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It depends on whether the conference will publish proceedings (i.e., full 6-8 page papers, not just an abstract). If yes, then you shouldn't submit the same material to a journal. Plenty of researchers do/did this, especially when it was harder to track down conference papers - so the work in the conference paper and journal paper would be identical. Now it's much more likely that a journal will catch you doing this and reject your submission, so people tend to put preliminary analyses or a subset of the analyses in the conference paper and save the full details for the journal paper, so there is still sufficient originality. If the conference is only publishing abstracts, or is not publishing anything at all, then go for it.

Does your department/university have a policy regarding using published material in your dissertation? I know of some departments that encourage students to do their degree "by publication" so it is a series of journal articles (with some added material that ties it all together) and in these cases you can literally copy and paste the content of the journal article as a chapter of your dissertation/thesis. Then at the beginning you have a statement noting which work has already been published, and providing the citation for each chapter. Other departments are happy for students to publish as they go, but expect them to write a slightly different version of the paper for their dissertation/thesis.

The ERA (Excellence in Research in Australia) previously had a journal ranking system that classified journals as A*, A, B, C or unranked. This ranking system was dropped last year. The idea was supposed to be that the ranks would indicate the best journals in each subject area, since other rating metrics such as impact factor have different standards in different fields.

There is a difference between a literature review (of the type Behavioral is describing) and a systematic review - eco_env seems to be referring to the latter, where you use set keywords and pick up everything that fits those keywords and then sift through it with set criteria for including/excluding papers. Systematic reviews can include meta-analyses, and there are very detailed protocols on how to conduct both systematic reviews and meta-analyses. For a literature review, I take my stack of papers and sort them by topic, then make notes on each of them - in varying levels of detail depending on how relevant they are. It often helps to put things in some sort of table/spreadsheet, so I can easily find all the papers using population A, population B, etc.

Regarding teaching, what Arts subjects does your university offer? Perhaps you could tutor for international studies or poli sci. You might also be able to guest lecture in some courses that are about international law / human rights law or subjects that touch on these issues for whatever reason.

Are you from US, NZ, or somewhere else? Unless you're from NZ, and/or the NZ university/dept/supervisor is held in much higher esteem than the US equivalent, I'd probably recommend US. On the other hand, you'd get much better food in NZ...

What area of psychology are you interested in? Because there are not many Masters programs in psychology in Australia - many universities are even gradually phasing out their clinical masters (in favour of DPsych degrees). But if you want to get into clinical psych programs in Australia, you are right that you will need an Australian 4-year honours degree or equivalent degree that is accredited by the Australian Psychological Society. US degrees are not accredited by the APS so you will need to do, at minimum, 1 extra year (i.e., Honours year) - however depending on your degree it is possible that you may not even meet the requirements for Honours, in which case you will need to complete a Graduate Diploma in Psychology in order to be eligible for Honours. On the other hand, if you are ultimately interested in a research PhD, then you may be eligible with your US degree. This is because research PhDs in psychology do not require an APS accredited undergrad degree in psychology. To get into a PhD, typically you need a first class honours degree. If your undergraduate marks aren't high enough you can get into a research masters (e.g., MPhil) but not many people do those - since you don't do coursework in most MPhil degrees, it is just like doing a PhD on a smaller scale, but there are very few scholarships available for MPhil students.

Most cognitive psych people I know end up in jobs that are either in academia (researching topics related to their PhD) or in human factors or other applied research settings, including for the dept of defence. Most social psych people I know end up in jobs that are either in academic or government jobs. The government jobs tend to be either stats, social/health related research, or policy.

Yes, I know a few people who have had their luggage damaged by TSA. Use a TSA lock or no lock at all.

Look at what your potential advisor's past/current students are doing. Have the current students published? If so, where/what? (What is particularly important if you don't necessarily agree 100% with your advisor's stance - I have heard of people not letting their students publish in such situations.) Where did the past students get jobs? One con of having a controversial advisor can be that it's a "niche" and that you will only get jobs in certain departments... but that can also be a pro, as well, because it means fewer people are "qualified" for jobs in those departments.

After.

If you truly think your GRE score will keep you out, perhaps consider applying to some overseas institutions - Canada, Australia, UK, Germany. Very few (if any) would care about your GRE scores.

Several of my friends have been in situations where their supervisor was dating a current/former student. All of them resented it. People will perceive you as having an unfair advantage due to the relationship, regardless of whether it is true.

Contact the graduate admissions departments at each school to see how they want it handled (e.g., leave it blank, put the score in your home institution's scale, convert it yourself). When I applied to a US university, they wanted me to convert my own GPA but had no set scale so they suggested that I Google GPA conversions and simply add a document explaining the conversion systems that I used.

Make sure you book your flight all the way to Texas on the same ticket, so it counts as international the whole way. Most airlines will still allow you 2 checked bags for international Australia-USA, but within the USA you have to pay for ALL checked baggage - unless you're on a domestic leg of an international ticket. Don't take too much hand luggage because the US has quite strict regulations and security, especially through LAX (the security for domestic flights through LAX is more intense than international flights through Sydney or Melbourne). Don't pack too much - with the current exchange rate, many things are cheaper in the USA (electronics, cosmetics, jeans, etc). Happy shopping!

I've never lived in a catered hall but yes, generally the idea is that you go within a certain time range to get your meal and it's cafeteria style serving. I've eaten at catered halls (not at ANU, but other Australian unis) and the food there is generally not worth the extra money you pay. Basically, there are three types of on-campus accommodation: catered colleges, self-catered colleges (you share a bathroom & kitchen; often the cheapest option), and self-catered apartments (self-contained apartment, either alone or with other students, which is a nice blend of apartments & college benefits, but costs more). The colleges have dances, band nights, toga parties, inter-college competitions, etc. There are definitely student bars in Canberra - the best known is probably Mooseheads. There are plenty of clubs and student associations - in o-week there is usually a day when you can sign up to join all the clubs. If people use the internet for socialising it is mainly Facebook, but a lot of things are advertised the old-fashioned way: flyers, noticeboards, newspapers, or word-of-mouth. That's why you need to make friends with locals!

You're not doomed. Canberra has a bad reputation, but that's largely based on people comparing it to Sydney or Melbourne (which each have 3-4 million people, compared to 200,000 or so in Canberra). It's more like a large country town than a city, but it has enough city attributes such as cafes, restaurants, bars, live music, theatre, etc. Some people do stay home and drink wine (especially during winter - it's cold outside!) but you shouldn't have too much trouble finding people to go out with. Just make sure you make friends with some locals, they will show you where the cool places are. I would recommend living on campus or nearby suburbs - O'Connor, Braddon or Ainslie. Then you can walk/bike to your lab and you're close to civic, which will help your social life. Housing can be quite expensive, so if you live at a self-catered college it may well be cheaper than living off-campus and will give you the opportunity to meet more people. There are some residential colleges dedicated to postgraduate students - University House and Graduate House, but they don't have a reputation for being particularly fun, so a better option would be the graduate apartments at either Burgmann or Bruce. The worst time of the year to find housing is January-March, because it is when most of the new students start and when all the new government employees arrive.

Trinity is not in the UK, it's in Ireland. I suspect one reason why UK PhDs (and PhDs from other countries with a similar degree structure) are viewed less favourably is that they are shorter, and therefore the candidates have less research experience, fewer publications, etc.

The nighttime shuttle route goes past the med school, plus there is a door-to-door shuttle service that you can call after hours and they will send a car or a minibus to come and fetch you and take you home (depending on how busy they are, it can 5-45 mins to arrive). There are several cafes and libraries that are open late - any place with decent coffee is usually filled with students working on laptops.

Kindle is fantastic for reading e-books but less so for PDFs, because you can't zoom or annotate. I have a 6" Kindle and if you view a PDF in portrait orientation the font size is typically too small to read. Rotating to landscape helps a bit but is still small on the 6" (would probably be okay on the larger Kindle). If you want to keep digital notes, you are better off using a laptop and using EndNote, Zotero, etc to keep an organized bibliography with notes and using a PDF reader to annotate.

Hopkins is well known and very well-regarded outside the US by people in public health/medical fields. (As someone who worked in a public health/epi dept at a research university in Australia.) Your average person on the street probably won't have heard of it, but then they probably won't have heard of most US universities beyond Harvard, Yale, etc. Having said that, name matters little if no one there fits your research interests.

Put a section on your CV for publications (if you have them) and presentations - if you don't have any publications just call it presentations. Use the APA format for referencing conference papers & posters. You can put the research team stuff under a section called "research experience", with a brief blurb about what the project is about and what you do.

ridgey raised some important points here - if you are planning a PhD that doesn't involve coursework, then you need to make sure that you already have the skills you need to finish your thesis, or can realistically learn them in the timeframe of a 3-4 year PhD. Otherwise you will run out of time and/or have to take time off mid-way to acquire the skills, both of which pose problems for an international student. In the UK they typically prefer/expect applicants to already have a Master's degree (although this will depend on how rigorous your undergrad degree is). For a PhD you would definitely need to have a clear idea of your potential supervisor and thesis plan. I thought the British Council had a page listing international standards that are equivalent to their honours ranks, but I can't find it.

On the off chance that the above two posts aren't spam: try RMIT instead, from what little I know about computing and IT I do believe theirs is (one of?) the best regarded dept in Australia for such things.

I barely saw anyone out and about in the city when it was high 40s. It was horrible. Especially the fires. But yeah, usually it's a couple of days in the low 40s, and then typically you'll get a day where the temperature drops 10-20 degrees in half an hour. Bless Melbourne weather! Is the new Uni Melb housing UniLodge? They're also terribly sterile and soulless. And the colleges are lame! I'm not sure whether Melbourne has any self-catered residential colleges, but they're all terribly overpriced... and terribly lame. Most Australian uni students commute to uni, particularly in the capital cities. (ANU is an exception; a large proportion of students are from out of town so the colleges have a much greater role in campus/university life, whereas at Uni Melb they are off on the edges of the campus and frankly much closer to the cemetery than the rest of campus.) Expo1986, you're welcome. I just stumbled here randomly and thought, hey! I can answer that question btw, does you username refer to the actual '86 expo that was in Vancouver?