rising_star

I'm sure I've said this before but I save money mostly by not eating out and because I don't drink coffee (so no $3 coffees in the coffee shop for me!). I use my crockpot (or slow cooker) to cook meals that have 4-6 servings and then I portion out the leftovers either for future dinners, to take with me for lunch, or I put them in the freezer for later. This saves me sooo much money (and subsidizes my fresh fruit habit). I buy grains from the bulk section of the grocery store (granola is $2.49/lb or less [way cheaper than a box of cereal], brown rice is $0.99/lb, etc.). I'll make a big batch of brown rice and then use that throughout the week to go with the crockpot meals. I also sometimes make large casseroles and freeze the leftovers for future meals. Also, as of this past school year, I no longer have roommates. This means I spend ~$150/month more than I did when I had roommates. I found the savings by cutting back on other areas of my budget. But, I also found that since I'm not sharing a freezer, I have room for bulk-prepared meals. YMMV, obviously. All of this is to say that I survive just fine on a stipend of ~$16,000/year before taxes and student fees.

I always hate it when I see my name on the list. I'd stayed off of it for months!

I also don't have cable but do have Netflix and Hulu and the internet more broadly. I am a regular watcher of a few things and am a season behind on others. Regularly: Chopped, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Make It or Break It, Off the Map, In Plain Sight, Real Housewives of Atlanta, Real Housewives of Orange County, Next Food Network Star, Biggest Loser Season behind: House, Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Royal Pains, CSI, CSI: Miami, Eureka, Finally watching: The Wire, Treme, Glee I realize that seems like a ton of TV. But, to be honest, I watch a lot of it while traveling to pass the time.

Timshel, you can give comments on students' work without uploading documents with changes tracked.

Do you want to consider doing research in Honduras? If so, you'll probably want to look for programs that are strong in both medical anthropology AND Latin American studies...

I use our online course management system to post grades for everything except participation. I don't divide participation points up into specific days, I give students a more holistic score based on their overall performance in the course (which allows me to account for things like improvement during the course). I also include feedback with those grades so students have an idea of what they did well and where they can improve. I typically do *not* upload edited Word docs to students, though I know some people that do. I've found that students never look at those extensive comments (whether done in Word, Turnitin, or on paper copies that I return) so I only make them on request now. As a backup, I download the grades from the course management system to Excel about once a week to ensure that nothing is lost and that I have copies for my own records. When I used to lead discussion sections (4 sections, 20-25 students in each), I would keep track of their participation on a spreadsheet that had each student's name and the date listed. I brought that sheet (one sheet per section, because I listed all the dates for the semester on it) with me to class and I would try to take quick notes when a student made a good comment. But, sometimes that would be distracting so I'd end up filling it out very quickly in the 10-15 min after class. I transferred those to a gradebook on the course management system, which was what the professor required all of us to use.

You want to list the current contact information.

I think this is really discipline-specific. In my discipline, it would be outrageous to apply to 10 or 11 schools. I applied to 7 for my PhD, which was too many. Most of the people I knew were putting in 5 or fewer applications. FWIW, you shouldn't just increase the number of schools because you want to get in. It's not worth it to apply to 10 schools if only five of those are schools you'd be willing to attend. If there's no one to supervise your work, little support for your research interests, and/or you aren't thrilled about the location, don't spend the $100 it'll cost you to apply to that school. This is good advice. I would say, though, that your dream schools may not be as unrealistic as you think. Grad school is about fit more than it is about numbers so, if you can get the right fit, you can get in without 1500 GRE and 3.9 GPA. Yea, I feel the same way about the seven programs I applied to. I really shouldn't have applied to three of those schools. One was an unfortunate circumstance where I'd been in contact with the POI but didn't know him well enough for him to tell me that he was sort of on the market. In March, he accepted a job elsewhere (at a school I didn't apply to despite it having good faculty for my interests because of its location), which meant there was no way I was going to go to that school. The other two were good fits on paper but the atmosphere did not match my personality at all when I visited. There's a fourth school that I probably shouldn't have applied to due to weather... In other words, I should've only applied to 4 schools instead of 7. Waiting until September means you're waiting for professors to be back in town and at work, and for them to have a solid sense of how many students they have.

Don't do a program you're not excited about. It's as simple as that.

Just Me, I feel like you're too down on arts degrees and working artists. I have several friends that make their living as artists. In one case, that artist is contributing the same amount to the household income as her husband, who is an assistant professor. I'm not saying that my friends are the norm but, based on what I know about them and those they went to school with, they aren't exceptional either.

This varies. In my discipline, absolutely. You're going to need 3-5 people to form a committee anyway.

Yes, you should contact them. See any of the other discussions about contacting POIs or potential advisors. There are dozens of them. For example, see here:

If he is citing you, then he is acknowledging that the ideas are yours. I don't understand what else you want. It's the same as when you cite an argument or research study in your writing. Your advisor is citing you in conversations with others, not taking credit for your contributions, right? So do you want him to hammer people over the head with the idea that it was YOUR idea? I think you need to tell us specifically what it is you want.

21 books? Sure, I've bought that many or more in a semester. If you're reading a book a week in each seminar, you take 3 seminars, and each meets for 14 weeks, that's way more than 21 books. But, you may not want or need to buy all of them. As for Amazon, it's great. Sign up for the year of Amazon Prime for free for students so you can get things quickly (and facilitate your last minute holiday shopping). I generally use bigwords.com to compare prices. I'll also order from Barnes&Noble (and I used to order from Borders) if things were only available new because they usually have coupons for 30% or 40% off the list price. Also, check with your campus bookstore to see if they have any discounts available for graduate students.

If it's in your area of interest, take it. Look over the syllabus first to make sure the readings and discussions will help you. If they will, sign up. ALL courses have kinks in them, so don't let that keep you from taking something.

Eigen, the quota has always been there. I can't remember what the number is though.

I'm going to explain how things work in my current department. There are no TA positions for graduate courses in my department. Our graduate courses are all 500 and 600 in course number, but those numbers don't distinguish MA classes from PhD classes or anything like that. The courses also have under 25 students. In our department, an undergraduate course must have at least 50 students before there is a TA for that course. As for what TA-ing is, that varies. MA students are *not* allowed to teach their own courses. That is a university-wide rule that says that instructors of record must have a master's degree. MA students lead discussion sections, teach labs, and serve as graders. PhD students can do anything that MA students do or teach their own course, depending on departmental needs. Yes, exactly. My advisor will buy me drinks sometimes at happy hour or other social occasions but that doesn't mean I'm getting an A in his class or an easy pass on comps or anything like that. However, and again my university is strict about this, I would *never* let an undergraduate in my course (whose work I am grading at that time) buy me a drink or do any other favor in exchange for a higher grade. That would be completely unethical, just like it would be unethical for me to buy my advisor drinks so I can get an A. Does that make sense, TheSquirrel? I know exactly what you mean. (Also, Hi! We haven't talked in a while!) I did my MA straight out of undergrad. You might have expected (or at least it seems like TheSquirrel might have expected) that most of my friends would be fellow MA students or undergrads. The only undergrad I knew was the senior who was my roommate. My friends in the department were almost exclusively PhD students, though I was friends with a few MA students in another department. The people I still keep in touch with that I met during my MA are the PhD students, most of whom have now graduated. There are lots of reasons I wasn't close with the MA students during my MA but a big one was that we weren't in the same subfield so we didn't take the same courses. We also didn't have a lot in common. The PhD students were into the things I was into, like football.

Honestly, it seems to me like something you could frame by saying that you'd like to be kept in the loop on what your advisor is doing so that you can make sure your projects don't overlap with it and/or identify additional areas where you can contribute.

In both of the graduate departments I have been in, MA and PhD students take the same courses and there are no TAs for those courses. Certainly my department would never let MA students assign grades to other MA students if they don't let PhD students assign grades to MA students.

You seriously don't know what differences in where we are in life means? Often, it means relationship or parental status. I was thinking of outside the work/study environment. I go to coffee/lunch with people, out to happy hour, to just grab a quick beer, go to people's houses for dinner, etc. And, for the record, the profs do join us at times. Our department goes to happy hour on Friday after colloquium, and that consists of faculty, grad students (both MA AND PhD [i make the distinction only because you do]), and the speaker for that week's colloquium. You really want hypotheses now? Okay, I'll bite. For the same reason grad students talk amongst themselves about when and where to go for dinner or drinks. Because they want to? Because faculty want to hang out without grad students around just like grad students want to hang out without faculty around? Because they need to discuss a work-related issue in the evening? Because they want to form a band together? Because they like each other's company? Was that enough wild guesses for you? If not, I'm sure I--or someone else--can come up with a few more. I'm drawing a distinction between professor-undergraduate student relationships, not between professors and students more generally. Personally, I don't treat MA students any differently than I treat PhD students. All of them are my colleagues and are potential collaborators on research or conference papers. In my department, PhD students do not grade the work of MA students. Professors grade the work of graduate students, regardless of the student's level. PhD and MA students serve as TAs and they grade the work of undergraduates only. Honestly, I feel like this thread has taken a massive detour because of your questions, TheSquirrel. People have already answered your original question and given you feedback on how you might better present such an inquiry in the future. I really do think you should make decisions about friendships based on what it is you want, not what other people think, which you seem hesitant to do for some reason. If you are need additional opinions about whether you can or should befriend MA students, I recommend you consult more advanced PhD students and/or a mentor in your field. They should be able to help you with this.

Eigen, I think it might be a display thing on your end. All three of the symbols in your post are what I see as a dot, a star, and a gray star.

Sure, the research stays the same. But often journals will want you to focus your article in a particular way that most fits that journals focus, which can involve rewriting the literature review and introduction, tailoring the methods and discussion to a particular audience, and making sure that you have plenty of references to other articles published in that journal in your reference list. Making all of those changes can be a lot of work, which is why it's often suggested that you have a journal in mind when you're writing.

This varies. In my department, there are assistant, associate, and full professors that are all on the admissions committee and I highly doubt the assistant profs would do it if their opinions weren't valued.

Actually, there are some plenty clear rules at my university about graduate student interaction with undergrads and also faculty interaction with undergrads. We are strongly encouraged not to socialize with undergraduates, particularly those whose work we are--or will be--responsible for grading. I do have some friendships with undergraduates through some of the things I do outside of graduate school, but none of them are close friends, probably due to the differences in where we are in life. As a professor, I would have no problem socializing with MA students. In fact, faculty in my department (and discipline) socialize with all graduate students, regardless of whether they are MA or PhD students. They also don't really treat MA students who are not going on to a PhD different from those who are. I see no reason to act differently once I am a professor.

I'm not positive but here's what I've figured out. Blue dot - Thread with new posts since you last read it Blue star - Thread with new posts since you've last read it AND that you've posted in Those with nothing - No new posts since you last read it