rising_star

Take the funding and don't look back, unless you're having doubts about doing a PhD.

This strikes me as incredibly sound advice. I don't know that anyone goes through the entire PhD without doubting what they're doing at some point. For me, the sunk costs meant that, once I hit the ABD stage, I was determined to finish so I'd have something to show for it (and also because I enjoyed doing my diss research and writing it up at the time and didn't see anything else I wanted to be doing more). Quitting takes a lot of courage, @AbrasaxEos. Congratulations on doing it and doing it without regrets. Side note: I'd like to encourage you to share your perspective with others throughout the forum. This post has recently turned into a discussion calling for more senior PhD and post-PhD students to stick around and share their views with current applicants.

This post is incredibly helpful so I pinned it to make it easier for future applicants to find. Thanks, Extra Espresso!

Ultimately, which one will give you the best preparation for the career you want to have? Is there enough money at School B for you to live comfortably on your income? Are you absolutely certain that you don't have one single mentor at School B? I find that unlikely since ultimately you'll have a dissertation chair and because people find mentors both within and outside of their program generally speaking. If answering those questions doesn't help, my advice is to go with School B because it is more prestigious (assuming the funding is sufficient).

You only have one family. Go with your gut on this one.

@unræd, honestly, I think the constant disrespect senior posters get when they speak from their experience is one of the reasons we have trouble getting them to stick around and continue posting. We created the entire "Officially Grads" section a few years ago in an effort to promote that but, it hasn't entirely worked for any number of reasons. Jumping down someone's throat, calling them names unnecessarily, and being clearly hostile isn't helping at all. I know that I've also been told that I'm wrong on here by those applying to graduate school when talking about things like the job market and its associated realities (see the previous drama thread about this from last year). As a result, I've basically stopped doing it, for better or worse. It's just not worth it to get attacked by random people on the internet when I'm trying to be helpful.

Depends on what the letter says and the writer's relationship is to whomever the letter is about. I suppose it might also depend on the foundation and whether it was something like the NIH versus the Cato Institute. When you sign a rec letter, you typically just sign with your name and your job title. Maybe your phone number if you're being fancy. Few people actually include their highest degree because it's generally evident from the job title (though if it's not, then maybe you would include it).

Serious question: do you think adcoms have enough time (or care enough) to look up where the person writing your rec letter got their PhD? Generally speaking, nope, they don't. If they know the name right away, great, maybe that'll help. But I've never looked at anything other than the name of the person and where they work when reading rec letters and I imagine most others are the same.

How much research do you want to be doing? Do you want to have undergrads, MA students, or PhD students as your research assistants? Because if you want to be able to do any significant research, you'll want a teaching load less than a 3/3, which will require you to shoot for a "higher tier" of jobs than you might have been planning.

I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea if there are legal actions which could be taken. Perhaps your friend should talk to the university's ombudsman about the situation?

A few thoughts on this: 1) If you're in American/ethnic studies, teaching is probably going to be a major source of your funding. If you don't want to teach that much, regardless of where you are, the onus will be on you to get pre-doctoral or other sorts of external fellowships which would get you out of that teaching. That isn't going to change simply by applying to other programs this fall. 2) Whether or not someone has 10 students may not matter. My PhD advisor had more than 10 students when I started but I was still able to get the time and interest I needed from him to be successful as a scholar and academic. YMMV obviously but, don't discount someone based solely on the number of students they advise. 3) If people don't know what they want to do their research on after 2-3 years, that's more of a reflection on them than it is in on the program, in my experience. There are people like that in every program and in every single cohort. Some get it together and some don't but, again, that's beyond your control and, to some degree, beyond the control of their advisor. No one can force someone to choose a topic. Plus, there are all sorts of reasons why someone may not have a topic which you wouldn't even know about as a visitor. 4) If you don't want to move now, will you ever want to or be willing to move? If the answer is no, then you'll want to choose a program which will prepare you well for positions outside academia. I probably know both of the programs you're talking about in decent detail so, like I said before, PM me if you want more info.

I still think you're looking at this too narrowly. What will get you into a top PhD program in the US is doing excellent research as a master's student. You can do that from where you are (or, rather, you could if you had any confidence in your own ability to do so). Graduate school isn't about getting help or having someone give you research topics. At the MA level, you get advice shaping your project but it's up to you to identify and develop that project on your own. Surely there is a history of migration into and out of Korea which you could study as a master's student, right?

Actually, geography as a discipline, allows many more opportunities to incorporate ethnic studies interests than sociology does and in many different ways. Of course, that's assuming the OP is okay with the roots in social justice which underpin contemporary human geography. (Geography, more than just maps!) That said, @td_ny, it would honestly depend on which sociology program, which geography program, and what your specific interests are. It probably also depends on why you didn't think either of those programs was the right fit because it could be the departments and not the disciplines as a whole. Feel free to PM me about this if you don't want to share here. But, there are a number of sociologists and geographers who have joint appointments in Africana, American, or ethnic studies, so there's possibly a way to do what you want from within those disciplines. But, if you're looking for a more diverse discipline to be in, then it might make sense to take a year off and reply to ethnic/Africana/American studies departments. Like I said, PM me if you want to get into specifics.

I can honestly say I've never heard of something like this happening. She should call the DGS and have a frank conversation, at a minimum.

Well, many people on here that do master's degrees complete a thesis so it's definitely possible to do research during a master's degree. You will probably want to talk to professors about their ongoing research projects to see if there's a way you can be involved. Alternately, you might talk to senior PhD students about ways to get involved in their projects, though this can be more complicated. If you're doing a professional master's, you'll need to be proactive about this if you want to make it happen.

So what you're saying is that your current degree isn't giving you any real experience in the field? I would put the onus on you to make that happen, in that case. I'm really not sure what you gain by leaving halfway through a master's program to pay to do another master's and nothing you've said has convinced me that it's the logical next step in your academic career. If it's not a bad idea to study with the professors in your current program, why are you trying to leave? What are you hoping to gain in two years at USF which you can't gain otherwise?

The student health plan cost is probably the same for all students at the institution, so I doubt you'll be able to negotiate that cost. After all, if they lowered it for you, they'd need to lower it for every single other student. Instead, you could ask for additional scholarship money, though it seems unlikely that you'll get it given that they've already given you a stipend increase to cover some of the health insurance costs. You're really only talking about $400/year that they aren't covering. Is that really too much?

A master's program is really what you make it, not some arbitrary thing. @TMP said it well on a different thread earlier today: "You need the funding to carry out a successful MA thesis. You need that funding handed to you for your own research, not for you to find a summer job to support yourself (and be distracted away from your research). I could not have done my MA thesis as well as I did if I wasn't funded for the summer as I had to take research trips." If you scroll up or down, you'll see similar comments made by two other posters. Whether or not you can leverage School B into a great PhD offer is entirely up to you. If you go to a top-ranked MA program but don't stand out or do good work, you won't be in a position to get into a good PhD program either, you know?

My experience (not in lit/rhet/comp) aligns with this. A few years ago, there a few of us were in a dispute with my PhD department about how they counted funding and their policies regarding external fellowships. The other grad students were really honest about not caring about our situation. Fast forward to about October 2015 when some of those same people who previously didn't care were being affected and now, all of a sudden, this is a huge deal requiring grad student association meetings with the department head and Graduate College. What's the difference? People realized they personally were being affected (there are also definitely some social/cultural differences between the group I was in and this more recent group). Have they gotten any changes? No. But, part of me wishes they'd started working on this several years ago because, if they had, this might've been resolved such that they were never personally affected. To be clear, I'm not doing anything about the above situation. I fought for myself and my friends when we were getting screwed (in my case, two separate attempts to get screw me out of funding I was owed) but then got the hell out of there are quickly as possible. Should I have done more? Probably. I previously was part of an effort to make a grad student union at our campus. That failed in part because many of the STEM students weren't concerned with things like salary (they were getting almost double in annual stipend of what the grad students in the humanities were getting). Another case where solidarity would've been quite helpful. As far as PhD and getting a TT job, I never intended to go into academia when I started my PhD. I'm still not 100% convinced I want to be in academia, even though I am. The working conditions as faculty (VAP or TT, I'm not even touching adjunct work here) really aren't great in many cases. There's enormous pressure to get grants or teach a lot and have great evals (while doing all those "learner-centered activities" that are the buzzword these days!) and do service work at the department and college/university level. You actually have WAY more time to do research and teach what you want is a grad student than you do on the TT unless you're at a R1 where you have a 2/2 or lighter teaching load. Once you go to 2/3, 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, etc. and add in service and advising work, you realize that you only have a few hours left each week (if you're trying to stick to 40-45 hour work weeks) to do your research. And, regardless of the institution, there is pressure to work more than 40 hours a week every week, to attend activities in the evening or on the weekends, and to answer emails in under 24 hours (even on the weekend). I digress! For me, there's something very appealing about the possibility of a job where you just work 8-5 and then go home and don't have to answer work emails or go to events or whatever unless you want to. It probably helps that my mom has a PhD and has never held a post-PhD academic position so I've always known there were paths you can take besides becoming a professor.

In that case, I'd see if School A can match School B's funding. If they can't, then go to School B.

I type my reading notes/summaries into Zotero, where they're then fully searchable.

Professional master's degrees are still graduate degrees. Those who do them are still considered graduate students at most institutions.

Definitely take time off and, if possible, get a job where you're doing public policy work.

How much money is School A offering you? Is it through teaching or research assistantships? Are we talking MA or PhD programs? Some more information would be helpful...

I wouldn't do an unfunded MA. Once you add in living expenses in Edinburgh, you're easily looking at being $40K in debt at the end of that year. Plus, since it's a 1 year MA, you'd likely need to take a gap year after the MA in order to have your MA experience help you in PhD applications.