the scientist-practitioner model where you're trained as a researcher first (but this is common to good clinical programs everywhere). Honours thesis probably just gets mentioned a lot because some Canadian bachelors programs don't require it (or it's optional) and they want applicants to have an independent research project of some kind. Pro tip: Get used to inserting u's into your words like honour and colour
  14. I'm a Canadian and I applied to 11 schools (4 Canadian, 7 American), though not in clinical. You apply to that many places to minimize the odds of random error sinking your applications (e.g., advisors on sabbatical). Acceptance rate is 10 percent? In theory I should get in somewhere by applying to ten places. I only applied to universities that offered full fellowships so that's how I would have covered the cost if I'd ended up in the U.S. Are your letter writers seriously giving you a hard time about sending out more than a few letters? That is not normal and I mention this so people don't think that Canadian profs are lazy or something. Most of the work is writing the original latter, the rest is just copy and paste. If you are organized and give your writers lots of time (i.e., a month) then they shouldn't complain (to your face). I agree with the person who said that there's more variance in quality among U.S. schools, probably because there are so many of them.
  15. My feeling, based on conversations with friends in that area, is that the private sector would like a business school (i.e., marketing department) better than the other two areas and, even more importantly, a place with good name recognition. Like social psychology at Duke or Harvard is better than Marketing at Podunk U. If you're going into academia then the reputation of your advisor matters more than the particular program; there's increasing overlap between social psychology and marketing.
  16. No kidding. People understand that, to some extent, your letter writers are outside your control. But what excuse could you possibly have for sending in a SOP two weeks late!? Even letters.... two weeks late I would start to think that the applicant had waited too long to ask their referees. This happens surprisingly often.
  17. I have no basis on which to judge other than my personal intuitions but I feel like less than 80th percentile is not competitive for a good program.... but of course it always depends on what kind of programs you're applying to--everyone in my year had 95th percentile or above but it was a pretty good school.
  18. I think some places have virtually no participant pool. I also agree that gradcafe is a terrible recruitment spot... a bunch of senior psych students is just asking for demand characteristics.
  19. I'd say that's unusual but if you're local, why not? I think 95% of POI's won't be interested in a pre-application meeting though so just don't raise your expectations for other places or see it as a bad sign if other profs don't do this. Read some recent papers and be prepared to talk about your past experiences, why you want to go to graduate school, and what you hope to do when you arrive.
  20. I think you will have a hard time finding strangers who will volunteer an hour (or 60-90 minutes, as the ICL says). Here's an unsolicited tip from a guy who does a lot of online research: Keep it under 15 minutes. Internet people have short attention spans.
  21. This was not my experience. One can be both creative and hard working. I'm not saying this applies to you, but sometimes grad students think they're creative but really they're not. Maybe their ideas are bad, or maybe they're unlikely to be fruitful research areas. People are not good judges of their own creativity. But it also sounds like the poster above was using the word "creative" to mean "non-traditional career path". I can understand why profs might discourage this; one needs to establish their bona fides first before doing something different. As Strunk and White said about writing: You need to first know the rules to break them.
  22. I'm a post doc. Benefits in no particular order: 1. One more year for your grad school work to go through the publication pipeline 2. A year to do just research and no courses/dissertation 3. New connections and letter writer. 4. [sometimes] learning new methodology. 5. A year to be on the job market. Things to consider: Ask about teaching load and what she expects you to work on. Frankly, teaching is a time suck (especially a new prep). If you're grant funded, you might be very limited in what you can do and not have as much time to do what you want. But I don't think that being assigned specific work is always a bad thing... a post doc can be a good time to get exposed to a new research area with potential, as long as it can be integrated into your past work somehow when you're on the job market later. There's also some opportunity cost of switching labs where it takes a while to get up and running somewhere new. Day-to-day my routine is very similar to when I was a grad student, though different research topics and more admin (e.g., some lab manager work, supervising the grad students). The pay's better too. If I had my choice I'd teach less--I teach two sections a year and one would leave more research time.
  23. ^^ I had written a paper on the topic for a seminar so was familiar with the general area, came up with a study idea that extended what had been done previously based on what I'd read. I based my methods off of that previous work but adapted it to my new research question. I also asked four different profs that I knew to read it at various points to get lots of feedback and revise it so it was perfect. Having experienced eyes reading your statement is very important -- can you ask profs you know back in your home country?
  24. I think you can say you "would like to" or "plan to" be an academic even if you're realistic about the probability of it happening being low. I can think of two reasons why some programs only take people who plan to be academics. First, profs are evaluated base on the success of their trainees and it's more prestigious to say you trained someone who went on to be a notable academic. Second, they put 5-7 years into training you but if you go into academia it's more likely that you'll be a career-long research collaborator and they'll get long-term benefits (i.e., be an investment that pays off). Strictly speaking, professors are tenured or tenure-track employees who research and teach, and always full time. Part time faculty are not styled as professors and often just teach.... and I agree that contract teaching is not usually a career path with good stability or salary.
  25. ^^ Translated: "This sounds fishy, I will take the time to look up their application requirements myself." love it.
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