rising_star

1) Don't write your own letter. It's a bad practice and people really shouldn't even ask for it. 2) Yes, take her up on the offer. The course is related to your interests and she must think of highly of you if she offered to write you a letter.

I wouldn't necessarily do it all at once. For multi-question assignments, I'll grade 1-4 questions at a time (depends on the length of each one), take a break, then grade other questions. That way you keep the consistency across questions but also give yourself a break. Or, make a quick cheatsheet/list of why you're deducting that you can reference later when you're more tired. The latter has the benefit of being something you could share with students if they want to know more about their grade or question your marking. I don't put grading off until the last minute. I try to do a little bit a day if I have a stack of essays. For example, last semester I had to grade for 60 students and for each essay they had 3 choices of which prompt to answer. So, day 1 I'd divide them based on the prompt, check Turnitin, and skim for obvious plagiarism issues. Then, after that, I'd do a quick skim of a few per prompt to get a sense of how they did and where I'll likely need to deduct. After that, I grade. I personally set a timer per paper because otherwise it's easy to get bogged down making lots and lots of corrections on a student's paper. The time is sufficient for reading, commenting, and writing the grade down. (For last semester, I used 6 minutes because papers were 2-3 pgs double-spaced and I needed to fill out a rubric. Any time left I used to check email, grab water, eat a snack, etc. And then after every 8, I took a longer break.) For me, this strategy works well but it's not for everyone. It took me a few semesters to figure out what works best for me and what I've ended up with is something that may not work for you. If you're literally leaving a pile of red ink, you might want to rethink your grading/commenting strategy. I try to give only big picture comments that summarize the key highlights and flaws at the end. In the paper, I tend to focus on things like missing evidence or citations, bad argumentation, or lack of a thesis statement. It There's so much I could correct but then it'd take me all day. Hence the timer thing to make sure I don't fix all their problems (there's a writing center for that!).

Yea, why not ask if you can collaborate or be a grad student assistant on his project without transferring to that program?

What is the point you're using the descriptive information to argue? Once you have that in mind, use it to structure and frame the descriptive info. Basically a literature review isn't meant to be an exhaustive recitation of the main points of every article in your field. It's meant to be a summary that builds up an argument (usually that we know A, B, and C, but what we don't know is D, which is really surprising and what the point of this study is).

Don't feel bad, I didn't get Mendeley either and totally gave up on it. I'm now at the point where I've really got to make a decision because I'm beyond the free storage part of Zotero so my stuff doesn't actually sync anymore, which is annoying when I'm working in my office vs on my personal computer. I can't convince myself that it's worth the (admittedly small) amount of money because I could probably find something free... Any ideas?

Thoughts are as follows (stated bluntly): No one really cares about your extracurriculars (aka, your fiduciary position). They might care about your being a tutor but, probably not. Assuming you want to stick with Middle Eastern Studies, one year of Arabic is not nearly enough. You'll be in an applicant pool with people with 4 years of Arabic, summer intensive programs, and in-country experience under their belt. You've said nothing about what your research interests are and how they fit with the program and faculty at those institutions. Applying to only 4 elite programs isn't a good strategy, especially given your overall GPA (which is on the low end for sure). And all of this is without being in your field, whatever that may be.

Honestly, you shouldn't be comparing your relationship with your advisor to anyone else's. I know my advisor has had and still has students he works better with or maybe likes more than me but, it's out of my control. All I (or you or anyone else) can do is produce the best work we can, incorporate the feedback we get, and improve. As for the classes, talk to your Director of Grad Studies or a more senior grad student to see if you can get some sense of why you're being asked to take 14 credit hours. It might be that you need these courses and they won't be taught before your exams. If not though, you might want to look into dropping one. Barring that, get better at skimming, try to combine projects such that an assignment for one class can be used for another (usually people don't frown on this at the grad level), and figure out where else you can cut back. You have to maintain your sanity, so keep the social time, whether it's with your cohort or with others.

Do you really want to be in a program that won't value the work you've done?

I wouldn't use Interfolio unless you have to. It gets expensive to have materials sent and, perhaps more importantly, you don't give your recommenders a chance to customize/tailor their letters for specific schools. That can hurt you, especially if other applicants do have those customized letters.

Why would it be too fluffy? If you used legal theories in a sophisticated way, it demonstrates your critical thinking, analytical, and writing skills, all of which are things you want to showcase in a writing sample.

I would use the Christmas time, to be honest. At least at my university, the entire university is closed for a week or so around Christmas and New Year's, which means that they do things like shut off the heat in buildings, close the library, etc. So there's really no point in being there.

They probably mean that you can get a assistantship through other places like Student Affairs (Housing, Student Union, Honors College), not another academic unit.

Have you looked to see if you could get one through another unit on campus? Given that you're in AZ, there are basically zero unions so wtncfft's last suggestion won't help you.

I think you should talk to your program's DGS about both the behavior of your p/a and the course you want to take before you make any rash decisions.

My desk at home or the one on campus?

Applying for funding sucks. But you have to do it. To get feedback, you might see if there's any sort of grants officer in the graduate school's office or your college office that can review your applications before you send them in and offer feedback. You might also see if there are any successful past applications that you can critically review and/or use as a model for your future applications. Hope this helps!

Brutal honesty ahead, feel free to skip: 9 months is a loooooong time to work on a single chapter and still need corrections. That's an entire academic year. If you work at that pace, it'll take 5-8 years to finish your dissertation, which nearly any advisor would find unacceptable without extraordinary circumstances affecting your work. Taking weeks to do revisions and then using that as an explanation for why you couldn't work on another chapter makes you sound unorganized and ill-prepared for the task at hand. At this point, you need to figure a few things out about yourself. How fast can you realistically write this dissertation? Why is it taking you so long to write chapters? Is it because you're still doing lit review and analysis? Do you suffer from writer's block? Are you letting distractions interfere with your work? Do you need to find better places to work where you can be more productive? These things are important for you to figure out before you go dashing off an email to either one of your advisors. If and when you do email your advisors, DO NOT MAKE EXCUSES. They're your advisors and they've heard every excuse in the book. And, even though you'll think you aren't making excuses, they (particularly Advisor 1) in all likelihood will think that's exactly what you're trying to do. This is, ideally, a situation where you would sit down with Advisor 1 to discuss his concerns about your work in a mature fashion. In that meeting you will listen and be respectful in an effort to better understand his expectations of the project and of you. You will not be defensive in any way or "stand up for yourself". This is about your work, not you personally, and if you want to finish, you'll need to know and understand the work your advisors are expecting.

If you get a traditional education degree, you should be able to get a job in any of the areas where TFA or TNTP are located since these areas are typically desperate for teachers.

Think of everything you want to cover. Write it all out. Then, delete about a third of it.

How or why could they stop you? The grad school will require that your degree be complete before you enroll in classes there.

You might also want to look into programs in area studies, geography, and sociology, depending on your specific interests and where faculty doing that research are.

Sometimes I've gotten books from the instructor, sometimes from the publisher, and sometimes paid out of pocket or held onto the library's copy for many, many months. It depends, in part, on the size of the class and the publisher whether you'll be able to get a desk/exam(ination)/review copy easily and quickly. Some publishers send them out within a week of your request and with minimal verification needed while others require enrollment information before sending them. Still others will let you keep the book for only a limited period of time unless you decide to order the book for your course and do so through the campus bookstore or another approved vendor.

I've taken a few grad/undergrad courses. I think, to some degree, their value depends on your background knowledge of the area. So, taking them when I was a first year MA student was very different than when I had to take one as a second year PhD student who had already completed a MA. That said, how the instructor handles it varies. In two grad/undergrad classes I took, the grad students had additional course meetings (in one class we discussed additional books, in another it was run as a journal club). The journal club class didn't have any other additional work for grad students so no research papers or in class presentations, but we did take the same in class exams as the undergrads in that course. In another, the grad students had to write a research paper, while the undergrads did not. So how the course operates will definitely vary based on what the instructor expects to get out of the class.

I'm all about the slow cooker meals: chicken cacciatore, chili, spaghetti sauce, soup (I love tortilla soup and black bean soup), coconut curry chicken Other easy meals: - Baked chicken (simply seasoned with salt, pepper, and rosemary) with a little white wine in the pan to keep it moist, baked potatoes (put in oven at same time but separate pan), some kind of veggie - Foil packets (boneless, skinless chicken, veggies, starch) - fried rice - macaroni and cheese (baked in oven, with veggies and/or meat) - healthy frozen meals (Costco sells these chicken and cilantro frozen wontons that are very healthy, for example) - beans and rice - large salad with beans, cheese, or another protein plus loads of veggies

Hahaha, we get basically no training at my PhD program. There's a university-wide mandatory TA orientation that's like 4 hours of stuff. There's also a required 1 credit course in my department that was basically useless. What I found useful though was going through the teaching center on campus. Ours offers graduate level seminars aimed at helping grad students understand pedagogical theory and how to teach. I mean, it makes sense to seek their expertise since they have PhDs in how to teach college students and experience helping professors and grad students from across campus and in various disciplines. So, yea, I learned more in the one semester course I took from them than I learned in the course from my department, the big orientation, and from convos with other students. The three biggest takeaways, if I had to distill them, would be these: 1) Chunking. Students attention span is about 8 minutes so don't lecture for any longer than that. 2) Don't try to write a whole test in a few days. The best thing to do is write a few possible questions after each class. 3) Reduce content. Write a syllabus with everything you want to cover, then reduce it by 1/4-1/3. We all try to cover too much content. But the broader conversation about how grad students learn how to teach is one worth having. Mastery of the content really isn't enough to make one a good teacher. And whether as a grad student or as faculty we'll be teaching things outside of our content areas so even content mastery may not be there. That's when it really helps/matters to have pedagogical skills and training. If you can find it somewhere around you, you should seek it out.