Arrowfletch
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Posts posted by Arrowfletch
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No papers for me. Just one more test on Wednesday, which I'm taking tomorrow to study for, and then two and a half days of being in the office that I need to fill somehow before I can go home (I'd love to leave after my final, but have very limited vacation days). I'm more worried about filling that time than anything else--I don't want to just sit in the office and goof off, but I'm a bit stuck on my project right now and haven't been able to ask anyone what I should be doing. And I need to talk to my advisor before I go, but he isn't super approachable. Besides, all I really want to do is stay in my apartment and rest...
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I think I'm in about the 40-60 hours category with this being my first semester, but it's hard to take a guess when I don't keep track of studying time. I'm not doing much research right now because of how timing has worked out this semester, but I probably have about the following:
In class: 8 hours plus extra time for after hours lab work and exams (~14 hours total)
Actually teaching: 6 hours plus 2 office hours
Grading/Planning: 4 hours
Studying: at least 25 hours, probably more some weeks
Research (reading, prepping, running experiments): less than 10 hours including weekend work and weekly meetings
So about 55-60 hours, most of that spent on classwork and teaching. Next semester should be balanced better since I won't have this insane lab course eating all my extra time, but I'll be hurting for research time to catch up on everything I haven't had time to do yet so the hours themselves might expand.
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So, anybody else feel like they have no ability to self-assess how they are doing? Normally in undergrad I would have had some sort of graded feedback in my first few weeks. In my PhD program I just finished my first quarter and won't get a grade for any of my courses until they post in two weeks - just finals & nothing else. Same with my research - I keep checking in with my advisor and he just sort of laughs at me and tells me to keep processing data. I am not tooooo worried because I feel like someone would give me a heads up if I were really floundering - but it's strange to be free-floating like I am.
Anybody else in the same boat?
Very much so. Especially with research: I have honestly managed to do very little, starting with a struggle to get people to take the time to train me, followed by never really having decent blocks of time to actually run any experiments. I have not talked to my advisor about research since my project was assigned, largely because they don't ever really come through the lab, and I've heard both that no one expects much to get done this semester and that previous new students were asked to leave because they hadn't done enough. So no idea where I stand on that at all, though I'm hoping after my tests next week I'll have time to poke my head in my advisor's office and ask to sit down with them to go over what I've done and what needs to be done.
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Ask. Send an email saying that you're concerned about the class and would like to speak to them about it, get a meeting, go in and try to have a conversation about what's going on. Take the form with you so if they agree you can get it all done. The longer you put it off, the less likely it will work out--you'll want to check right away anyway to see if there's a drop deadline that has already passed, since often after midterms it is no longer possible to drop a class without penalty. If you feel you can articulate well what's going on to the professor, you might be able to ask for incomplete instead so that you can take the course again at a later time and delay the grade. You'll need to find a good way to phrase things, though, because honestly, going to them at this point in the semester and telling them for the first time that you're struggling is not going to earn any sympathy from them if they would have to make a special arrangement to help you.
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I don't know that it would be too different anywhere else, except the issues with that one professor. I sit in on a class twice a week, and teach discussion four days a week, plus planning and grading 180 assignments every week. I'm a first year, and partly because of this I haven't had time to even start research yet. I would keep in mind, though, that once you get into the upper years you might be able to get an RA position and not have to teach at all--here a lot of students only teach until they finish their own classes.
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I didn't start getting imposter symdrome until I actually got placed in a lab--now it's pretty full blown. I haven't done a single thing yet. At all. Not even training past what I was initially shown...and that three weeks in. I don't feel like I'm slacking--I'm working on class work and teaching all the freaking time and barely have time to sleep--but I'm getting really, really anxious about the fact that research just isn't happening. I've been told it's fairly normal for this stage, but at the same time I am expected to have made pretty significant progress by next semester--enough to submit a detailed report that proves me dedicated and working above an undergraduate level. Because my project seems kind of simple anyway, it's going to look really bad if I haven't just about completed it by then.
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I don't really see any reason to avoid mentioning a degree-- phrased the right way, the completion of multiple degrees could be an advantage. You just have to address clearly why you did those, how they relate to this new program, and why you wamt to get a third degree. They will wonder why you are doing multiple masters and not a phd, but that doesn't have to be negative. If you don't mention it in your statement, though, I definitely wouldn't outright lie by saying this would be your second one. That could be a red flag unless they somehow never find out.
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I do want to get started soon, and once I can I will--I'd rather screw up and have something to learn from than not do anything, and at least then it would be evident that I'm trying to put the work in. I do have a bad habit of being passive and waiting for things to happen when I first start in new groups, and I'm trying to break out of that--I've actually written down in my daily plans the things I need to talk to people about to get things going to try and force myself to do it. I did manage to get someone to do some more training with me today, at least, so I'll have that to work on next week even if it isn't my project yet. Since I'm just starting out, I'm not really supposed to try things completely unsupervised just yet (or so I was recently told), and it's turning out to be difficult to find an open time slot when people are there but not using the stations I need to practice on. I'm aware that is partly a communication issue, and will work on it. I also have no work space yet (waiting for some leaving people to actually clear out so I can move in) so that's more of the awkward waiting game (and I have talked to people about that, there's just nothing for it right now).
Right now, I'm hoping that I will be deemed trained enough to start trying some real work by fall break. As long as I get the go ahead to use the equipment on my own, I can spend the first weekend and few days of that week on real stuff before heading home for the holiday, so that I have something to show at the end of the semester (it's a bit doubtful that anything will happen between the end of that week and finals what with teaching, proctoring, and my own biweekly tests at that point). I have at least been told by older students that it isn't unusual to only get about a week's worth of real research in during the first semester, and if I can actually have some solid days of work without running off to class at odd times I know I could get a lot done.
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My advisor doesn't generally do anything in the lab anymore, so right now it's more on the other students to help me get started. When I talked to my advisor about the project I would be doing, they helped me set up a couple training things,and just implied that something concrete needed to be happening during this first semester (in that previous students who didn't stay with the group hadn't bothered to really start until their second). From what I've heard from the other students, the slow start is normal--it just feels weird, I guess. I know the first, really simple step of the project and should at least be able to do that much by finals, I hope, but it's still a matter of making the time once I'm actually confident in the techniques. Honestly, my only expectation for myself is that I manage to get through this tough first semester and get more comfortable with everything, including the lab group, so I can have less general anxiety when I start in earnest.
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The way things work at my school, I didn't get into a lab group until about a month ago. I'm in a group now, and I have a project, but nothing has happened since then. I've had a single training session on how to run one type of experiment, but there are other things that need to be done first for my project that I still haven't been shown. Beyond that, there are all sorts of little details about things as simple as the sample prep that I can't quite figure out from what I've been given. I know I'm expected to accomplish something this semester, but there are really only a few solid weeks left and there's no way that I could start, even if I had the time--and one of the classes I have this semester is a crazy lab that takes pretty much all of that already. I feel like there isn't much I can do about it right now, but it's all really weighing on me.
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I'm certainly not intending to ignore feedback, rising_star, and I've mentioned a couple times that I have several changes in the works already--I'm just allowing myself to feel good about how the second class reacts to me. Small victories are important.
danieleWrites--that's where I'm at right now: deciding what weight to place on things and what the real issues are. There were definitely several categories that either are not in my power to fix or really just needed more communication--some things will be easy fixes now that it's actually been brought to my attention, for example. It's helpful that these forms include ratings for the class in general, which involves multiple sections and teachers, so I can also see if they like class but not discussion, or dislike the entire class. Official evals are at the end of the semester, and go through the office first, but these are just something that the professor likes to do. It is really helpful since my students rarely speak up about issues directly to me--I never did either as an undergrad.
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It's not that they don't think I care about the material, but rather how they are doing with the material, which I think is more concerning. Whatever it is, I'm not seeing the same trend in the evaluations from today's group, at least not the ones that were handed in already. These were more what I expected, and the lower scores are mostly in categories that I completely agree I need to work on more. Granted, I only got about half of them back today since we ran out of time, so we'll see--the disappointed students may well be the ones who took it home with them.
Honestly, I didn't find the workshops put on by the teaching center here to be very helpful--we attended several days of them before classes started, and they were very repetitive and usually not very applicable to this type of class. I've only taught for one semester before this, at my undergrad, and the general vibe was very different there. Not to mention that I had a class about 1/3 the size, so I was actually able to interact with them. Now that my own things are settling down a bit, though, I'll be able to work on improving things--that's not to say that I haven't been putting an effort in, just that it's very hard to make the time to really think about how things are working and problem solve when I'm also trying to set up the path for the next several years of my life.
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In my opinion, it depends on how "factual" a statement can be assumed to be. You can make statements that might not seem right off the bat, but you should be able to support it in some way that the reader can end up agreeing with you, even if they had to think about things in a unique way to get there. For the example of fossil fuels vs. nuclear energy, you can want to say nuclear energy is cheaper but if you don't actually believe it is, that lack of belief on your part will come across as you write. But if you make cost into a more complex definition so that you can believe what you're saying--a combination of economics, environmental concerns, work and processes involved, long term cost vs gain, etc--then you can still be convincing. For the "who won a war" example--you can totally say the south won, if you define winning in such a way as to make that statement true, though it might be difficult to do so convincingly. For some topics, that's a completely legitimate strategy for creating a really interesting essay.
In other words, I would avoid making up numbers or trying to pass things off as fact when they aren't, because in order to be convincing you need to believe what you're saying. But being unconventional with the way you define ideas or consequences is fine, even interesting if done well, as long as the reader isn't drawn out of the argument by obvious fallacies. Now, if you know nothing about a topic that you're given, making things up might be all that you can do--you just still have to make it convincing on some level.
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There's also a search tips section on scholar that might be helpful :http://www.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html. In general, I would try what pears mentioned, or try putting quotes around the terms to return only exact matches, though sometimes that's too restrictive. Alternatively, there is a drop down menu on scholar on the results page (shows as a downward facing arrow in the upper left until expanded) that can get you to advanced search: the advanced search has categories to limit articles to ones containing every term put in, exact phrases, without certain words, etc.
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The way these evals work, it isn't a written comment, just a score assigned to a provided category. I honestly don't know where they get it from at all, though--I always ask for questions, I try to explain things in multiple ways if they don't seem to be getting it, I always try to make sure that they are prepared for their quizzes, etc. Due to the extremely basic level of the course, there are some questions I just can't answer without delving into much more complex material, and there are some things that really do just need to be memorized. My best guesses are that's the type of material they mean, that something I've said has been misconstrued (though I don't know what), or that they want a more personal connection that I don't know how to provide in a 50 minute class with 50 students who don't come to my office hours. If that last is the case, it actually concerns me less because I can understand it--but if they feel that I don't care how the class as a whole is doing, then something has gone terribly wrong.
Most students don't bother with written comments at all, of course, which makes it harder to understand the scores they gave--of those that did, only one is actually bothering me (not the harshest one, which I honestly decided not to take seriously for several reasons). My brain just hasn't been in a real good place lately, so even though the logical part is okay with mediocre and making plans, the rest has decided to be down in the dumps over it.
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I'm not really worried, just a little disappointed--it would help if students gave feedback outside of a brief, anonymous survey. I can tell when things aren't really working, but without student involvement it's hard to adjust things. I just handed out and got back the evals this afternoon (these are nonofficial, so we just collect them ourselves instead of going through the office), so I haven't spoken to anyone yet--we have weekly TA meetings, though, so it will come up then. There are a few small things that I'm going to talk to the other TAs about before then to see if they're doing something different than I've been based on the guidelines we were given, and a few things I can just do (find a way to avoid making people just sit there when they finish a quiz early but class isn't over, somehow give an option of working examples on the board for those it helps or working alone for those it annoys, etc)--I just have to get creative because there are such varied needs and a discussion class of almost 50 students is pretty hard to work with effectively.
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If you work out a visit through the department of interest (and not just the school itself), you should be able to get more out of it. Usually you'll be able to give a list of people you would be interested in meeting with, and the graduate office can try to arrange those meetings for you. Sometimes they can also arrange for you to talk to current students (either in a group of interest or students who are on a welcoming committee of sorts) who can give you an insider's rundown of how things work there. What you ask beyond that depends on what's important to you and what point you're at in deciding things. In addition to questions about the program, though, don't forget to ask about general life in the area--common living arrangements, safety, transportation, etc. I technically visited after being accepted, but that was really just because I didn't even decide to apply until nearly December, and the only time after that to visit was toward the end of the semester when everyone had official visiting weekends anyway.
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So I gave out midterm evaluations today to get some feedback on how things were going...apparently they aren't going real great. I got a handful of very positive reviews, and a handful of very negative ones, with the majority being pretty middling overall but with low scores in surprising places. There are a few changes I can try (and will try) to work out, but I don't really know how to fix some of these things--like the number of students who apparently think I don't care about how well they learn the material.
I'm mostly just trying not to get too down about that handful of very poor reviews, though. One person put down that I know what I'm talking about, but not how to teach, several think I'm wasting their time on easy things (which are the only questions being asked in class, though), and one "dislikes" me "very much" and hates everything about the class and how I do things. That last one was extremely harsh, but the student also expressed that they were only there for a grade and revealed that they really shouldn't be in the class at all (they should have taken a higher level course but did not listen to that advice), so I'm trying to convince myself that it isn't my fault. I have another group tomorrow, and expect those results to be worse since I can't ever seem to get them involved and a group of them has been fairly open about just not liking me.
Anyone else have evaluation anxiety, horror stories, etc?
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I just thought I'd leave an update in thanks for the advice: after finally making it to group meetings for both groups and interacting with the professors a bit more, I've decided on the first one. I came here wanting to do something with environmental applications, so I'm sticking to that. The main downside is that the group is so small, but I feel like the PI is very approachable and will be hands on outside the lab if I need them to (they're very much a teacher) so I should be alright without older grad students sticking around. And there are a lot of undergrads in the lab, so it's not like it will be empty and lonely. The benefits of the second group would have been size, interaction, and the PI, but I got the idea that the group is actually so large everyone doesn't interact with each other, and I've decided that the two PIs are actually similarly approachable and easy to get along with--it was just faster to relate to the younger one, and that skewed my initial image of them both. Anyway, I think I've made a good decision for myself and will be making it official tomorrow!
- rexzeppelin, mop and St Andrews Lynx
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I responded to this in another thread, I believe, but other than what I said there:
I wouldn't say that a full year of undergrad research plus an internship is minimal, especially considering that a lot of internships and even opportunities within a university might expect junior and senior level students. I had about the equivalent--two internships and only 1 semester at my university--and it certainly didn't seem to hurt me--I only applied to three places, largely based on location, but that includes two on your list and all three gave competitive offers. There will definitely be people with more, but there will be people with less, too. If your research advisor writes a strong letter for you, I'd say that goes a very long way to convincing them that you can manage research well.
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I don't have a scale so I don't know numbers, but I've definitely lost weight since starting. It's not a good thing for me, since it is because I skip meals because of my schedule, forget to eat because I'm so overwhelmed by what I'm working on, etc.
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I won't be too much help, since I only applied to 3 places total and know little to nothing about what they care about, but I think you're in good shape. When I applied, I had a 4.0 gpa at a fairly small largely commuter based university, 167/160/5.5 GRE (though I really don't think most places put much emphasis on that), no chem GRE at all, a couple internships and 1 semester of undergrad research. Taking everything together you seem to be in a pretty similar boat. Out of the schools you listed, I applied to Purdue and IU and heard back from both pretty quickly with fellowship offers. I only didn't apply to a couple of the others because they required the chem gre and it was too late for me to take it.
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Honestly, I would just take the GRE and see what happens. I don't know what it's like in your field specifically, but from what I've seen and heard, the GRE is more to weed out people who are clearly not prepared than anything else. Most places I've looked at don't even have a minimum score listed, just the requirement that you take it, and those that do list a minimum score have it right around 150. I'm sure some of the more competitive programs will care more, but it's worth a shot anyway. I didn't study for the GRE at all--just did a couple practice tests and took it--and had no issues.
In short, if you have other strengths--good coursework, research experience, good recommendations--your GRE score may not matter too much beyond an initial cutoff.
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Thanks for the responses. I have at least met with both professors once, and got to go to a group meeting for one (the other doesn't have one until later this week, which I do plan to attend, it's just so late in the allowed time). I wish it were as simple as spending time on this instead of classes, but the time taken is from actually being in class, not working outside it: between just attending class, teaching every day, office hours, grading, and weekly 3-4 hour evening exams for my lab course, I only have a few spare hours a day, usually after 5. I know I need to talk to other students, but I have no normal interaction with them and am very uncomfortable emailing complete strangers out of the blue without specific questions. Any tips on how to go about contacting someone like that, how to start the conversation, what to ask? Is it acceptable to just drop by the lab (when I haven't met the students working) to talk to them? I know I seem kind of helpless, but I feel like I've been thrown into this with a lot less guidance than I expected from the setup of the program (also doesn't help that mental issues are acting up--stupid dreary weather).
Also, I'll add that I do have the official option of changing labs after my first year--so there's some chance that I could switch into the other lab if things don't work out, but no guarantee that they would still be open.
First years - how are we doing?
in Officially Grads
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My first grade is an A-, and I don't have terribly high hopes for the final I have tomorrow in my one other class, so we'll see. That A- is in a class that was essentially pure grad school hazing, though--I was told that the professor was disappointed that this year's TAs didn't make anyone cry--so I'm feeling pretty good about it on its own.