rising_star

Option 1 sounds like a great choice. Do it and don't look back!

What do you plan to do with the master's? If your plan is to actually teach secondary school, I would say that ranking doesn't matter all that much because most HR departments are going to be focused on whether or not you have a master's degree at all.

Great point! Part of the problem is that TT positions are being replaced with contingent positions (renewable lectureships, VAPs, adjunct work), rather than TT positions. Consequently, even if grad schools reduce the size of each cohort, it may not help since you can no longer assume that when one TT person leaves, they'll be replaced by a TT person in that same department. At many institutions, TT positions now go into a pool and if a smaller department loses a person, "their" line may go to another department. That of course isn't something a grad program can anticipate or plan for. There have been a bunch of posts related to this on VersatilePhD over the past few years. I highly suggest you start reading them now to understand what you can do to mentally prepare for a non-academic position.

UMN Twin Cities sounds like a great option to me, especially because you'd have the first year to concentrate on your studies and getting some research experience. That said, I'm assuming a public health PhD would take more than two years so, what do your funding options after the first two years look like at UNC and UMN?

Why not just send a short summary of where the project is and offer to send a link to the Virtual Machine if your POI requests it?

If you do some research during your professional master's, you should be able to go on to a PhD in the future. Take a look at the CVs of current and past PhD students to get a sense of whether they came in with master's degrees and, if so, what degree they had.

From a perspective outside of history, I have to say that none of your options sound particularly appealing. If you know you need to build up your language skills AND you have an interest in East Asia, why not try to teach English abroad for a year or two and take language classes while you're in the country? If you went that route, you could potentially save money, rather than going into debt for a MA.

I'm not in philosophy OR linguistics but I've applied for a number of faculty and postdoc positions where I was required to submit ALL transcripts, both undergraduate and graduate, as part of my application.

We've discussed long distance moves a lot on here, including doing it as inexpensively as possible. Here are some previous posts which you may find helpful: This one is on moving companies, specifically. Here's one on moving with a partner. Hope these help!

I would talk to the Director of Graduate Studies and/or the department chair about this. Also, there's got to be someone at your school who is responsible for making sure these funding reports go in who is incredibly irritated with your PI about this.

I'm not sure what the salaries are like for journalists but, will you be able to make enough money to cover the additional debt you'd take on if you went to NYU? If not, then you have your answer.

@OwlKirbyPenguin, do you really need someone who does exactly what you do? As long as they're familiar with the theoretical and methodological framework(s) you're using, you should be fine. My dissertation advisor wasn't familiar with my particular topic but that didn't mean that he couldn't help me study it.

@WillisF, there are definitely many more options for a funded master's than what I listed. I just listed the first schools that I thought of but, there are others, including Alabama, Auburn, a couple of SUNY schools, Ohio University, Miami University of Ohio, University of Arkansas, University of Tennessee, UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, Indiana-Bloomington, Idaho, Montana State, Utah State, University of Nevada-Reno, UC-Boulder, Syracuse, UConn, Temple, Penn State, Virginia Tech, University of South Carolina, Georgia State, etc. Most of the state universities which have a master's program offer funding through teaching assistantships, which typically means either teaching a lab section (or two) or leading discussion sections.

Experience helps more. Have you contacted anyone to get feedback on why you were rejected? If not, you may want to try doing that. MAPSS isn't going to give you time to gain more research experience because it's such a fast program and you could be applying again after just a couple of months there. Would you be finishing your degree in Korea before coming to the US? I ask because another option might be to get a job doing immigration-related research or work for a year or two and using that experience to bolster subsequent PhD program applications.

Have you looked at job descriptions/requirements for clinical coordinator positions? If not, you definitely should. What you want to know is whether they require or prefer that the clinical research coordinator be licensed. If you're seeing that it's preferred, then maybe it is a path you want to pursue. But, if it's not required, then maybe you don't.

In your case, I would try to get two letters from professors and one from the speech language pathologist who you did your clinical hours with. You may be surprised by how well your professors remember them. Either way, you should offer to send them any materials they may need, including your letter of application, personal statement, CV, previous papers/assignments, etc. Good luck!

I would definitely go with Ole Miss. The main thing is attending an accredited program, right?

Did you have a good research fit at each of the places you applied? If not, that could explain some of your rejections. In any case, I wouldn't go $70K+ into debt for a master's, even to get an Ivy League MA/MS.

My advice is not to do an unfunded MA, especially not in NYC, unless you have a trust fund or are otherwise independently wealthy. I have several colleagues in Film Studies and most of them did their MAs in English programs where they could concentrate/specialize in film/cinema/media and which offered them funding via teaching assistantships. Could you find something similar? I know Pitt has such a program, just to give one example.

Actually, a number of geography programs offered funded master's programs, @geographeyyy, so it's unlikely that you received funding simply because they expect you to move on to the PhD. For example, UNC, Florida State, UGA, Kentucky, Arizona, Rutgers, Ohio State, UIUC, Louisiana State, Kansas, and Kansas State all offer funding for master's students, regardless of whether or not you plan to subsequently pursue a PhD (and whether you plan to pursue the PhD there or elsewhere). Some of the programs I've just listed do require you to have a master's before you do the PhD, which you can either do on the way to the PhD or as a standalone degree. @WillisF, doing a master's first has a few potential advantages. 1) It gives you a chance to further refine your interests and show that you're capable of graduate work, which could help you get into better programs. 2) It often buys you an additional year of funding. At Kentucky, for example, MA students get two years of funding and PhD students 4 years of funding. If you do both the MA and PhD there, you get a total of 5 years of funding (see here, scroll to bottom of the page). By comparison, if you did your MA at, say, LSU and then your PhD at Kentucky, you'd get 2 years of funding at LSU and four at Kentucky, for a total of 6 years of funding. This isn't to say that you'll need or should take that long to finish but, it does potentially give you more options. Also, FWIW, many programs do require that you meet the MA requirements before you can move on to the PhD. The UGA Geography PhD Student Handbook says this: "Acceptance to the Ph.D. program will normally presuppose that the student has met the minimum requirements of the departmental M.A./M.S. program, except for a thesis in the case of students with the M.A./M.S. from a school where no thesis is required. In all cases, at least three full years of study beyond the bachelor's degree are required for admission to candidacy." (from this PDF file). If you do want to improve your application to compete against MA/MS students at a place like Clark where everyone does the PhD, you'll need to have clear research interests, relevant research experience, knowledge of any languages or techniques required for your intended project, and strong recommendation letters.

You need to be really careful about a strategy like this. Exiting a PhD program early is often seen as a sign that one wasn't up to snuff as a student. So, if you're planning to try to leverage an unfunded PhD offer at one school into a funded PhD offer elsewhere, it will be tricky to do at best. I could see this working better if it were a master's degree but, it sounds like you're trying to "master out" of a PhD program, which is typically not viewed as a good thing. In addition, if you're self-funding, you're not going to have the same opportunities to work with a professor on their research as other students because those are students are the ones whom they are paying to do research. You'll have to convince people to let you work in their lab or on their projects without pay, which some faculty aren't willing to do at all. (Why? Because it suggests that everyone should self-fund their PhD and paid research positions aren't needed anymore, which is a rabbit hole few faculty want to go down.)

George Mason is also a pretty well-known school. Given that you'll be doing the degree part-time while working, I'm guessing that your work experience will be more important when looking for future jobs than the name on your diploma. Save yourself the money!

*sigh* This sounds like a very poorly run course. There should be substantive conversation of the history of racism, background readings to flesh out what is in the videos, and a real conversation about how the issues we see today can be traced back to the history of racism. I suppose that you may be SOL if the professor isn't intervening to force these kinds of discussions to occur.

Best preparation is to have a solid work ethic, good study/reading habits/skills, and self-care practices. This thread is what you need: