rising_star

You'll be fine. When the rest of your cohort arrives, you can be there go-to person for where to get a cheap drink, find good ice cream, or get good food late at night. Yes, you'll be starting at a different time than them, but that might also make it easier to connect to the current grad students there. Be willing to go out with people after your time in the lab or on the project if they ask. If someone invites you for lunch, coffee, or dinner, say yes whenever possible.

Talk to the POIs at the UC school to see where their students are now working. If they're working at companies you'd consider, then you should be fine.

Yale FES is very prestigious, especially if you want to go into an environment-focused field. I would go with whichever school offers better/any funding since they're both great choices.

They're probably combining Stafford loans and Grad PLUS loans.

For a master's, pick the one with the better community. For a PhD, go to the one that will make you the best scholar and give you the best chance at securing a job, which sounds like the first program from your description.

It's probably impossible to change the GPA of your degree once you've graduated. Also, why waste time taking undergraduate courses you already took?

Sure, but I also never worked more hours than were in my contract and I think that would be true of many TAs.

Sean, it's hard to say whether it's too low without knowing the cost of living.

That would depend entirely on the wording of one's contracts. All of mine had 20 hours of work per week or less written into them and made it explicitly clear that I was not a full-time employee.

Try to set aside 10% of your paycheck for a combination of savings and retirement. You want a rainy day fund for emergencies (car repairs, you get sick, animal gets sick, relative dies and you need a last minute flight home, etc.). But, any money you can save toward retirement now would be helpful long-term. For most grad students, a Roth IRA makes the most sense since you can put in after-tax dollars and you're unlikely to make that little money again.

Have you considered trying to get a job in finance or for a microfinance organization and then returning to school with some work experience under your belt?

Graduate students typically do not pay FICA. This sucks in the sense that you aren't contributing to social security but is fine if you believe social security will be insolvent by the time you're of an eligible age.

I would apply now so that you don't end up without any funding at all.

It does. There are several in the Political Science, History, English, and Sociology forums. There are probably more who lurk and don't post simply because the questions people ask are not things they can or should be answering.

Whether or not it is allowed depends on the specific terms of the contract you sign with that program. Some programs don't allow any outside work without permission. Others have a blanket prohibition on outside work. There's also questions about time and dedication as you may find it difficult to balance your graduate school responsibilities, research program, and an outside job.

How can you decouple experience and development? It is the additional experience that contributes to the development one sees (and experiences) going from college to graduate school. Again, if you aren't expecting there to be much development in you, as an individual, then why even do a graduate program? Part of graduate school is about growing and developing, and that happens from your first day there even if you took a grad course or two in undergrad.

I would look for opportunities on the TAMU Wildlife & Fisheries Job Board. Unpaid volunteer experiences may or may not actually give you the experience you're looking for.

MAPSS is really expensive. If you think it's your language skills that are holding you back, then you should do defer the OSU acceptance and do everything you can to improve your language skills in the interim. Would you and your partner be willing to move to Russia so that you could teach English there and strengthen your Russian language skills? Or, are you willing to sacrifice and do a summer intensive program in Russian this summer, combined with additional language courses during the upcoming academic year to strengthen our skills? Both of those seems like better options than taking on $75K in debt for a one year program. I don't know OSU's ranking in history so I can't comment on the prospects. What I do know is that academic jobs in Russian history have been extremely scarce the past several years. I have several friends who are Russian historians and they often talk about how there might only be 6-8 job ads in their field for tenure-track positions in any given application year. And that's ignoring the location of those programs or the type of institution. If you look at h-net, you'll see what I mean. There were a few more posted in the fall but, this will give you a good sense of what I mean. If your goal is any sort of academic job in Soviet/Russian history, you need to go to a top 10 program in that subfield for sure. Before deciding on OSU, check on the recent placement record, not of the program, but of the specific person you would be working with. Check to see if their recent graduates are even employed, first and foremost. Then, you can consider whether those jobs are the jobs that you would want. Good luck!

Do you want to be happier for 5 years or have the chance to be happier for much longer by having better job opportunities in the future? That's a serious question that only you can answer. Because taking the risk now and going to School B may not pay off when you're on the job market and you may then find yourself having to make tough choices about where you're willing to live and where you can even find a job.

Actually, I think being a faculty member who advises prospective grad students gives me qualifications but I realize those are meaningless. I wasn't posting as an administrator. When I do, I'm pretty clear about that. But I didn't realize that being an administrator meant that I was never allowed to express an opinion on posts. If that is somehow now the case because you, constant_wanderer, have decreed it so, then I'll just go delete about... 3950 of the posts I've made here since 2006. But not really. If you aren't happy with the idea that moderators/administrators also have brains and opinions, you're welcome to request an account deletion and stop participating here. Note that this is not me saying that you should or must do that. I'm just putting it out there as an option if you are discontented. I wasn't trolling. If you check my first post, you'll see that I offered a genuine comment about how being a college senior and being a 1st year graduate student may seem similar now but may not once one is actually in graduate school. I have yet to see anyone take up that aspect of either my comment or the original post. It has occurred to me that this could be a disciplinary difference and perhaps the first year of psych grad school is like being a college senior. If someone could address that, I'd actually be interested now that I'm mulling it over. It would certainly be helpful to the students I talk to who are concerned that grad school will be much harder than what they've done thus far. If there's concrete evidence that, at least in psychology, taking one grad course in college and taking a full load of grad courses as a 1st year grad student is the same, I'm sure many (both here and who I advise) will be grateful and relieved by that information. To further address the original post, let me add the following. Are the graduate courses you took related to your interest? If so, then taking them helps show the adcom that you have done what you can to prepare yourself for graduate work in the field. Were courses with the same or similar content available at the undergraduate level? If so, then taking those at the graduate level is evidence of your commitment and dedication, as well as your willingness to challenge yourself. My guess is that some of the advanced stats might not have been available at the undergraduate level. If you have that training, that may make your required methods courses easier as a graduate student, which again can look good to a program. They probably aren't going to go "Wow! Ze took XXX as an undergrad! Admit them immediately!" but they are going to consider the training you got as additional preparation that can make you qualified for the program. Taking those courses and having a low GPA might not be enough to get you in. But, having taken them will also make you a better graduate student once you are in a program. If you continue to take grad courses while working as a lab tech, you may be able to transfer 6-9 credits into whatever graduate program you ultimately enroll in, which can also help you out in terms of time and being able to take what you want and need to take once in a program.

You asked if there was a significant difference between a college senior and a 1st year grad student. My answer has been, and will be, that yes, there is (or, if there isn't, there should be). College seniors do coursework and go home. They may participate in a research project on the side or work as a RA but that is not the same as being a graduate student who is expected to be working on classes and research for 40-60 hours each week. The rigor is different. The expectations are higher. I took grad/undergrad courses in grad school and the graduate students were always expected to do more work and to do so at a higher level. Regardless of what you may think, it is different because you will be graded differently. What I meant in my post earlier is that you seem insistent that there is no difference. If there really were no difference, then all college seniors would be encouraged or even mandated to take graduate courses before completing their bachelor's. Or, the first year of grad coursework wouldn't exist because it'd be assumed that everyone covered that with the same rigor in college. Neither of those exists currently at most US grad schools, which is why your assumption is faulty. That you insisted upon it even after I said that my experiences as a grad student directly contradicted that and after you have an advisor suggesting otherwise indicated to me a belief that you know better than everyone else. If you want to now say that's not the case, that's fine. But, you posted here to question the advice given to you by an advisor and you posed your question to other applicants, rather than other faculty where it might be better directed. I thought I was being helpful as one of the more senior members of this board who has BTDT in terms of grad school but I can now see that wasn't what you were looking for. It strikes me that perhaps you just wanted people to affirm what you've already decided about the utility of graduate courses, about your advisor's advice, and about the lack of differences between college and the first year of grad school. I wish you the best of luck in whatever path you pursue. I do hope though, that you don't tell people in whatever grad program you go to that there's no difference between being there and what you did as a college senior as people may not take kindly to hearing that.

I disagree having been an ambitious undergrad planning to go to grad school and then, a few months later, being the 1st year student sitting in multiple grad seminars. But hey, it's good to know that you already know it all, TenaciousBushLeaper. Since you do, why even ask the question?

A thesis does more than just review the literature. You need to make an argument and then back it up with empirical evidence. A case study or two of businesses that have used CSR to generate brand equity is probably your best approach. Talk to the lecturer or whomever is supervising this thesis again about what it is you need to do. You might also want to read other theses that have been completed in your department to get a better idea of what is expected.

DON'T DO IT!!! Take a year or two to seriously improve your application then reapply.

It really depends on the program. In my PhD program, 6 credit hours of coursework were the minimum if you had a TA position. In my MA department, 12 credit hours was the minimum, though there were some fluff things you could register for to help you get there. In my MA department, both MA and PhD students that were TAs tended to take 3 seminars a semester. In my PhD department, some people did 2 seminars a semester, some did 3. It depended somewhat on people's interests, as well as what was being offered and if one wanted to do independent studies. As GeoDude! has said, a lot also depends on what sort of TA assignment you have. I took 3 grad seminars while leading 4 discussion sections and grading for almost 100 students one semester and I don't really recommend that.