danieleWrites

Support for my p33ps! So, classes don't start until the 26th, but due to the wonders of email, assignments have trickled in. I've been doing my pre-reading and re-acquainting myself with a horrid fact of my life. Reading every word is like trying to sit still on a live ant pile. In literature studies, skipping words is a bad plan. Skipping sentences is even worse. I like reading pulp fiction (for lack of a better term) because you can skip entire paragraphs and not miss much. It's like leaving a soap opera for a decade and only needing 15 minutes to catch back up. Managing ADHD is important. How do you do it? I've learned a few tricks over the decades (old coot here), which I apply liberally and update for the information age. Librivox.org is sweet, sweet joy. Reading aloud to myself means drinking a lot of water, but picking up every word. Marginalia and annotation is fabbo, but sometimes, the only way I can unsnarl a sentence that my eyes do not want to read is to write it out. Not terribly effective long term as it's too time consuming, so I only do so when absolutely necessary. Medication turns out to be necessary for me, so I'm part of the Adderall generation. Maybe the Royals will give me a 105-game suspension, in which I do not have to see headlines about the Royals. PEDs for grad students, go team! Organization is my religion. Messy desk = messy brain. I make friends with the learning disability accommodations people because, if nothing else, the option to test separately with added time reduces my stress. I've never used testing accommodation for ADHD, but I have used for my other issue. But focusing for extended periods of time? Oi vey. Even with meds, a cool room with soothing light, and the quiet white noise of a fan, it's still like sitting on a live ant pile. Even when I'm reading the things I love. I had to read Das Kapital with an ice pack on my neck. I don't know if that's physiological or psychological, but it helps. I wouldn't give it up, though, oddly enough. I can't multi-task anymore than anyone else can, but I am, by nature, cross-disciplined. One focus is not satisfying, practically impossible, so I must have two or more. Is that ADHD? Dunno, but two majors helped. I could go from Marx to Milton with not only nary a missed beat, but with a renewed sense of energy for both texts. Of course, that's all channeled together. I looked at Milton sociologically and I looked at Marx's prose with New Criticism. Thankfully, someone has already invented the sociology of literature, so I have precedent for recalcitrant professors. How do you soothe the savage breast? Tame the wild brain? Teach yourself to focus? How does ADHD effect your scholarship? Does it make you a better academic or is it only a struggle? Something else? How does ADHD effect your relationships with your cohort? Professors? Students? Or does it? My brain is one of those 20% that makes it impossible for me to sit still for a long period of time. Study groups? Yeah, can be interesting. Sharing an office? Meetings with advisers, mentors, professors, where you're supposed to be professional-ish and brilliant? Do you sign up with the accommodations center, so the professors you deal with are notified of your ADHD? Why or why not?

Hop onto a database related to your field and stick in a series of subject terms related to what you're doing. Make note of the journals that crop up. Read some of these journals a bit so you can get a feel for how they like papers to read. Tailor accordingly and submit. You can try google scholar, but a dedicated d-base seems to work best. Sage has a ton of publications they deal with, and a d-base to go with. Check JSTOR. Fact o' publishing life: not only do you have to create a well-research article, you have to research the publication.

I approached like any other essay. I started with a research question. Sometimes, the school provided a start, most of the tie, it didn't. I ended up with 4 specific questions that all of my SOPs answered, and in this order: 1) Why is a PhD for me? 2) What do I plan to accomplish during my time as a PhD student and after I obtain the PhD? 3) How can the department and its faculty help me obtain my goals? 4) Why is a teaching assistanceship a requirement for me? (The last question added depending on the school's stated requirements). The first one was my "catch". It's the personal story that tells them about me, as a person, and why I'm not taking the PhD thing lightly. It was my "this is why you should like me better than anyone else" sentence. I wrote about 5 pages answering this question and managed to condense it into two and three sentences. I would interchange these sentences depending on the length of the SOP. The second question, I answered in about 3 pages, and condensed it into two sentences. I wrote several pages answering question 3 for each school. That took a lot of research (I read department blogs, faculty blogs, abstracts of recent dissertations and theses by current and former students, articles put out by relevant faculty and might-be-relevant faculty, even faculty dissertations (at least in part), checked which conferences they've been to, checked their social media, if available, to see what their interests were, in short: faculty stalker!). I found the SOP how-to guides less than helpful. There was too much conflicting advice and none it was from the departments I was interested in. I took the common ideas (such as: give them something right of the bat to distinguish you from everyone else, and apply a nickname to, like sociology girl or library girl or whatever, because nicknames are easy to remember). The SOP is a cover letter for a resume. It's deeply personal. It's about fit.

To avoid plagiarism, do two things. First, learn the difference between common knowledge (you never have to cite it, even if you have to look it up, though you can cite) and what must be cited. Second, cite everything that you get from someone else, either in quote, paraphrase, summary, idea, or whatever. When in doubt, cite it! It's easier to over-cite the first draft and take unneeded citations out than to under-cite and find you've technically plagiarized and have to put them back in. Keep a bibliography. If you go back and use a source, copy and paste from you bibliography. Buy the book, if you don't have it, and learn MLA's logic. Works cited page citation entries follow a pattern. If you learn the logic of the pattern, you can pretty much just type the citation out on the go and fix any minor formatting details with relative ease. Do not rely on a citation generator like easybib. If you do, you'll have to go through and fix the formatting details that it often gets wrong. MLA's current edition does not require the use of URLS for web-based sources, but it's better to have it and have to remove it than not have it and have to hunt it down. If you don't know how to make tables, add graphics, create footnotes or endnotes, or, in general, do more than some basic things with your word processor, learn how to take advantage! Take a class, buy a book, or find an online tutorial. The word processor can be a thesis writer's best friend.

Find someone in the department than can act as an adviser and discuss your goals first. Don't ask if you should transfer, but rather how you anticipate your program of study will go. If you're into bio-engineering and they can't accommodate that, then are you in the right school? Prestige is important, but not everything. A person going to a lower-ranked school who does impressive research, presents research at conferences, gets published, and networks is far more, um, acknowledged than a person who goes to the top ranked school and doesn't do more than go through the motions. You get out of your education what you put into it. I believe this not because of my CV, but because of someone else. While a single instance does not constitute proof positive, it does show that it happens. So, ask first. They are just as interested in how you fit in with them as you are.

I get all spazzed about it, too. I learned, unfortunately enough, toward the end of my MA how to not just organize time, but to organize projects, papers, etc. I had to figure out not only when to work on research, but how to do it most effectively. In English, I don't have any experiments, labs, and other considerations. I have a lot of reading. I maintained research logs, lists of need-to-know, a working outline of the paper, and some indexing of the literature I was working with. I was still feeling like a horse that had been rid hard and put away wet toward the end of the semester, but I wasn't driving everyone around me insane while I was doing it. Management is key. Developing your own management style, even more so. Frankly, I'm a bit terrified of the PhD program. Class starts the 26th and I have to have 300 pages of a 1200 page book read by then. Yeah, it's assigned. Oh, heck, what have I done to myself?

I would think that you shouldn't have trouble shifting from one to another. The big question is what kind of sociology are you interested in? ASA has a listing of sections (http://www.asanet.org/sections/list.cfm) that can give you an idea about the spectrum of things you can get into. A lot of people want to just do theory, but sociology is a science and theory is a part of the method. You've probably read Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique ofthe Judgment of Taste. This is living the theory dream. If you still have JSTOR access, go read some sociology journals and see what people are doing. If you do have trouble, there's something called the sociology of literature. Terry Eagleton has an interesting article called "Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature" in Critical Inquiry Vol. 14, No. 3, Spring 1988. There isn't a lot out there on the soc of lit, because it's not a major thing. It's practiced by people in literature (Eagleton) as well as people in soc. I have a BA in soc and a BA in English. The methodology is very different. Getting into a program just means that you'll have to take undergrad courses to make up for your deficits, like statistics and methodology. I'm into the idea of the sociology of literature, but I'm coming at it from the literature angle rather than the sociology side. I don't want to simply examine a piece of literature with a theoretical perspective (oh, look at the classism in House of Mirth, as Marx would point out, capital is everything!); I want to use literature to support and test theory. Sociology's purpose is to test theory. I don't think the changing of majors in undergrad is a big deal; universities know that the truly weird are the ones that never change their major. What you have to do if you decide to go for sociology is write an SOP that convincingly explains what you intend to do with in sociology, how their program can help you do it, and how you fit into their program. If you don't know what you want to do in soc, you're going to have trouble switching. A strong, confident discussion of how your background makes you qualified helps. I don't think you need to get a second BA, unless you're set on soc and you keep getting unilaterally turned down. This is all my opinion, with no backing.

I have ADHD and routine is necessary. I never do anything in the library other than coursework, for example. I don't read off-topic stuff, hang out, cruise the internet, or whatever. My brain automatically associates the library with work. It helps keeping me from distracting myself. I'm an introvert, so your problem is my idea of heaven. You prefer to socialize, so I'm going to guess that you're more of an extrovert. Like jullietmercredi said, find a way to work with your cohort in order to both satisfy your need to be with people and to get your work done. Make some friends and work together. Study together. For some people, reviewing for an exam (for example) is better in a group than solitary. You can help each other. Study groups rock. I'm a fan of scheduling, mostly because I married a social butterfly who won't leave me in peace if I don't have a set schedule of when I'm not to be disturbed. Scheduling your solitary time can help. Particularly if you also schedule friend-time. Socializing is important. Don't cut yourself off from your friends, no matter how much work needs to be done. A couple of hours with friends can give you enough energy to spend six hours working by yourself. I don't know much about your personality, but you can use friend time as a reward, or you can use it as a kickstarter. Make sure that you keep your projects organized. The thinking is always the hardest part, but once that's done, you can plan work time. On Monday, you'll spend two hours making an outline for the essay in Class 1. Tuesday will have two hours to write lab reports for class 2. And so on. Frankly, organization can make or break your stress level. Keep your time, your space, your files/notes, your stuff organized. Organized doesn't mean super-neat. Organized means that you have a working system in which you are able to keep track of all of your school stuff so that when you do work on your school stuff, you don't have to spend the first 30 minutes figuring out where you are, where you left off, where you stuff is, when things are due, and so on.

I've just found out that I'll be sharing not only an office with a ton of other people, but that I'm expected to share a desk with at least one, probably two people. While I totally get that office space is budgetary issue and people who are only using an office for a few hours a week on a temporary basis don't need to waste department budget and space on their own luxury suites, I still hate sharing a desk. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it! Not in love with office sharing, but good times have been had. Okay, ranting finished. I really doubt I'm alone in the dislike of overcrowding, but despite all my rage, we're still just rats in a cage. So, anyway. What kinds of tips, tricks, etiquette, passive-aggressive whining, Thou Shalt Nots, and/or please do!s might you have for sharing offices? Sharing desks? Here's some of mine: I teach comp and we always have to conference with students. And for some reason, we all seem to schedule conferences at the same freaking time. I learned to negotiate with my office mates from the beginning so we weren't all trying to conference in one office at the same time. I'll conference Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, you take Monday and Wednesday morning. Food. It's a problem. Stinky food, particularly. It's not the food itself, or the act of eating it, but rather what happens to the wrappings, discards, and whatnot. I think that it's courtesy not to use the office trash can for food items after the custodian has been through for the day. It's worse by a factor of a bajillion if the food is tossed in the office trash can after the custodian has been through on Friday. Monday mornings are gross. I take my banana peels to a less enclosed trash can. When eating at your desk, chew with your mouth shut. Seriously. If you're a messy eater, don't eat at your desk. Coffee pots. Make sure it's pot for coffee and not heating water before making coffee in it. Make sure it's a communal pot, Make sure to keep it clean! Coffee drinkers should work out who will empty and clean the pot before everyone goes home for the day. Moldy coffee is gross. Moldy coffee grounds are gross. Don't "borrow" people's candy. It's not cool. Bakers, we're in a sedentary job. Don't get pushy or take offense if someone turns your wares down. You may think you're being nice, but some of us are working off the undergrad 45, or have high cholesterol, or we're allergic, or something. No doesn't mean we don't love you. It means we don't want to eat it. Music: Headphones. Also, I can hear it if you turn it up too loud. Conversation. It's a work space. People in the office are doing work. People in the office next door or across the hall are doing work. Enjoy the conversation, have fun and enjoy the people you work with, but keep it down. Before you coat the walls with pictures, posters, and fun sayings, make sure you remember that you're in an office that you and your colleagues will use to further a professional student-teacher relationship with visiting students. Your credibility as a teacher will be judged by the stuff you have on the walls. Your credibility will be judged by the stuff your office mates have on the walls. You don't have to turn the place into a doctor's waiting room, but don't turn it into a party, either. Be courteous when you're sick. Don't snot on my dictionary and I won't snot on your thesaurus. It's an office, not a quickie day care center. Bring the kids for a visit, but if you want to bring the kids, especially the younger ones that require a lot of stuff and attention, for a long visit, perhaps while the parent or whoever is in class or at an appointment, put a little thought into it. Take them around the department to show them off, then take them outside to play. Don't assume that you should instruct your office mates in how to prepare assignments, syllabi, select books for a course, blah blah blah, even if they ask you. Answer questions, don't lecture. (My tone here is pretty much proof that it will be irritating, not well received.) For your own safety, don't vent about the annoying things your professors may or may not be doing. The walls aren't that thick and voices carry very well through corridors.

A lot of great advice! Be aware that every class has a different personality. Most people in classes will stare at you blankly when you ask a question because they do not want to speak. Getting student to participate in discussion is pretty much the most challenging part and everyone has to find the way that not only works best with the class's personality, but their own. One of my TA cohort was a happy, outgoing person (still is), and she would bring a camera to class the first day. She'd have each student write their name on the board and take some pictures, which she would use to learn their names, do writing projects, and stuff. It worked great for her; it did not work for me. I'm an introvert with a dry sense of humor and it fit me like bucket of slime. I made them love me right off the bat by bringing out my cell phone and explaining that the number on the syllabus made my portable internet make funny sounds, which eventually produced voicemails and texts. Then I also explained that the alarm would go off 5 minutes before the official end of class. This was not the signal for them to pack up their gear, but for me to finish my lecture, complete any class business, and get them out the door on time. Anyone who has ever taken an English class knows that English profs are the worst at thinking that 10 minutes before the other class comes in is theirs to use. Clear assignments help, too. They want to know what's expected of them. Clear and logical grading paradigms help, too. What are you looking for? Be precise and be clear! I'm easy to pull off track. I have ADHD and I love the bright and shiny. They figure it out pretty quick. I've seen it in the classes I've taken, where the students are bored and someone will ask a question to pull the prof into a more interesting line of talk. I've done it myself. Once I figured that out about myself, I developed a strategy to use that to my advantage. Sometimes, a few minutes on an interesting, off-track thing can bring the class together. I teach comp and lit, so I can pretty much bring any discussion back to the subject, even if it isn't about the specific lecture. Be reasonable in the work assigned. They have 4 other classes (generally), jobs, friends, family, and so on. The homework should be a reasonable amount, not an overload. I had a prof expect everyone to read 300 pages a week because she couldn't bear to cut any more literature out of the class. It was way too much. The more the work, the less absorbed. Extra credit is pointless. The only people who really do extra credit are the people who are not satisfied with 96%. Be flexible, but be clear and consistent. Don't be sarcastic. Well, amend that. Sarcasm works for me, but only if I don't use it as often as I'd like. Do not every be sarcastic toward a student. You will have bad days when you don't want to herd the cats. They will know that you are having a bad day because you will take it out on them in your own way. You've been in classes where the prof/teach has done that. It helps me (but not everyone), to openly acknowledge that I'm having a bad day and that I am doing my absolute best to not only teach them, but to be respectful of them as students and as people. Unless the department requires me to, I don't give points for daily attendance and participation. Some people do because it works for them (personality!), but it doesn't work for me. I do take attendance and I do excuse absences because a certain number of absences means that a student can be dropped from the course (and the university I taught at wanted to track failure and withdraws based on attendance) and the only way students can make up missed work is with an excused absence. Other than that, I don't want someone to come to class if the only thing they're going to do is sleep or text. I make the academic honesty policy very clear on the first day. In comp, that means explaining precisely what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. I don't go into a deep discussion on the cheater's consequences, but I do discuss the consequences of cheating for everyone. Piper High School makes a great example about how 18 people can hurt 1000s. I do my best to make sure that I'm approachable and contactable. I tell them when I check my email, so they have a clue when they can expect me to respond to them. Find a, well, mentor in the department that you can go to for help. Get copies of assignments from people who've taught the course before or ask them how they approached an assignment or a reading or whatever. You don't have to use it as is, but you can use it to help you figure out how to do your own. If you say: "Any questions?" You won't often get much of a response. People don't want to appear stupid, so they will pretend to understand, and then come up after class to ask questions. If one person has a question, then at least half the class will need the answer to that question. tl;dr: I suppose the biggest thing comes down to respect and honesty. If you treat them with basic respect first (for example, assume that everyone is honest, hardworking, and good), they'll appreciate it and return the favor. The other important thing is to be honest. If you say that they can expect their work back by a certain date, do your best to get it to them. If you have office hours, be there. If you tell them you'll return emails by 8pm, do it. If you must be absent and you've explained your policy on cancelling class, follow through.

I sympathize, and totally get it. It's bureaucracy. I don't think there is anything you can do about it. You earned the lower GPA. While you went for years believing it didn't count because someone made an error and people kept compounding the error, I don't think you can really do anything to change it. I've spent half of my life either in the military or married to it (we were not in at the same time), so I have a very clear understanding of how bureaucracy works and how it really puts it to you. Your original adviser didn't care about your grades, it wasn't his problem, and he told you who was responsible: the registrar's office. At that point, you should have gone to the registrar's office and had them clear it up specifically, and once they did, had whoever made the determination put it in writing for you, with a signature. Since that did not happen, you were led to believe, for years, that you had a higher GPA and had earned Summa Cum Laude. Without documentation from the registrar, I don't think you have a way of getting your preferable GPA re-instated, creatively or otherwise. We had a friend who was overpaid three months in a row back when the army and the rest of the government was transitioning from paper pay checks to direct deposit. They always lost our paychecks. Anyway, they kept the money in a saving account for a year or so, in case the government wanted it back, and then spent it. Three years later, the guy didn't get paid for two and a half months because they took it back and didn't bother to ever tell him why. He was totally hosed and had to take out a couple of expensive loans to cover it, and crawling up the chain of command didn't get him anywhere, just some sympathetic, sorry, can't help you. You've got the same problem. The registrar made the error in your favor; but, when the bureaucracy eventually caught onto the error, they fixed it. Unless you have documentation from the registrar stating that they were not accepting the grades from your transfer credits, you're stuck. Your only option is to return to the registrars office and ask them to change it, followed by taking your frustrations to the ombudsman for what amounts to an official apology from the university. If you put yourself out there with the better GPA, an official apology from the university, on paper, will do wonders for covering you from any fallout. You may never need that letter, but in academia, where integrity is everything, you don't want the registrar's mistake to come back and bite you. So even if you decide to not fight for the summa cum laude, you should get that letter from the university that explains who made the mistake and keep it on file. It's not satisfaction, but it is the university backing up your integrity, which they owe you.

Thank you! Just goes to show how far behind I am.

I have no suggestions, other than Terry Eagleton at Oxford, about programs. However, while you're searching, look at each university's sociology department. Many universities will allow you take courses outside of the department and sociology is where Marx is at. If you can't find a great fit, at least find a good fit that allows some cross-training.

GRE test preppers are good, but they can't tell you what your real GRE score will be. The only way you can do that is to take the test. I haven't met a GRE test taker that wanted to take it more than once; you're not alone in that. The fact is, a significant number of people have to take it twice. This is no reflection on the intelligence of the person, or their abilities in their field, or what they know. All it reflects is a person's ability to take the GRE and all the GRE really measures is your ability to take the GRE. Study hard, but don't let yourself obsess and stress out over the test. Your emotional state will effect your ability to perform on any test. You can put so much pressure onto yourself to be a GRE rockstar that you set yourself up for failure. Accept the fact that you may be one of many that have to retake the GRE, and, if you do, it will be okay, to take unnecessary pressure off of yourself. Do leisure activities, as well as getting some fresh air, good food, exercise, and time with friends and family. I've seen people in the courses I teach nearly kill themselves trying to earn a 99% when they already have a 92%. In the end, they're in tears because they didn't rock the class, but the A is still on the transcript. Put in the study time, but give yourself permission to be something less than perfect, while you're at it.

In my department in my university, reading courses apply only to what they call the reading year and have to do with the comprehensive exams. Seminar courses are different. We are required to complete all coursework, including a specific number of seminar courses, prior to enrolling in a reading course. Every university does things differently. You should speak with your adviser.

I've read Das Kapital Vol. 1. Every word. All the way through. It took ages 'cuz Just OMG. I've read Adam Smith, some Ricardo, Wallerstein, a bit of Keynes, and I read a lot of stuff economists put out pretty regularly in regular news outlets, periodicals, and sociology journals. I'm a Marxian when it comes to theory. I'm also involved in a very long argument about whether or not Reagan was a conservative or a neoliberal (I say neoliberal, but my conservative family are bleeping rings around themselves). The take away I get from reading these people is that a large part of writing in economics is explaining one's viewpoint and why one's viewpoint is more valid than someone else's opposing viewpoints. There's a lot of teaching economic theory in tiny nuggets involved in all of these readings. Unlike hard sciences, there's no definitive proof that one system will work better than another system, just strongly suggestive evidence and a lot of religious-type fervor for one's pet theory. So, I think that there is some personal value in a non-academic learning some pedagogy, beyond learning the material by teaching it, how much value there is in pedagogy is too subjective to properly measure. It's like trying to measure the liberal education component in, say, an engineer's bachelor's degree. There is value, but how can anyone quantify it. I suppose that this kind of thing is individual for everyone, even people who are planning on a job teaching.

I've been teaching Comp 1 and Comp 2 for several years. As a comp teacher, I would give you a C- on the news program prompt and a B on the national curriculum prompt. AS a GRE scorer: not a clue. The news program response has a few simple fixes. First, your thesis statement is blandly vague and doesn't actually say anything. The sentence prior to that does give you the meat of the argument, but your response uses that as introductory material and never addresses it. You need to combine the idea that correlation does not mean causation with the idea that more evidence is necessary. Your main points do not address causation directly and clearly, or how the lack of correlation between complaints/revenue loss means they need more local stuff. Your thesis statement should be focused. It should make a specific claim with reasoning (more evidence is needed because correlation does not mean causation), rather than just a blank claim (more evidence is needed). Vague. The second problem is a problem in both responses. Your word and syntactical choices. You needlessly complicate your responses with big words and funky structure that relies on passive voice. Example: "There is much that needs to be elucidated." The phrase "coterminal events" is so Talcott Parsons. You sacrifice clarity for GRE buzz words. You sacrifice your credibility for fancy words. As Strunk and White so sagely advise: never use a big word when a normal word will do. Do not say precipitation when rain will do. Worse is passive voice. Passive voice has its uses, but it's difficult to read and, more importantly, it's boring. The GRE graders will be reading reams of these things. Do not bore or confuse the GRE graders for they will downgrade you for it. And they will be correct to do so. Now, you do have some strong things happening in your responses. You have a thesis in both of them, and the thesis statement in the national curriculum is a strong thesis statement. Your main points clearly, logically, and reasonably support your thesis, which clearly expresses the central idea of your response. Your evidence is logical and you give a strong argument with it. You have obviously strong language skills, though you don't apply them correctly to the rhetorical situation. Analyze the prompt carefully. Note that the news program prompt says "our news program", meaning that your response is to be aimed at someone involved in making decisions at a local station, not at the GRE grader. Suggested reading: William Zinnser's On Writing Well (I like the 30th anniversary edition). I think it's better than Strunk and White, though a little Strunk and White goes a long, long way. Caveat emptor: I have never graded a GRE paper and I never will. I know nothing about their grading rubric.

Exactly what fullofpink said. The idea that there is a "safety" school, where you figure that you're guaranteed to be admitted so you apply there in case your picks reject you then you'll at least have a program to go to, is kind of magical thinking. It presupposes that these "safety" or undesirable, but adequate schools exist and always have open spots for the good school rejects. There are definitely programs that are harder to get into than others. You've got a better shot at getting into a state university than an ivy league one. Instead of thinking of it as "dream school" and "safety school", think of it as dream school and the other, more realistic schools you want to get into. Harvard or Oxford, for example (I have no real figures) might have a billion applicants for ten spots, while State U has 300 applicants for ten spots. The "safety" is about statistical odds, not about any guarantees. "Safety" schools reject most applicants, as well. So there is not safety in applying to them. Do what fullofpink said, treat each school as if it is just as important as your dream school. You must research them so that you can find the one that fits you best and you fit the best.

Don't eliminate any of the graduate school. Only eliminate a school if you cannot afford to apply to that school or if you cannot afford to go to the school Visit each school's website and find information for international students. The schools will explain how to apply and what you must do. Find the link for graduate students and look for international students. If you can't find a webpage explaining their requirements, you should contact the school's graduate college directly, via email, asking for information. In most cases, you will have to pass a TOEFL exam. TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language, is a test of your proficiency with English. Universities will require that you have a certain amount of fluency in English because without it, you cannot succeed in an English speaking program. Some universities will require the TOEFL before accepting you; others will require it after they admit you, but you cannot register for classes without passing it. ETS, who also does the GRE, does TOEFL testing. You will find information on the TOEFL on the ETS website. Each university website will have information on what your minimum scores on the TOEFL should be.

If you are quitting smoking, you do not want to move into a home where other people smoke. It helps to find a quit-smoking buddy, too. As far as mooching off of your parents? There's this American ideal that once a person graduates college or high school, that person should be entirely self-sufficient. In today's globally off-shoring economy, that's pretty unrealistic. While I'm not saying that you should stay in the more expensive place because your parents are willing to help, you shouldn't discount that help out of a misguided notion of pride or what others consider to be the mature thing to do. I suggest this: go and have a discussion with your parents before you make a decision. Talk to them frankly about money. How much of a burden are you financially? How much are they invested in your education? Caring parents might equivocate, and pass off the money as if it's nothing when it is something. As a parent helping a kidlet go through college right now, I want him to stand on his own financially, as much as possible, but not if that means he spends so much time working he can't get in the learning he needs, or that he comes out the other end so saddled with debt, he has to move in with us again just to pay his bills. While you should make sound, financial decisions, you should do that with information on how much your parents are able to help you. A PhD is more difficult than a bachelor's, and that help might be important. I live with a smoker, as well, so I understand the financial drain (not to mention health) that smoking is on the pocketbook. An artist friend was a heavy smoker in New York City and decided to quit her 2 carton a week habit. She put all of the money she normally spent on cigarettes and cigarette products into a saving account. A decade later, she used that money to move to Alaska, pay her bills for a year, and pay cash for a new SUV. Smoking is not cheap. It might be better for both your health and your finances if you remained in Spider Central until you've quit, and then found a situation among non-smokers, than to move into a place that's okay with smoking, and not quit or have the quitting sabotaged. Since you're in the UK, you should check into smoking cessation programs. Nationalized health care systems tend to offer these for free or at greatly reduced cost. As I've said, talk with your parents. No matter what you decide, sitting with them and having an adult conversation about handling money will make all of you feel better.

You don't really have gaps to explain in the SOP. You're to young for academic/employment gaps to be a big deal. Students take a year off all the time. Couple that with the fact that your undergrad transcript will clearly show that you changed majors, your time off is something your SOP can ignore. Rather than gaps, think of it as extra training. I'm starting an English PhD with a BA and MA in English *and* a BA in sociology, along with enough creds for a BA in Korean and a bunch of mox-nix junk in my failed attempt at computer science. I have classes in calculus, java, and three more sciences than I need. I'm about 30 credits from a BA in math, actually. I didn't explain any of the time I spent not in English or not in school. I explained, rather, how my degree in sociology makes me a great phd candidate. I didn't say anything about the math, science, and engineering. Even though the computer science turned my undergrad transcript into a minefield of crappy grades. I didn't have to because it didn't have any bearing on English. Rather than approach your varied experience as 'gaps', think of them as advantages. Find your thesis statement, which will answer the simple question: "Why should you accept me into your program with full funding?" The answer (thesis statement)" I would be a great addition to your program because I...., and then elaborate on why. Look at the program and how you fit into it. What can you bring to their table? What can they do for you? How can biotech apply to programming? How can your electronics experience apply? What do you want to do in the program and how does your experience help? You don't have "gaps"; you have advantages. It's not like applying for a job where you have to explain gaps in employment away in some manner, because employers seem to find unemployed people are icky for some reason. You're applying to learn. You have to explain to them that you're ready to be taught at an advanced level, that you have great credentials, and what they have to teach you. For every SOP you write, do some research and write yourself a brief analysis of the audience. Who is going to read it? The professor in charge of graduate studies and his/her committee. Read what they've published recently. Learn who they are. Write the SOP directly to them.

It's the Mastery v. Pedagogy approach. Up until recently, in most fields, it was assumed that a mastery of a field made one competent to teach in the field. Actually, there's still a lot of people who believe that. There's just no pedagogy. TAing in English for my masters was as enlightening as it was horrific. We had one day of orientation, half of which was filling out forms and browsing through the table of contents on the books we'd be using that semester (and we were only using them because they'd been ordered for those sections, later semesters book choice was up to the TA). After that, we took a 1 credit hour course called Topics in Teaching. We met for an hour each week to pretty much complain about how people spent too much time texting. It was totally run in the mastery paradigm. It wasn't until last spring, as an adjunct, that I got any help on creating an assignment sheet so the student could understand the assignment clearly and deliver it. Mastery paradigms just assume that this kind of things is common sense. It's not. My doctoral program promises to be helpful. In addition to three intensive TA orientation days by both the graduate school and the English department (my department), I have to take a 3 credit hour pedagogy course that will include writing essays, taking exams, and readings from the big guys in composition pedagogy. We'll also be assembling a teaching portfolio that includes a teaching philosophy. So I'm beyond excited about this. For TAs with little or no support, I recommend hitting the library for pedagogy books. Find some pedagogy texts in your field, in a field that logically supports yours, and in general. There's tons upon tons of composition pedagogy out there. English comp is huge with the pedagogy these days because universities are churning out students without any aptitude in writing. You can also look through past line schedules and find professors (not TAs) that taught what you're teaching and ask them for copies of syllabi, assignments, or general advice. It might seem weird for, say, a chemistry TA to read English comp pedagogy, but assignment design and assessment in composition is en vogue so there's a lot of info on it. There's also a Writing Across the Curriculum program in practically every university. The WAC people may not have time to help out, but it doesn't hurt to ask them if they have any sample assignments or assessments that you can have. That would be a generic "you", not at any specific person on the thread.