rising_star

Just pretend like you weren't on thegradcafe at all. That is, that you know nothing about whether other applicants have heard anything or not. It's at most a month since applications were submitted, which isn't really a lot of time at all. Go to the meeting and behave as you typically would, whether that's being silent, asking questions, providing an update on whatever it is you're working on, etc.

That wouldn't have been allowed in either of my graduate programs. At both, you were required to have at least a master's degree before teaching undergrads as instructor of record and you could not grade for or instruct a graduate level course. Definitely unusual to me.

I don't know sociology well enough to offer specific programs BUT I will say that you should consider whether the mixed methods person has to be in sociology or if they could be in another social science department like anthropology, geography, or political science (or maybe even psychology). If so, then you may want to see if the Graduate School offers any sort of certificate or minor in qualitative research which could complement the quantitative and statistical training you'll receive in a sociology PhD program. For an example of what I'm talking about, see this program at the University of Georgia, which offers a graduate certificate in Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies.

While this is true, it's also true that graduate programs want you to have a broad understanding of the field you're in, including areas that you aren't actually work in. There are typically courses that everyone, regardless of their subfield/interest/specialty has to take. A quick google search led me to the program at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which has a list of courses of areas in which students need to have demonstrated certain proficiencies. That list includes electrical circuits, electronic design, and other areas. If a school has something like that required for admission, then they're going to be paying close attention to more of your grades than you might think/wish. This is something to look for when reviewing potential programs and to think about as you're deciding and strategizing about where to apply.

My advisor hugged me when I passed my dissertation defense. And now he hugs me when he sees me at conferences. *shrug* I've legitimately never even thought about it until seeing this question. OP, are you asking because you think there was something inappropriate about the hugs?

I'm not in your field but I think it's egregious for people to expect prospective graduate students to fly around the country with no financial assistance whatsoever. If I were in your shoes, I'd ask all three schools about the possibility of a Skype interview rather than spending so much money out of pocket without any guarantees of acceptance.

If you provide your recommenders with your transcript, then it should be easy for them to talk about your performance in upper division classes without you having to specifically ask them to do it. The question I'd have (were I reviewing your file) is what courses those lower grades were in and whether the concepts covered in those courses are crucial for your understanding of the field or performance in some graduate courses you may be required to take. For example, if you performed poorly in calculus and our program requires two semesters of calculus for all students, then that would be a concern. There's really nothing you can do to make up a low GPA. Everything you're doing will help but you can't change the grades you've already earned. Good luck!

Honestly, this doesn't really belong in the research section because your questions aren't really about doing research but okay...The overarching issue here is your own lack of self-confidence and how you're not even willing to put yourself in the best position to have the career you want. I'll get back to that though. To answer your questions in order: 1) I know of many co-advising situations. It's impossible to generalize them though because a lot is dependent on the personalities of those involved (both professors as well as the student). The real question is whether these two professors work well enough together for this co-advising situation to be a success. One thing you should do is clarify how involved Prof 1 will be after retiring before you commit to this school. 2) Yea, it's a bad idea to go to a school where you can't do the kinds of things you actually want to be doing after graduation. 3) None of us can tell you what would make you happy. To me, it seems like your best option at this point would be to go to this school and leave with a master's and full support of Professor 1 as they retire. Then you can apply to PhD programs elsewhere where you can actually study the things you want to study using the techniques which interest you. Right now, you're not putting yourself in the best position for your future career. You're trying to make the best of a bad situation (Prof 1's retirement), letting a relationship influence a decision which will affect your entire career, and not really thinking about your long-term career needs.

Go with however you will feel most confident, which in this case means having a nicely trimmed and maintained beard.

I have several thoughts and I'll do my best to present them clearly here. Feel free to ask questions if something I say doesn't make sure. 1) If you're headed into your last semester, you should have already started on your thesis or, at minimum, done a proposal. Have you done that yet? If not, get on that ASAP. If you don't have a proposal, it's hard for people to give you good feedback. If you have, then you should be getting feedback on it from your entire committee (see below). For proposals, you may want to check out the book Proposals that Work. Without knowing more about your interests, it's hard to help you figure out how to craft a proposal. It may be worth asking other students if you can see their proposals or talking to PhD students you know about the proposals they submitted for their MA work. It's up to you to figure out what resources you'll need and if they're available, which you can then use to refine the ideas in your proposal. If you really have no idea where to start, begin with review papers in your field and by reading the discussion section of articles you like so that you can get some research ideas. 2) Who else is on your thesis committee? If you haven't already, you should be talking to them about your ideas and your plans for your thesis. This is even more important if you aren't getting good feedback from your advisor. In general, you should be working with 1-2 other people on your thesis, ideally folks who you've already taken a class or two with. That way, you'll be able to get strong recommendation letters from multiple folks for your PhD applications. 3) If you're planning to do a PhD, then your advisor's attitude about just getting the MA/MS thesis done is pretty common. It's the same advice I got as a MA student because I was going on to the PhD. There isn't the time, if you only have one semester, to do the research, write everything up, and get it into publishable shape in the time that you have left, particularly if you're trying to graduate in the spring semester. The deadline to defend and file your thesis will probably be 2-3 weeks before the end of the semester so, realistically, you have about 10-12 weeks to research and write before submitting your draft for feedback, making revisions, etc. That really isn't enough time to produce something publishable on a topic, especially if you're not confident about your subject area knowledge... 4) You start off this post by saying that you've barely learned enough to scrape by in the field. Why do you think that? Are you able to pick up articles in your area of interest, understand them, and recognize the references in the lit review? When you read a review paper in your area, are you surprised by any of the findings or the information presented? Ideally, you'd be able to say yes to that first question and no to the second. If not, then it's on you to do more reading in your field. It's not your advisor's job to force you to deepen your knowledge of the field. I'm also wondering if you ever took a course on the history or theory of your discipline. If you did, then you should've gained some good knowledge of the discipline. You may need to re-read the texts or, if you read excerpts originally, read more of the text but you should have a good starting point. If you didn't take such a course, a quick google search for syllabi should yield you some ideas of where to start with reading. Also, if you didn't take that kind of course, I would take one this semester, even though you're about to graduate. Audit it if you have to, sit in on the undergrad version if you're really unsure, or see if you can find a MOOC with relevant content. Take it upon yourself to shore up your knowledge of the discipline. All of that said, graduate school is about going deeper into one particular topic, which necessarily means you won't have deep knowledge about all aspects of the field you're in. This is especially true in a discipline like anthropology which has four fields. You need broad (senior level undergrad) knowledge of the discipline as a whole but, if you're an archaeologist, no one is going to expect you to have deep knowledge of the key texts of linguistic anthropology, you know? 5) If I were you, I'd try to pinpoint the things you think you should know that you don't know. That way you have a targeted path for your future studies. But also because you may realize that you know more than you think. Good luck!

How will you feel more confident, @Taylororr1? Will you feel confident at the interviews if you are clean shaven?

Have you asked about an alternate visit date for any of the three interviews? I ask because you're bound to be exhausted by the time you get to School C and may not be able to do your best on the interview after a week of travel and being "on" all the time.

Yep. And it definitely varies by school. Even the number of hours required to be a FT grad student varies. At my MA institution, it was 12 hours required for full-time (everyone took at least 3 credit hours of research, which was dedicated to thesis work). At my PhD institution, it was 6 hours for full-time status. There, we also all enrolled in this one credit hour course for our colloquium, the revenue from which helped pay to bring speakers in for those talks. Even though we had tuition waivers and weren't actually paying for the course, the institution assigned a dollar amount to this, which the department got.

See the only time I deal with letter grades at all is at the end of the semester because I can't submit numerical final grades. But, during the semester, everything is graded based on points, with assignments varying between 25 and 125 points depending on the complexity of the assignment and the depth of analysis/synthesis expected. When I add up the total points, I typically look for natural breaks in the grades (that is, I take all the point totals, copy them as a column into a separate sheet in the workbook, and then sort of ascending to descending) and use those to figure out where the breaks should be between various point totals. I then go back and match these grades to each student, which gives me the chance to do some of the things @Eigen describes above by taking into consideration whether a student had issues with one assignment, if they improved over the course of the semester (not uncommon as some students struggle to understand how they're being graded early in the semester even when you give them rubrics), or other factors. The advantage of this is that I'm not playing favorites with any students when I'm figuring out the letter grade. And, if there is one student with a 89.1% and another with an 89.4%, they're going to get the same grade even if one was a pain in my side all semester. Whether that ends up being a B+ or an A- depends on the semester. But mathematically and per my syllabus, it's a B+ so anyone who gets an A- will be happy. I find this method doesn't lead to (m)any complaints. P.S. If you really want to understand the plus/minus grading system, here's an interesting PDF where a philosophy professor worked out a conversion from a system without to plus/minus grades to a system with them.

You may want to consult with the department you'll be visiting to see if any graduate students are able to house you. That would help you save on costs and potentially give you someone to tour the town with.

NPR's Book Concierge makes it easy to find books. But, this suggestion that people stop reading books by white male authors and read books by anyone else is one I find admirable and will likely take up. It's actually something I took on in teaching a class in the fall and it was interesting to see how long it took the students to catch on.

I'm loving that there are multiple threads about reading on here right now that are pretty active. The Read Harder Challenge is a great suggestion from another thread. WBUR has a great post about reading books that aren't written by white male authors. You can also check out NPR's Book Concierge if you need recommendations. I'm currently reading Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett and The Man Who Fell From the Sky by Walter Tevis.

I'd go with the funding, honestly.

It's fairly common to ask visiting students to stay with a grad student. Think about it. You're going to be spending a lot of time with these folks if you get in and decide to enroll at that institution so it behooves you to get to know some of them now. It also gives you a chance to ask questions more informally, better understand the housing options available, etc. Try to view it as an opportunity, rather than thinking about it as unprofessional.

There's nothing arbitrary about my grading. I would be offended if a student ever told me that the grades they earn are arbitrary. Typically, I'm looking to see where natural breaks in quality and performance are. So, for example, though my syllabus says an A- is a 90-92.49%, this semester I gave a student with a final grade of 89.2% an A- because their performance was substantially better than those who got an 86% but not as good as the student with a 94%. Does that make sense?

Mod note: I moved this to the "Speech-Language Pathology" section.

Is it a problem? No, but mostly because your professor is unlikely to be checking their work email during their vacation and on the weekend. Think about it. Would you expect a government employee to read an email sent over a holiday weekend? Of course not. So why treat your professors differently? Do they not deserve even one weekend without checking their work email? (And, if it helps, think about it as if you were the professor in question. Would you want to work nine straight months with no days or even a whole weekend off? Probably not. So extend that attitude to them and treat them accordingly.)

1) I wouldn't say it's pointless but I would pay attention to what you could do with the degree. 2) No, but I think you may want to look at instructional design jobs on Higheredjobs to get a sense of what the qualifications, software knowledge, and experience they're looking for are. I have a friend in this field and get the sense that a PhD isn't required to get jobs because what you really need is the experience but YMMV. You strike me as someone that would benefit from doing informational interviews with several folks currently working in this field.

I don't know that there's any bag that screams "Professor". To give a sense of my department, one person uses a leather messenger bag, another a Timbuk2 messenger bag, another a Jansport backpack, another a more outdoorsy-style backpack, and another an all-black backpack. I alternate between a messenger bag and a daypack depending on the weather and what I need to bring with me. There's another thread on here about bags with lots of recommendations that you may want to check out. But, if you're thinking about an interview bag, then that's another story altogether. I'd go for professional, able to fit a tablet, and something that can hold your notebook, pens, a bottle of water, and a granola bar. The styling of that will depend on your personal preferences.

First, the good news. YES, you can change your academic path. I did it and so have many others on here. The key is being able to convincingly articulate your interests in your SOP and having good recommendation letters. It also helps if you can convince a faculty member they want to work with you. Have you taken any undergraduate history courses? Are you able to articulate a time period and/or region/theme of interest for you in history? If the answers to both those questions is no, then it's going to be difficult for you to get into a good master's program. If that's the case, you may want to try taking a few history courses at a local institution to help you refine your interests and get good letters of rec in history. That aside, make sure that academia is for you. Check out the forums on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's site to get a sense of what academia is like. Then, go check out VersatilePhD to see why people are leaving academia even after getting an advanced degree. It's difficult to know if you'll like academia until you're in it because, quite frankly, it is basically nothing like your undergraduate experience. I'm not sure what you dislike about the film industry but it has more in common with academia than you might be interested in. Good luck!