rising_star

WHOA! There are LOTS of people that fund their undergraduate education through scholarships, not by paying for it out of pocket. Furthermore, many of the graduate degrees people on here are pursuing are not going to translate into getting a higher-paying job. So, why would you pay for 4-7 years of school when your potential earning power will likely not increase? I don't know about you, but I would study the subject I love independently while working full-time if I didn't have funding.

Totally OT but elsewhere, it's been debated and discussed about when is the appropriate time to have children. Many female academics think grad school is a better time because your schedule is more flexible than it will be once you get an academic appointment.

We've discussed this on a few other threads and generally, the answer has been no, it's not appropriate.

Not to overly alarm people, but it's worth noting that there are plenty of other states where the universities are in trouble. Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New York spring to mind. At state universities in any of these states, funding may not be as generous as it was in the past due to the lack of state funding. This, of course, will vary from one university to the next and one department to the next. emgem, it's difficult to say how the specific departments you're interested in will be affected. I'm not at a UC, but I know my department is planning on admitting fewer fully funded students, though the total number of offers made may be the same as it was in years past. Will that be half? Don't know yet. The budget crunch was already apparent last year, in that not all incoming students were guaranteed funding for the duration of their program. My guess would be that the number of students fully funded for the full program will be about 4/9ths of what it was last cycle. This is a completely uneducated guess though.

Why not? Those same TA's are often the ones teaching and grading in undergraduate courses, thus directly influencing the grade a student receives on his/her transcript... And I say this as a TA that handles all the grading for an upper-level course that is writing intensive (ie, 85% of their grade comes from take-home exams and essays). (FWIW, other students in my department are instructor of record on intro and upper-level courses and I have been in the past.) So is your argument that it's okay to trust a TA's judgment when she or he is working for the university and being lowly-paid but not when she or he is working for ETS part-time but likely at a much higher hourly rate?

Talk to your department's business manager. S/he will know what you need to include. Also, look at other people's budgets to see if you left anything out. I know for my research, I would include necessary equipment (digital voice recorder, digital camera with underwater casing, data analysis software) if possible. Oh, and a cell phone if you'll need it. It's really hard to say what your budget might need without knowing what your research is.

Define "frequently".

It really depends on what kind of grant you're writing. Is it for summer research funding? For dissertation funding? For a post-doc? Of course it also depends on what agency you're applying to... I second the above recommendations to contact past recipients to see if you can read their grants (and these might be online already, depending on the funder), talking to past winners, reading everything you can find on the internet, and working closely with your adivsor since s/he should know more about this than you do.

100% agree with this.

I would go to the funded program. What matters is going to be the conference presentations you give, the papers you write, the networking you do, etc., not strictly the name on your diploma.

I SO need to start using this. My discipline is hard enough to explain, and it's hard to explain how my research fits within it and isn't anthropology. Or I could go back to the literal meaning from the Latin...

Alton.

Not for graduate school. All graduate students--regardless of their age--are considered "independent" for FAFSA purposes...

This is one reason why I advocate fostering pets, either dogs or cats. If the rescue group is large enough, they'll be able to find someone else to temporarily watch the pet for you while you're out of town, whether it be for holidays or over the summer. Case in point: I currently foster a dog, and the rescue group knows that come May, I'll need to take a break from fostering while I do my summer research. Then, when I come back in the fall, I'll foster another animal.

Hey, you know what? Even us young kids drink with faculty! And have friends older than us! Some of that vacillation will ease when you do the happy dance of your first acceptance, trust me.

You'll be eligible for Stafford loans either way.

All of this is written from my perspective as a current grad student. I probably would've written quite different responses when I was applying. This is something that everyone should do. You want to know if the stipend is liveable or if students are struggling to make ends meet, if there are problems with the program/university, etc. A visit is best to find this out but otherwise, try to have a frank phone conversation with someone rather than doing it over email. (But you can definitely set up the conversation over email.) 100% agree with this. I would NOT give out inside department info or dirty little secrets to someone that I don't know, and I definitely would not over email. Moreover, I'm far more likely to give out detailed information to someone that has already been accepted and is trying to decide where to attend rather than those who have applied but may or may not be accepted. I did the same thing that fuzzylogician did when I applied, talking to current graduate students when I visited programs and, for the program that I couldn't visit, over the phone and IM. I had great conversations with people and learned a lot about programs. Though, to be said, I could tell fairly quickly on some visits that the program wasn't the right place for me. I agree that you want to know these things but, unless you have friends in the program, it's unlikely you'll find out these things via email from a random person picked off the list of current graduate students. I can always tell who finds me that way, in part because my list of interests on the department website are out of date.

I get "So you study maps?" and "You study rocks, right?" a lot.

So I didn't read everything in detail but here are my thoughts: - It's too early to be making this kind of decision. The first year is the hardest. Finish this year, go into the summer, and wait until October 2010 to think about whether or not you want to stay there. - I'm not sure what your focus is but generally there's fieldwork involved in the PhD, right? If so, you ought to be preparing for spending 9-12 months living wherever you do research, which decreases the time you have to spend in the small university town. Furthermore, you don't have to return to your university to write if you can secure a dissertation writing/completion fellowship. Just food for thought. - Name isn't everything. My program isn't a big name but I work with some really top-notch people, which means our department's prestige is up and coming. Go to a conference and see how people react when you name your university/department. That will tell you what you need to know about its name and prestige. - If you want your preliminary advisors to pay more attention to you, schedule meetings with them and have a plan for what you want to get out of those meetings beforehand. You can't expect them to put in the work to get to know you unless you put in that work as well. Same goes for the big name advisor. FWIW, Yes, you can leave a program with a MA and get a PhD elsewhere. It depends on how you go about it though.

I've had lingering thoughts of what-if and second guessed my decision countless times since starting my PhD in Fall 2008. But, I know that I made the best decision I could at that time and with the information that was available to me then. Now, there are things like state budget situation that I didn't think about then that would enter into consideration if I had to make a do-over. Really though, I think there are challenges with graduate school regardless of where you go, which can make you second guess your decision.

No professor is going to take you seriously if you walk in and say this. The ability to do this will vary from one department to the next, and one university to the next. Research the university's approved study abroad programs and see if any of them offer graduate courses in your area. My guess is that they don't. rogue & Lifeisgood, as someone who does overseas research in what are often considered desirable locations, I can tell you that it's not nearly as fun as it looks from the outside.

It depends on what you mean by "study abroad". Are you talking about taking courses at a university in another country, working with researchers in another country, or doing research (ie, archival work, interviews, or other forms of field data collection) in another country?

That can totally backfire because you may not be able to switch, depending on the situation. For example, my advisor has been very carefully reigning in the number of students he takes in preparation for taking on more administrative and service duties. As a result, he's basically been admitting only one new student for the past few years and plans to take on zero new students in this cycle. BUT, my program admits people to the department and not to work with a specific person. What does this mean? It means people come here, assuming that the person they're initially assigned to based on the interests in their SOP is a temporary person that they can switch from after they get here. Sadly, that's not the case as he is refusing to be the advisor to any of them (though he is more than willing to be on their committees). Basically, there are some disappointed people out there who don't have their first choice of advisor. It's not quite the same as you said but similar enough to be relevant.

I think it's a tough question, and one that thegradcafe has spent the last 4 years struggling with. When I think about the people I know that are currently working on a Latin American studies graduate degree, they are studying any/all of the following: history, geography, anthropology/culture, biology, public health, public policy, literature, linguistics, and political science. Then, there's the projects that range across a number of these like immigration or agriculture. So, in my mind, the area studies are interdisciplinary. More to the point though, over the years, the various regional studies have been in both the humanities and social sciences*, sometimes in both simultaneously with posters in one not aware of the posters in the other. My own university has some area studies in the humanities and others in the social sciences, though I doubt anyone could explain why Africana, East Asian, Russian and Slavic, and German Studies are humanities while Judaic, Latin American, Mexican American, and Middle Eastern Studies are in the social science. It might have to do with where faculty members hold appointments but even that is just a guess. I think where we erred was in introducing the new category of "Interdisciplinary Studies" during the busy time, rather than during the dead part of the summer. But, it was a decision that bgk and I have debated for at least two years and we finally agreed that though it's messy, it is also needed. *In the end, I doubt it's a big deal where we end up categorizing the regional studies fields as long as people are able to find them. Four years ago, there was a lengthy discussion about whether history belonged under humanities or social sciences (and, if bgk were to comment, ze'd probably point out that this is why there was so much reluctance to divide into these broad categories [as in Social Sciences, Humanities, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, etc.] to begin with as it wasn't part of the forum's original structure). During that debate, people tried to use the "But University X says it's this one!" argument. As it turns out, some universities place history in the humanities and others place it in the social sciences, with no clear indication of which it is based on prestige of the university or the department. Ultimately, it's worked out just fine and I don't think anyone on the history forum is still pissed about it being under humanities and not social sciences.

*shrug* I doubt it really matters in the long run. FWIW, when I had the opportunity to do this, I explicitly chose not to. I was actually in the same town as a school I applied to (on vacation because I'm talking about my hometown) and chose not to contact the university or department. (And no, I had never attended the university nor had I met any of its faculty before applying.)