danieleWrites

I have epilepsy and like to go out into the woods. I wore medic alert stuff and always broke the chain, but now I've got an ice band (icedot.org) that just broke and needs replaced. Anyway, it's medic alert for people without medical issues, basically, but it's designed for cyclists to wear in case they wreck. Anyone can get one. It has a method for emergency services to contact the company with a unique pin so emergency personnel can get immediate medical information and emergency contact numbers. The card in the wallet is fabulous idea. I've made one for everyone in my family and stuck it in their wallets (and mine). Just because I have a band doesn't mean the emergency responder will know what to do with it. I keep my phone locked, so they would have to break the password to get into it.

I'm going to address the homesick thing because that seems to be the root of your problem. Don't let homesickness be what makes your choices for you. It is natural to miss home and the people you know the point of being miserable, even seriously depressed. Something is missing: what you're used to. Before you make any decisions, visit with your campus counseling center about how you're feeling. Counseling isn't just for people who need to spend a great deal of time in therapy. It's also for people who only need to speak with someone a few times to make sure they're making good decisions. You've just started the program, the people are great, the program is great, you're going out and doing things, but you're just feeling something missing, but you're not sure what. Give the program a shot. See how the full semester goes. If you do choose to leave the school for one closer to home, make sure you're doing it because that's the better choice for your future, not because you're missing home.

Not touching the teaching-isn't-valuable-for-hiring argument. That said, if you get the sense that teaching is going to be part of your hiring evaluation, keep a teaching journal that allows you to analyze what you've done over the semester, what worked, what didn't, what changes you'll implement, what things you've done that are new/original (or seem to be), and why you chose to do the things you do. At the end of the first semester, write a teaching philosophy statement and, at the end of each semester, tweak it with what you've learned. If your field offers pedagogy theory and methodology studies, keep an eye on it to some extent. Eyeball the abstracts on new journal articles about pedagogy in your field, if nothing else. The more teaching oriented the field, the more these pedagogy theories should support your teaching philosophy in your teaching philosophy statement. I wouldn't go totally crazy and put as much effort into this as you would your research, but do spend a few hours per semester reflecting on your teaching with an eye toward writing that teaching philosophy statement that some job openings might ask for. Keep a copy of all your syllubi and assignments that you develop in some way, for future reference. Make notes on why you developed the syllabus and assignments the way you did, why you developed the grading the way you did. If you assisted a professor rather than taught your own course, make those notes about why you believe the prof developed the syllabus/assignments in a particular way and why these ways were good/bad ideas, and what you might do differently. Like I said, a few hours per semester, not per week. Be casual about it, other than a teaching philosophy statement and your CV. How much this will help you depends entirely on you, your field, and your goals. Keep an eye out for pedagogy publication and presentation opportunities, as well. In some fields, you shouldn't bother because they're stuck on Shaw's idea that those who can do, those who can't teach. Other fields, this can be a great place to get yourself out there.

My kid just had a vehicle accident and this kind of brought things home with a bang. He's fine (just some minor scrapes and a bit of muscle strain), but his scooter is in many, many pieces. We live two hours away from him when there's no traffic. I left for grad school, so he did stay in his home community for college, where we have a large network of friends and acquaintances (no family). Luckily, my spouse was in town, and actually driving nearby when it occurred, so he was able to be on the scene in a few minutes. So, my advice? If you're new to an area, make an emergency plan. An, I just got hit by a bus, OMFG plan. Find someone, maybe make an emergency contact group out of your fellow no-family-in-town cohort, to be your go-to person/people until either your family can get there or you can take care of yourself. Someone that can take your bookbag from the scene of an accident and hang on to it until you can reclaim it, or you family can pick it up. Someone who your parents can call if they need help finding your hospital room, or getting into contact with someone at the university so they can deal with an extended absence. Sit down and make a list of what needs to happen if you get hit by a bus. Do some rough figuring, how long until a family member can show up and start taking responsibility for the things you can't do until you're out of traction? What needs, at minimum, to happen between you getting hit by a bus and your family member getting to your bedside? Do you have a dog that needs walking? A plant that needs watering? An experiment in progress that needs monitoring? TAing to cover? Food in the office fridge to be tossed? A cake to buy for an office birthday party? Library books that you left scattered on the road? Pre-plan for disaster. The plan will probably fall through in some fashion (most people don't get hit by a bus), but having an arrangement worked out in advance is smart. Particularly since you can put your local emergency contact's name alongside of your non-local emergency contact so someone can get there quickly.

I didn't get a new paper jitter until the seminar paper I had to write for a seminar course. I'm a writer by profession and avocation, so I've been spewing crap out for decades and never getting called on it for being crap (I have turned in waaaaay too many rough drafts as first drafts simply because I can make a gorgeous sentence but the proverbial slap in the face I got--an F with the option to revise--from an English prof who actually did his job with me is another story). I'm not at all nervous about writing. But then came the seminar paper. In grad school. In a life where publish or perish is carved over the gate rather than abandon hope, all ye who enter. New paper jitters would have been lovely. Instead, I got The Paper That Ate My Life. I was given an incomplete so I could complete the paper (it often happens in seminar courses, my prof told me), and by the time I'd gotten the paper completed, I had learned a significant portion of a related field because I'd mowed through the library trying to put off actually putting the paper together. I just knew that everything I was writing was factually wrong and I needed more research to make sure it wasn't. So when I finally get the paper done, I have a two hour conference with the professor so I could explain some things (including a bibliography that was fifteen pages long and nearly three-quarters of entries were in a different field) that she didn't actually know enough about to evaluate. I expected that because I'm doing interdisciplinary work without actually being in an interdisciplinary program, but not that much discussion. Moral of the story: instead of tying myself up in mental knots over my lack of knowing absolutely everything, I've told myself that it's okay to be wrong because I can always tweak the draft when someone points out that I'm wrong. I'm told it works in conferences, too. "I hadn't thought of that; if you want to give me email address afterwards, I'll look it over and get back to you."

Depends on the culture of your program. I wore a Darth Vader t-shirt and jean shorts to teach last Friday. Thursday, when I went to class, my t-shirt said, "Ask my about my AD/HD Highway to Hey a squirrel!" My Thursday class is a research methods course that grad students from several disciplines take every semester. There are two folks from the business school, one in public policy, and one in some profession blah blah blah that I didn't catch. The business school and professional blah blah blah wear formal business wear. Seriously, they're totally dressed to be an ADA on a Law & Order episode at any time. I'm a total shlub next to them. The public policy student is somewhere between business formal and business casual, more Sunday School Teacher Formal than anything. I consider dress to be text, ergo, the way one dresses is defined by the rhetorical situation: what your purpose for the text (persuasive, informative, entertaining---bearing in mind that all text is persuasive when accounting for ethos)? who is your audience? what is the genre (business school, art school, going to a concert, meeting the parents for the first time)? who is the rhetor (who am I supposed to be for the occasion)? There's also medium, but it's clothing and accessories, duh.

I cut my meat with beans. For example, if I'm making tacos for dinner, I'll use a can of black beans or pinto beans and 1/3 pound of beef instead of a full pound of beef. Not only is it cheaper, it's healthier, and has a more interesting texture. White beans for ground or diced chicken, and so on. I make a lot of meals that involve stir fry techniques, so this works out well for me. I make enough to store. I don't have a microwave. I know, say what?!?!?! We were going to get one, but we never did. We not only eat healthier, but cheaper. We have a toaster oven instead of a microwave, so those things that needed to be heated and we don't want to turn on the oven? Toaster oven. Microwaves do save time, but our food bill dropped when we quit buying microwave dinners and started making toaster oven dinners. This meant spending some money on glass storage containers, but that's actually worked out better because we haven't replaced them in years, unlike plastic ones (which can get seriously nasty). I do have a breadmaker and bread slicing knife and guide. I got the breadmaker at a garage sale for $5. It paid for itself in two loaves. The knife took 2 loaves and the guide took 5. But now, it's the cost of flour, yeast, sugar, and oil. It's actually easier to make bread than buy it and cart it home. We live close to the grocery stores we go to. One is four blocks away, so we often walk to it. My bus stop actually puts me halfway between the store and my house. Our kitchen has a tiny freezer and we don't have much storage space, so we don't stock up. I buy stuff at the store every few days. I get in a bit of extra exercise and the fact that I have to haul everything home by hand means that I don't buy extra stuff. The other store we go to is a mile away and we bicycle to it. Again, space restraints and the fact that a hill that belongs in the Alps as between that store and my house keeps us from overspending. I do wash my car at least once a month, more if its winter and they're salting the roads. I pay for the drive through part so I can get the undercarriage. I apply regular wax by hand at least once a quarter. Yes, it's cheaper not to, but only in the short term. We keep our vehicles for long periods of time, and maintaining the paint is just as important as maintaining every other part of the vehicle. Those hundreds of dollars saved on car washes are not worth the thousands of dollars in depreciation that goes with a fading or chipping paint job. We winterize *and* summerize our home, even though it's a rented duplex. We make sure the filters in the airconditioners and heater are kept clean. Twice a year to replace a filter that's expected to be in use all year (like for a combo heater/ac) and at the beginning of a season for one that's in use for a season (like a window ac). This means calling the maintenance guy in October and nagging until the filter is changed. Utilities are part of the rent, but if they go up, so will the rent. We put plastic over the windows. This cuts utility bills like crazy. We also make sure to get anything leaky fixed as soon as possible. Nag, nag, nag the maintenance man. Flu shots make a difference. The biggest saver of time and money has been cultivating entertainment and spouse-time tastes that involve doing things that don't cost ad hoc money. We bicycle out somewhere, have a picnic, and I always a bring a book. He'll nap, I'll get some paragraphs in before I fall asleep, too. We did spend extra money on really good bicycles, but we use them all of the time. Our community is bike-friendly. We go to free plays or shows. We (usually me) go to lecture series. We go to the farmer's market. We

Mine were a huge deal. They were from three professors who were familiar with my work and familiar with the part of the field in which I intend to focus my research. I provided my letter writers with writing samples (at least one from a class I had taken from them), my CV, a bio, and brief description of my research interests and reasoning. Of course, the program was small and they knew me pretty well, but having data on hand when they were composing these letters was helpful for them. The most difficult part of this for me was that the programs I applied to wanted sealed letters directly from my letter writers, so I had no access to what they wrote unless they chose to give me a copy. I never asked for a copy and I still don't know what they wrote in those letters. I honestly didn't want to know. Once the final deadline for turning these letters in had passed, I sent a thank you email to two of my letter writers; I had to wait for my third to get finished and sent in (late), and then sent a thank you. I wanted to do so before I knew anything from the schools, so that way I wouldn't be upset by the rejections I assumed I would have across the board. Anyway, these letters gave them an expert's evaluation of my suitability for the program and whether or not I could do the work that I was proposing to do in my SOP, or do the work in grad school, period. I assume that an outside opinion of my abilities, no matter how presumably partisan, was a necessary step in considering whether or not to offer me a spot in the program and funding to go with.

Contractual loopholes exist. If you got a W2, you probably violated the no-outside-jobs clause. If you get a 1099, you may or may not have, depending on the wording of the contract. If you got paid under the table, yeah. If you have to turn in a FAFSA, the school will know how much money you earned. The first thing you should do is read the contract you signed carefully. I can't imagine how a web-based employment service is in competition with biology, so it's unlikely that you've violated any non-compete contracts (read your contract). By working a job while being in school, you may have violated the contract. You may only violate it if you're working a job while being in school and doing assistanceship work. Read the contract. It will explain it to you. The second thing you can do (but only if you feel it's safe for you) is wander into your DGS office and inquire about the future. If I'm not enrolled in classes next summer and my stipend gets cut again, is it against the rules for me to get some temporary part time jobs during the summer? Like working with a temp agency? I burned through my savings this summer and I need to make some plans in case this comes up next year. Personally, I wouldn't use a site like that. I think that many grad students that I know would use that kind of site, though. As to whether or not you should pursue it? I have no idea what's right for you or what your contractual obligations are. The problem will be finding out what kind of companies will use a site like that.

According to ETS, GRE scores are good for five years. Academia prefers new stuff, but scores that are taken during the calendar year shouldn't be frowned upon (YMMV depending on program and discipline). For most programs, the GRE isn't a very big factor in the application process. Your application materials are. Aside from the subject test, the GRE tells them nothing about your scholarship in the field. I would recommend taking the test early enough so that if you must retake the test, you have time to do so (this includes finding an open spot to register for on test day). There is a waiting period for a retake. And people often do retake the test for a variety of reasons. I know someone who had to retake it because she ran over a frog on the way to the testing center and cried her way through the first part because of the frog and then the rest because of stress.

You mention two things that struck me as odd. The first is that your MFA program leaves you with the impression that creative writing isn't a hobby, but a Life (capital letters Life). The second is that you're not sure you want to devote your life to just one interest. I know a lot of MFA graduates. A lot. They are devoting their lives to teaching composition courses as adjuncts because the jobs that utilize the MFA are not thick on the ground. Not all MFAs adjunct or instruct, but the degree is remarkably worthless, career-wise. Creative writing is whatever the creative writer needs it to be in his or her life. If creative writing is a hobby for you, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you have the money to spend on an MFA and no real ambition to use that MFA for a creative writing focused (writing poetry or short stories as opposed to creating ad copy or greeting cards/author v. industry, as it were), then the only question to answer is whether or not an MFA program will do something for you personally. Will you get something out of it? If you feel the program is right for you, but the attitude is a stumbling block, then stay in the program and make your adviser and instructors aware that you feel a sense of hostility and rejection toward your vision of the place creative writing has in your life. Your program is probably, like every other program, looking for graduates to brag on, hence the pressure. However, your program should still be sensitive enough to your goals as a student to not alienate you. To be fair to the program, they may be playing the take-it-seriously card in order to try to elicit better work. Quitting is viable. Ultimately, what it comes down to is what your plans are for the MFA, should you stick with the program and get the degree, and whether or not you're better off sucking it up and getting the degree. Most people featured in the literature books we make college students buy? They don't have MFAs. That's a relatively new invention. There is nothing wrong with writing as a hobby. Emily Dickenson composed entirely as a hobby, for herself. It wasn't Her Entire Life. She's one of our greatest poets. Anne Broadstreet. I can name a ton of others. What it comes down to are the answers to a few questions: how does and MFA fit into your future goals? why are you getting an MFA? is the program helping you become a better writer? if you quit this program now, are you looking to enter another MFA program in the future, or a different graduate program? Full disclosure: my MA was in creative writing; my PhD program is not.

It made life interesting! The thing that always got me was the flash rate in flourescent light fixtures, the light bulbs with the long tubes, particularly when we had to do work with computers. I literally could not do it. I have tonic-clonic and absences seizures. If I'm not mistaken, myoclonic seizures are subject to status epilepticus. However likely status epilepticus is for an individual with epilepsy, first aid for seizures instructions (which each professor should have given to them before the first class meeting, if possible) should include a when to dial 9-1-1 because the epilepsy just got life-threatening. The thing that helped me the most was being proactive. I met with professors during office hours the first week of school with a typed sheet that I made as professional looking as possible, kind of brochure-like or care sheet like, that used information that I could cite from the epilepsy foundation. This made the look and feel of the thing that much more important. No one is immune to rhetoric. I would be very open about my seizures because a seizure can be a very public and very scary event. Never bothered me much (I didn't notice at the time), but it freaked my classmates out. Most of my seizures were absence seizures, so I just seemed extra spacey to them. I had to make it clear from the beginning that it wasn't that I hadn't done the prep-work for the class, but that I was having a seizure. It also helped to do what I could to manage my work-load. If a syllabus said I had a paper due at mid=term, I would be in the prof's office first week of class asking to start on that paper as soon as possible because mid-term stress would mean an ADA accommodation. I never took exams with the class; I told them that I would be very disruptive should I have a seizure during the exam. I had that happen my first semester. Over 100 people had to be given the opportunity to retake the final exam because I left it up to the professor to decide if I should take the exam with the class or elsewhere. Professors with large classes will choose the path of least resistance. I think my get-the-work-done-before-the-problem-starts approach to dealing with the professors helped them see it as epilepsy rather than malingering. A professor or two, in my time, had to be dealt with on a different level. Absence seizures were daydreaming to them. One publicly humiliated me in class, so I returned the favor. Tenure does not protect them from anti-discrimination and hazing. He was an odd duck. Once the snarling was done, he turned out to be my favorite professor. My worst problems were left behind in undergrad (other students in large classrooms that would not give up a tonic-clonic-friendly seat). Mostly, I think grad school so far has gone so well for me because I went to office hours and I worked with the professors to adjust the course schedules to best fit my seizure thresholds and their preferences.

Headphones plugged into something wouldn't be rude, even if you don't have any music playing. I used to play Gregorian chant over mine very, very quietly. As an introvert, it turns out that I'm a fabulous listener (who knew?) once people figured out that my weird wasn't that creepy. This meant that I had to set some boundaries with office mates. Some just can't/don't realize they've crossed boundaries, so headphones were a clear signal that I was in my own little world. Ear protection, like the plastic ear muffs they wear on shooting ranges, now that would be rude. Headphones say I'm in my own little world. Muffs say your noise is not welcome. Even if those muffs are super effective.

My process: Take stock of myself. What am into? What do I need from the full complement of faculty in a program? What do I need from faculty that would fill the role of advisers, mentors, etc.? What do I want to do with my scholarship? How much help do I need to get through the program? What things must a location offer for my spouse. Use that to make a list of minimum criteria that a school, its program, and its location must meet in order for me to get along there. (This is where I defined fit--based on minimum need, not want.)Read a lot critical articles in the areas I'm interested in and in areas related to my interests, and then compile a list of people to follow up on. I was not looking for a mentor-figure, but for people who were doing exciting scholarship and could handle what I want to do (since this requires a mixture of literature and sociology, I was looking for flexibility in thinking rather than someone working with the same theories or authors). I knew that not everyone on the list would be faculty or faculty involved in a PhD program, but it was my beginning.Find the schools that 1) employed these people and 2) had a PhD program in literature and a minimum of a master's program in sociology so (I need, at minimum, a methodology course). or the schools from which that these people got a PhD (lit and soc requirements, too).Look at school requirements to reject any that I didn't meet (weirdly, enough, none of them despite my less than stellar GPA); and to reject any that did not allow me to take a few courses in sociology.Look over dissertations by recent graduates to see the quality of scholarship coming out of the school. Dissertations are supposed to represent the best work of the student, so if the program is putting out junk, it's not a program I'm into. I didn't expect to find a lot of junk, and didn't. I did reject a few schools because the super-majority of dissertations were lighter on theory than I was comfortable with. And this was only because my interests are theory-heavy, not because the quantity of theory is a measure of quality scholarship. I did not use dissertations to gauge fit in any other way.Stalk faculty! This step is dual purpose. First, to find programs that had enough faculty that were doing things within my interests or related enough to my interests that I would have a range of people to work with. Second, to makes notes to tailor my SOP for each program. While I had (and still have) no idea which people read my application, I did hope that whoever read it would be able to connect my stuff with people in the department.Because I didn't have enough sense to do it during step 6, rank programs in order of the ones I was most interested in/most useful to me.Take list of schools and their locations to my spouse and have him veto the ones that were in locations he absolutely could not do, and asterisk ones that he could live with, but would prefer not to. He vetoed everything in New England except Yale because it was Yale and he'd rather suffer the fires of hell (which is apparently all of Connecticut) than have me give up an opportunity like Yale). I accidentally forgot to apply. Oops. I should note that I decided, in advance, that I would only reject schools where it was clear that I couldn't get in due to GPA or GRE scores. The big names can't tell me yes if I don't give them the opportunity, right?Re-order the list because it did not occur to me that there would be a list with asterisks when I was doing step 7. First part/top of list list, I ranked the ones my guy was okay with in order of most interested (my preferred four schools were there anyway, which was very cool), to least. Bottom of the list, I ranked the asterisked schools.Found out application costs, including transcript costs. Figure out how many schools I could afford to apply to the first round, and apply to the ones at the top of my list. The list was put aside for next round, in case I didn't get in.After that, it was creating my application packet for each school and spending a lot of money on transcripts. I have credits piled up in several colleges. Ouch. I got into my top choice. College ranking guides played no part in my decision. The collective ability of their graduate students to demonstrate skills at the GRE was not something I found useful. The only, and I emphasize only role the concept of prestige played in my process to choose programs to apply to was to not let prestige stop me from applying to a school. I firmly believe that the PhD level, it's the work a student puts into the education that's important because the work is what gets published, gets put into conferences, and so on. If the program has opportunities for research and publication, conferences, etc., then it's good enough to shine. Sure, having Harvard on the diploma will make a difference, but not as big a difference as doing great work in a compatible program will.

In addition to the other excellent advice given about approaching your new roomies, I would add that you should have some strong reasons (more than one) to rearrange a kitchen. It's one thing to organize canned goods into a usable order, or to put saucers to the left of the plates because that would make the plates easier to get out of the cabinet. It's another thing to move things to different cabinets because that will disrupt the habits and patterns the other two have built up over two years and you'll likely find resistance to that. If you're doing minor reorganization, such as grouping crackers with crackers and cookies with cookies or Roomie A's snacks with Roomie A's snacks and Roomie B's snacks with Roomie B's snacks (and you've helpfully provided bins/dividers/something) in the exact same location, just do it because these things will still be where your roomies expect them to be, just organized. If your shifting things to different cabinets or shelves, you should ask if that's okay and have a reason other than that's where you're used to things being. As for cleaning? You're either going to have to get used to their level of cleaning or be prepared to do it yourself for the rest of your time with them. They might pick up after themselves a bit more, but if they're content with how they live, they aren't going to change that. If you don't mind doing the cleaning now, but expect them to start doing your level of cleaning later and they don't, you're going to resentful and angry for doing all the work in your shared space while they just sit around or go out and have fun after contributing to the mess. Instead of taking on the cleaning yourself, call a meeting and ask what their expectations are as to cleaning and specific chores (everyone uses the same shower, who cleans it and how often, for example) and how they're to be assigned and what consequences should happen if someone should "forget" or "not have the time" to do an assigned chore and someone else has to take up the slack.

First: yeah, it was unethical and uncool of Kirk to cheat on the Kobayashi Maru. He failed to learn the lesson the test was designed to impart. Further, failing the test was required to "pass" the test. Fact of the matter is that no win situations do happen in battle and it's better for someone to learn to fail, and live with the trauma of that failure, in a safe environment where no one gets hurt, than to try to learn to live with failure. Not that the Kobayashi Maru would do what it was supposed to do. Seriously, Spock? It's not like there's a vaccine for PTSD! Second: OP, you invoked oppression and justice in terms of a test. I will invoke a man who explained the ethics of dealing with injustice and oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, King wrote: "One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." While this seems to hold your position, that it is appropriate to cheat on an unjust test as there is no moral responsibility to obey the rules of the unjust test, you will note that King wrote this while he was in Birmingham city jail, and he was in this jail because he broke the very unjust laws of what we in the USA refer to as the Jim Crow South. King believed that people have a legal responsibility to obey unjust laws (a legal responsibility to not cheat on an unjust exam). For King, and I agree with him, this means that he had a moral responsibility to break the unjust law and a legal responsibility to accept and submit to the legal consequences of breaking his legal responsibility to obey the unjust law. If you truly believe that the GRE is an unjust tool of oppression, then you have a moral responsibility to "break the law" of the exam, that is cheat, AND you have a legal responsibility to face the consequences for "breaking the law" of the exam, that is cheat, by informing the place that proctored the exam that you cheated and accepting the consequences for it. If you cheat without submitting to the punishment of the law, you have done nothing to change the oppressive status of the GRE. If you feel that you are unfairly oppressed and your human rights have been violated by the unfairness of the GRE, and you feel you have the moral responsibility to do something about the unfairness and oppression, that means that your moral responsibility does not stop with cheating the test for personal gain. That means that you must cheat the test for social gain, which means that it must be publicly clear that you have cheated and you are willing to face the consequences of cheating in order to make it known that the test is oppressive and unfair so that it can be changed. Otherwise, you clearly show that you do not believe the GRE to be immoral, but rather, a difficult stumbling block that you couldn't overcome without cheating, so you must now throw out words like oppression and equality in order to justify your own unethical behavior. Since you haven't fessed up to ETS that you cheated, and there's nothing in the wind (try Twitter! GRE haters are everywhere!) about rising up against the oppression of a test that does nothing but measure the ability of a person to pass the GRE, then I assume that you, OP, are trying to make yourself feel better about cheating because you know that cheating for personal gain is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

My interest is in research, but the ultimate goal is pedagogical in nature. And it's literature with a secondary emphasis in comp/rhet.

This is a problematic question to ask because track/emphasis matters. Comp/rhet is as interested in pedagogy as it is research. Literature has little to offer in terms of pedagogy, so research opportunities take up most of it (I've never been to a lit class that mentioned pedagogy, let alone offered the opportunity to work with it). Creative writing doesn't have much interest in either. YMMV, of course. Anyway, pedagogy = research. If pedagogical work is not backed up by research, it's just opinion based on personal experience.

I've gotten a bunch of excellent help with disability services at my grad campus. I'm epileptic and have ADHD, so I'm a two'fer. While my epilepsy was not controlled, I had problems with my profs because they couldn't understand why I couldn't always come to class, and these absences tended to cluster around midterms and right after Thanksgiving. Stress = seizures. The folks at the disability center, once I asked them to intervene and signed a ton of paperwork (it seemed), were able to help me intercede with these professors. Anyway, these days, I get precisely what I need from disability services and they do a good job. I haven't noticed a bit of difference in the way they treat me from undergrad to grad.

I've ended up using three different google accounts for a planner because I have to make my schedule clear to a "let's go out and do something" restless extrovert that I'm married to. I use google calendar (from my academic email account) to schedule appointments with students for conferences, so I don't put personal things there that I don't want them to see. I use my personal gmail account for that. I have a household gmail account for things that involve household things. I use tasks lists on the google calendar to manage my to do lists and stuff, in conjunction with scheduling time on the calendar itself. I used to do this all on a combination of paper and outlook, but it's sooooo much handier to have my guy sync all three of my calendars so I don't have to constantly tell him what I'm doing.

Thanks for the link Telkanuru! I'm kind of boring. I use a combination of zotero, dropbox/googledrive, and Adobe XI (freeware version). Adobe XI has a range of annotation tools and I store the annotated file on dropbox/google drive so I can access it from any device. I use zotero to organize my search. If there's a way to get annotated pdfs into zotero, that would rock, but I don't know how to do that if there is.

Residency is a funny thing based on the laws of the two states involved. For people going to school, this generally means that you have a residence (leasing a room qualifies) for about 9 months per year in the school's state, and about 3 months in your state of origin. Each state has laws defining what residency means for 1) tax purposes and 2) voting. Changing residency doesn't immediately mean getting a driver's license. It can mean nothing more than moving into a place that you intend to spend 75% of your time for the next 2 to 6 years. The place to check about residency rules is generally the home state's and the school state's department of revenue (or where ever they locate their tax laws). One thing that most state have in common is the idea of intention. If you establish a residence with the intention of staying there permanently, you must change your residency (change driver's license, voter registration, vehicle tags, and so on). If you must file taxes, and you don't change residency, you will have to file taxes in both states. You should get all taxes paid back from the school's state because you are not a resident. This means you may have to pay taxes to your home state. As far as car insurance goes, they don't care what's on your driver's license. They charge based on the home address where the vehicle is most often parked. This means the place you live when you're at school.

It's difficult to say. 15 page papers generally (discipline mileage will totally vary) are "conference" papers. 20 to 25 page papers are "journal" papers. Anything over that are "thesis" papers. Different disciplines have different requirements, of course, but these are some ballpark numbers for genre. As far as a lower limit goes? If you have an outstanding 15 page paper, a school with a maximum of 20 pages isn't going to freak out. If there is a minimum number of pages, that's different. Don't submit less than the minimum. For a school with a 30 page limit, instead of submitting one 15 page paper, submit two papers. I think half of the required writing sample isn't a good plan. If there is not expected length requirement, submit something that is of conference paper or journal article length. The key isn't page length so much as it is a good read. A 22 page page-turner will go over better than a 20 page meh paper if the limit is 20 pages. The purpose of a writing sample is so that they can actually see your best scholarship in action. The length limits are so they don't get a bunch of theses (reading 50 to 100 75-page samples would sooooo suck). The minimums are likely set in place because short papers are unlikely to show personal scholarship so much as they show a student's response to what was learned in class. If you can cut down your 60 page paper into a 25 page paper and still show excellent scholarship, go for it. Otherwise, you're better off submitting two papers instead of one.