rising_star

First, administrators don't get spring break. Spring Break just means there aren't classes. Second, spring breaks range from early March to mid April.

That's interesting. I'm in another social science discipline and every PhD student starts with an advisor (the one they identified on their application). But things are pretty friendly and people can and do switch advisors as they see fit. My advisor has told me all year long that while he enjoys working with me, I'm more than welcome to switch to working with whomever I want in the department, and that he'd still serve on my committee if I did. So I would say that people "take students" in the sense of agreeing to advise and mentor them throughout their MA and PhD program. This was true of where I did my MA and is true of my current PhD program (and those I applied to). But, I never received "confirmation" of who would be my advisor when I accepted. I always contacted the prospective advisor and made sure that s/he would be willing to serve as my advisor/dissertation chair throughout my program. Often, when I visited schools, that person was the one that coordinated my visit, made sure I had airport pickup and a place to stay, arranged faculty meetings, etc. So it was pretty clear that it wasn't an "informal advisor". Maybe polisci is really different than other social sciences.

Maybe this is true in polisci but it certainly wasn't my experience. Where I did my MA, the committee met and reviewed files. If they were considering the applicants, they then passed the application on to the faculty mentioned in the SOP and on the application (applicants are asked to list who they would like to be their advisor). If the faculty member passed on the applicant, then the file would go to another faculty member. If all the faculty pass on advising the applicant, the applicant isn't admitted. Sometimes the applicant's first choice passes due to having too many students and someone else decides to accept the applicant. My MA advisor wasn't on the admissions committee but helped me secure admissions because she immediately and enthusiastically agreed to work with me when my file was placed on her desk. Why? Because we'd exchanged something like 10 or 15 emails discussing my research interests, other units on campus I could work with, future course offerings, etc. So, at least in that program, an individual faculty member can sway the admissions committee because they could all decide that an applicant's interest doesn't fit in with theirs, which would mean that someone with a 4.0, 1600 GRE wouldn't get accepted. Like I said, this isn't a poli sci program but I know that admissions style happens in other fields too. Also, I'd hesitate to say that every member of the admissions committee reads every file because that is often NOT the case (as in, not at my current program and not at a couple of places to which I applied). I would say this is important in the humanities and social sciences too. A lot of people waste money applying to work with some all-star that already has all the PhD students s/he wants and isn't planning to take any students for a year or two. Emailing first to ask this question can save you money. (Personally, I learned that two people I wanted to work with weren't taking students when I was applying so I saved myself $125 in application fees alone by not applying to those schools. Without sending those emails, I would not have known as my advisors had no clue about that either and even seemed surprised when I told them.) I would also ask questions about advising style, student success obtaining funding, etc because if you want to develop your own project, and the person you want to work with has a big grant that they want their RAs to work on and write a dissertation based on, it may be an incompatible relationship.

So TAing at Princeton probably isn't required because it's just leading precepts (discussion sections) and because EAS doesn't offer many of those. If you look at the course offerings, you can see which courses have precepts and how many sections there are. The other factor is doing the work now vs. doing it later. When you're a first year assistant prof, you have a lot to do (publish from the dissertation, get involved in service, teach, keep up with your research). If you don't already have teaching experience, you'll be prepping lectures and exams for two courses (or 3 or 4) while simultaneously trying to do all those other things. As a TA, I can tell you that grading often takes longer than you think it will, writing lectures isn't as easy as it seems, and that all of that can be exhausting. And that's aside from having to come up with a syllabus and choose books and write course descriptions and stuff. Having just designed a syllabus, with a colleague, for a brand-new course, I can tell you that it was a lot of work. Doing all of that is, quite frankly, easier as a grad student than once you're faculty. Plenty of asst profs have told me that the available time for your research decreases as you progress through your career... I'm really surprised that the cost of living is the same in both. Princeton always seemed crazy expensive to me, though I guess you could live in either University housing or a nearby town. Car insurance in NJ is expensive, which you should definitely keep in mind if you own a vehicle. Princeton itself is kind of sterile, imo, and there's a certain disdain towards all graduate students amongst the undergrads.

Agreed. My discipline has a strong social justice bent and I wouldn't go to a program that didn't. Also, I enjoy talking political issues and like doing it with likeminded folks. For a lot of reasons, I doubt I'd fit in with a bunch of white, rich, Polo shirt wearing, conservative guys.

Honestly, even most programs that have grades don't really use them. My school uses A/B/C/D/F. Since anything below a 3.0 is failing, a B is a warning shot and a C is an indication someone doesn't think you belong in the program. I asked a prof about his grading for one class and he said most grad students get As. I asked if those are grad school As or As and he answered, "Grad school As".

I put a lot of weight (when deciding where to go for MA and for PhD) based on how much I liked the people that I'd be going to school with. I think it's an extremely important factor. Honestly, I made my MA and PhD decisions at the last minute both times. I was deciding between programs that I loved equally and honestly didn't know what to do and just went with a gut decision at the last minute. That said, I turned down other offers in late March and early April because I already knew I wouldn't go there.

Yes, teaching requires time and energy. Do you want to be a professor? If yes, then you need to get teaching experience while a graduate student. Also, when Yale says "2 years teaching" they probably don't mean teaching your own class for two years. Some of that time is probably spent working as a teaching assistant/lab instructor/grader (depending on the department). Also, one thing to consider with Princeton is that their graduates can have a hard time competing for jobs against grad students and junior faculty with teaching experience under their belt. A lot of the answer to your question depends on your discipline, which you haven't listed... If you want to learn about the areas, you can head over to "City Guide" and read about New Haven, CT and Princeton, NJ. No one really needs to rehash all of that here for you.

The point of CGS is that they don't have to keep the offer available after April 15th. If you haven't told them anything, they can offer your acceptance/funding package to another student.

In general, graduate school isn't for worrying about grades. Worry about your research, publishing, and teaching, but not about grades.

I think the Foothills would definitely be stretching/breaking the budget, unless you're in one of the hard sciences that pays upwards of $25K. The drive is definitely more than 10 minutes most of the time, and worse during rush hour. Live somewhere closer with mountain views. I wouldn't go north of River Rd, which puts you at a 5-6 mile bike ride to campus. I would say that living either Downtown/Armory Park or between 1st Ave and Country Club (east-west) and Broadway and Limberlost (north-south) is pretty good, for the most part. Tucson is really hit or miss when it comes to good neighborhoods. Everywhere has property crime, the real question is how much. Get renter's insurance, a club, and don't keep valuables in your car. Sam Hughes can be really expensive to rent a house ($1200 for a 2 bedroom), and has a lot of undergrads because of it. There are lots of good deals on casitas (guesthouses) in good neighborhoods. The trick is to scour Craig's List and wait for a good deal or to come out a few weeks early and drive neighborhoods looking for "for rent" signs. I recommend living on/near a good bike lane so you can buy a quality used bike and get around town that way. Bike racks are everywhere in Tucson. If you're looking to buy, houses in the area I just mentioned are selling for $200K+ right now (down from $300K). Townhouses are more like $150K.

First, having gone to TA training at two different schools, I can honestly tell you that I've never heard of this being covered. TA training covers your responsibilities as a teaching assistant and university and federal policies (like FERPA), not what the expectations of you as a student are. Second, often instructors are unclear about how much collaboration is allowed on an assignment. If the instructor didn't want students to search for solutions on the internet, s/he should make that explicitly clear to students. From what I've read so far, it seems like the OP is confused about how searching the internet for a solution is any different than copying the solution off of a classmate, which I think is a legitimate complaint. Third, I can't think of any program that tells students when they can and can't use the internet for problem-solving before or during the application process so saying "you should have known what the expectations were before applying for the program" smacks of silliness to me. When I took statistics, we were told to use whatever resources we needed to answer the questions, even if that meant searching the web for information. Seems to me like one of the problems here is that the instructor did not make his/her expectations clear, yet everyone seems to be blaming the OP. Now it could be that things were clear to everyone in the class and the OP didn't get it, which is a different thing, but still not one that means the OP "chose to willfully ignore [the expectations]". Should we punish people for not understanding even when they admit the mistake? And, what if the instructor's expectations really weren't made clear until this incident erupted? I think everyone here is quick to indict.

This question, and variations on it, have been asked repeatedly over in "Applications".

I didn't say they didn't read them. What I meant was that you might not have made more than a preliminary cut because they knew they had to accept fewer students than they have in years past. The budget situation at UofA is bad. A 5% cut in August, followed by a hiring freeze, followed by a 10% cut, mandatory furloughs for faculty and staff. And, even with all that, next year's (09-10) budget will be less money than departments have now.

You want your money back because they decided not to accept you because they can barely afford to support the students currently enrolled?

The thing with the GRE Quant is that low 700s actually isn't super high percentile wise. I got a 760 quant and that's 83%ile.

That's usually a two year program, right? So you'd have one year left? How many valuable contacts in SoCal do you think you can make in one year that you wouldn't/couldn't make other wise? How able are you to afford payments on the loans for the tuition and living expenses?

If you're interested in learning more about these kinds of careers, you may be interested in Duke's WRK4US listserv.

Honestly, I recommend getting books from your favorite non-academic authors and reading them. Spend some time enjoying the scenery, the outdoors, etc. Why? Because once school starts, most of your time will be spent reading things you've been assigned, reading things for your research, and with a computer. This is your last summer "off" of your life so do what you want with it. I regret not having a summer off between undergrad and grad. (Also a current grad student, if you couldn't tell.)

(Not in sociology but) I started my MA at 21 and my PhD at 23.

Sonnyday, there are quite a lot of grad students around here, mostly lurking. It's hard to give a lot of super-specific advice, especially now that the polisci thread for this year is over 2000 posts... If you want to get feedback from current grads, you probably are already even if you don't realize it.

Awww, flatcoat, it's not either-or. You could've gone with geography and had both!

What do you mean? Why would you have to work harder than them?

Could be that your applications wasn't considered due to the universities budget issues.

Agreed. I think it varies by program. I don't think anyone every frowned on me for wearing jeans or gray pants when I did campus visits. As someone else has already said, khakis can be very unflattering for the pear-shaped gal, which is why I don't own a pair. The gray pants are casual pants from The Limited that come in khaki but the medium gray looks better on me. And definitely nice jeans, not the ones with holes in them. For example, in my discipline, you look dressed up if you present at a conference in a button-down and dress slacks. If you wear a suit, people wonder who you are and what you're doing since you hardly ever see someone in a suit outside of a job interview.