lewin

I was also admitted to that program in lieu of PhD acceptance. At the time the tuition was $25,000/year with no possibility of funding and (it sounded) limited access to faculty supervision. Unless you're independently wealthy and don't have other options, I wouldn't recommend it.

Some great advice is to never design a study where you don't have a data analysis plan in advance. Since it's too late for that... Are these the same individuals at 2011 and 2015 and is it possible for someone's GOLD classification to change from 2011 to 2015? Because if so, the most appropriate analysis might be a multilevel model where GOLD predicts quality of life nested within individuals, and time is a repeated-measures factor. That's pretty complex stuff though. If people stay the same GOLD classification across years, a mixed-model ANOVA with time (2011 vs. 2015) as a repeated measure and level (a,b,c,d) as a between subjects variable might work.

These scores are on the old scale but here's my anec-data: Verbal: 690, 97th Quant: 740, 80th Writing: 6.0, 97th Psych: 810, 99th Applied to 11, interviews at 5, accepted at 4.

I believe they've sent out six or seven invites already. Visits are definitely being planned. I don't have firsthand knowledge, but I heard from people--so grain of salt.

Everybody makes mistakes and owning up to them is a big part of being part of a collaborative research group. A recent biggie for me was a coding mistake so that only two of four conditions ran, I worked overtime to collect the missing data myself.

...and even if it is, it's not your circus. You can only work with what she gives you so take a deep breath and set your expectations in a way that corresponds to her effort.

Since we're trading numbers, psychology graduate program in Canada where we were paid $1250/month for 10 hours/week. It's rarer up here for health insurance to be included because it's socialized. I paid a nominal fee for extended health from our student association regardless of whether I had a TA or not. Tuition is also cheaper, ~$6000/year, so waivers are less common. In my program TAs were only one component of funding.

This varies from person-to-person and from institution-to-institution. There's no secret rule. As a thought exercise, prospective grad students should read this paper on how feeling a lack of personal control increases illusory pattern perception (e.g., superstitions, conspiracy theories, patterns in noise). I think the application experience primes people to look for patterns in everything.

Sorry to be clear I didn't mean your response, but the school's behaviour. Any individual school is better off insisting on an early deadline--which some do because they're trying to scoop up good candidates before other schools can--but if too many do this than the whole system collapses.

I think I'm going to use this as a tragedy of the commons problem for teaching sometime.

Just to be clear, you should definitely reply something to the email ASAP even if you don't accept/decline. I would say something like: "Thank you, I'm really excited to receive your offer and have the opportunity to attend your program. I'm still waiting to hear from several other programs and would like to have as much information as possible before making my final decision, but I will keep in touch and let you know as soon as I can." Next is more of an etiquette situation. I like the rule "Never have more than two pending offers." So if you're in the enviable position to have three offers, take a day or two and decide which one is at the bottom, then decline that one politely. e.g., "I'm honored to receive your offer but have decided to attend another program that seems to have a better fit." Even better is if you can keep it to one pending offer, i.e., quickly decide which is your favorite and decline any others. Repeat if new offers come in. The reason you do this is so that programs can go to their wait list. If you decline everything in April then it could screw some other people out of their chance. Not that you owe it to them, or should rush a decision, but it's polite.

Stop beating around the bush. Saying, "might not be able to make it," without any explanation has high potential to be interpreted as a lack of interest. Just directly ask whether they're able to provide travel funding for interviews because you've already committed to several out-of-pocket trips. "I'd be really excited to visit, are you able to provide any travel funding?" They will understand this.

As others have noted, sometimes things come up (especially when there are status differences like this) and whether it's really unprofessional or not will depend on how the prof reacted to missing the meeting. If they explained and were apologetic I wouldn't think too much of it. Now..... maybe I'm reading too much into "and feelings/nerves" but it sounds like you're taking this a bit personally and if that's what's happening, try to dial it back. Making your advisor responsible for your feelings isn't a good road to travel down, and any whiff of defensiveness won't reflect well on you when the interview happens.

Some of my research is on stereotyping and gender bias in STEM and I just wanted to say that the anecdotes in this thread are disheartening but also motivate me to get more studies done. My actual discipline, social psychology, has fairly good female representation but there are definitely departments out their with a reputation of being excessively male-dominated or sexist and who have trouble attracting young female candidates because of it.

There isn't really such thing as a graduate student transfer. There's leaving a program and starting a new one. At the graduate level this usually makes you a worse candidate--because you look indecisive or unreliable--not a better candidate. If you have a completed graduate degree that's another story (as posted above).

Don't bring it up. If they ask, which I highly doubt will happen, say: "That was my first stats course and I was still getting my feet wet, but if you look further down, Advanced Experimental Psychology was actually the follow-up stats course that included topics factorial ANOVA [or whatever is the most advanced/relevant technique] and as you can see I mastered the more advanced material."

My impression is that unless it's Phi Beta Kappa (i.e., oldest and most prestigious honour society in US), or maybe Psi Chi, nobody will care. B.S. honor societies, self-published print-to-order books, and scammy pay-to-publish open-access journals--let's call them Academic fraud schemes--are a burgeoning industry right now.

ETA: During grad school I used SpiderOak because they seemed to have the best privacy/security policies. I was lucky to get in on their $125/year unlimited backup plan. Everything is backed up instantly with client-side encryption. Upside: privacy/security. Downside: slow upload client, occasionally buggy, it's still on the cloud.

This setup requires more startup cash and some tech savvy but storage is all local. I use a D-Link ReadyNAS with two 3TB WD Red harddrives (in raid) and Bittorrent Sync running on the NAS. A BTSync client runs on my work and home computers, immediately syncing all my work files between them (about 50 GB, I have large raw data files). It uses end-to-end AES-128 encryption. The NAS is encrypted so that it requires a USB to boot, which I keep separately. That is, if someone stole the box it wouldn't power up again. Soon I'm going to buy whole disk encryption for all the computers too. Upsides: no cloud storage, as much storage as your local harddrive can hold, no ongoing costs Downsides: no cloud backup, higher upfront costs, sync always requires an online peer [but the NAS is this if you leave it on], high memory use if you're syncing lots of files, occasional sync quirks (e.g., rarely, if I rename a large folder, it recreates the whole tree of empty subdirectories) Bonus feature: I have BTSync running on my lab computers so that when the research assistants collect data it's immediately backed up off site (to where the NAS sits at my house). I can also deploy experiment files from my work computer to the lab computers, e.g., if I need to update a program.

Two points of anec-data. First, our department is doing a job search and a priori decided to only consider complete applications. (Not my decision.) So far two candidates have been eliminated for missing letters and one for a missing CV. Second, some fellowships I've applied for require a completed application to be submitted by the deadline. If the system didn't show all letters present it wouldn't let you submit, and then shut down after the deadline. I'd also hope that most places wouldn't hold a late letter against a candidate because it's outside their control, but it's not a guarantee (especially for higher level things like later job applications, or competitive fellowships).

I use my presentation remote waaaaay more for entertaining my cat and dog than actually presenting. It works much better than those cheap pet store lasers. Still collecting data one whether they prefer red or green.

Yes, you can set whatever countdown you want. Plus it has a green laser which are like, way, way cooler than red lasers.

The kensington is good but my recommendation is the Logitech R800. It has a timer that vibrates at t-minus 5, 1, and 0 minutes.

1300 is too much for "about a thousand"; it's almost an extra single-space page! But I sympathize about the pain of letting go of words. I've probably had more practice, but just now I applied for a small grant and described the purpose, methods, and implications of two experiments in 800 words. So, a thousand should be plenty--you can do it. Ask somebody objective to edit; second readers are better at seeing what's extra. Writing with brevity is something they're assessing with the statement, and a critical skill to develop for grad school because you'll always have word limits. Consider reading The Elements of Style, which is a classic, and has lots of advice on this. Famous line: "Make every word tell."

Here's your assigned reading: The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. "Although commentators periodically declare that Freud is dead, his repeated burials lie on shaky grounds. Critics typically attack an archaic version of psychodynamic theory that most clinicians similarly consider obsolete. Central to contemporary psychodynamic theory is a series of propositions about (a) unconscious cognitive, affective, and motivational processes; (b) ambivalence and the tendency for affective and motivational dynamics to operate in parallel and produce compromise solutions; (c) the origins of many personality and social dispositions in childhood; (d) mental representations of the self, others, and relationships; and (e) developmental dynamics. An enormous body of research in cognitive, social, developmental, and personality psychology now supports many of these propositions. Freud's scientific legacy has implications for a wide range of domains in psychology, such as integration of affective and motivational constraints into connectionist models in cognitive science." Freudian Defense Mechanisms and Empirical Findings in Modern Social Psychology: Reaction Formation, Projection, Displacement, Undoing, Isolation, Sublimation, and Denial "Recent studies in social psychology are reviewed for evidence relevant to seven Freudian defense mechanisms. This work emphasizes normal populations, moderate rather than extreme forms of defense, and protection of self-esteem against threat. Reaction formation, isolation, and denial have been amply shown in studies, and they do seem to serve defensive functions. Undoing, in the sense of counterfactual thinking, is also well documented but does not serve to defend against the threat. Projection is evident, but the projection itself may be aby-product of defense rather than part of the defensive response itself. Displacement is not well supported in any meaningful sense, although emotions and physical arousal states do carry over from one situation to the next. No evidence of sublimation was found." All that said, Freud's claims and findings need to be taken into context -- he used case studies and introspection, methods which aren't a great means of determining causality and susceptible to confirmation bias. His research was also conducted >100 years ago. The ideas he proposed are foundational to many areas of psychology but, of course, don't reflect current scientific thinking in many ways--just like Darwin or, closer to home, Piaget. Do dreams have meaning? People sure seem to think so.