rising_star

It sounds like you don't even know what you want to study. I recommend you get involved in undergraduate research as much as possible (e.g, write a senior/honors thesis, maybe try to incorporate archival research) then take 1-3 years off to really figure out what it is that interests you. The three types of grad programs you mention above (MTS, MA in IR, JD) are all very different and would prepare you for vastly different types of careers. In that sense, figuring out what you actually want to be doing/studying at a graduate level would be helpful for you and your admissions chances.

UNC Writing Center to the rescue: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/curricula-vitae-cvs-versus-resumes/ Even if you don't have any fellowships or publications, your CV should differ from your resume. For example, on your CV you may want to list the titles of relevant courses or final papers which illustrate your interest.

Mine are on the left. No one has ever said anything to me about it.

It definitely makes more sense to finish your current master's program for all the reasons given by @MarineBluePsy above. It's also totally okay to earn your master's from one program and your PhD from another. In fact, in some fields, it's pretty common. You'll start applying for PhD programs in the fall of your second year. At that point, you should apply to more than one program, looking seriously at your qualifications, who you want to work with, and where you want to live for 4-6 years while doing your PhD. In your master's program, focus on building strong relationships with faculty members, getting good grades (3.5+ GPA definitely), and gaining research experience. All of those things will help make you more competitive when you apply to PhD programs a year from now. Good luck!

I'm not in a MLA field so, take this with a grain of salt, @my_muse. When we recently read applications for a position in my department (teaching-focused institution), we all focused primarily on the person's teaching experience and then, from there, looked at their research to think about the courses they'd be able to teach easily and the types of electives they might offer. I will also say that applicants with scant teaching experience who didn't also put some serious thought into the paragraph(s) about teaching in their cover letter didn't make it very far in the review process. In fact, that was one of the easiest ways to weed people out. I'll also note that it was super obvious who followed Kelsky's cover letter format and who didn't. On the one hand, following that format meant that I knew exactly where to look for certain information. On the other hand, knowing where to look for specific things led me to gloss over other parts of the cover letter. For my own letters, I did change the structure depending on the type of institution (I also change the order of categories on my CV) because I want to make sure that teaching-focused institutions understand me and why I'd want to work there, rather than somewhere research-intensive (and vice versa!). If you want to be thought of as a serious teacher for a job where teaching is 65+% of your job, I would make sure your cover letter reflects that. If teaching is an afterthought in your letter then, at least for my own department, I don't want to hire you because I already have enough teaching to do.

Streamlining grading for papers is actually not that hard, provided you focus on quality and not quantity. That is, 3 really good assignments are better than 5 or 6 mediocre ones. In addition, think really carefully about the length of each assignment. First and second year students are going to struggle to write decent papers of more than 4-5 double-spaced pages so, if you're asking for that, you're putting yourself in a situation where you'll need to give a lot of feedback because they're struggling to do what you've asked. In my writing intensive second year course, there's only two assignments (the midterm and the final) that are more than 4 pages double-spaced. Everything else they write is under 750 words (I use word maximums, rather than page numbers) and several are capped at 300 or 500 words depending on the task. (300 words is if they're summarizing something; 500 if they have to do summary and analysis.) I've found that limiting how much they can write in this way forces them to be more concise which gives me less to grade. I've even had students thank me for forcing them to cut all the fluff out of their paper (aka, they hit the word maximum but realized they hadn't said what they wanted to say so they had to go back and edit heavily). For grading, use rubrics and a timer. The rubric makes it easier for you to know what to deduct for and also gives some consistency to the grading. I use rubrics for all of the papers I assign. If you go the rubric route, provide students with the rubric in advance (definitely before the assignment is due) so that they know how they are being evaluated. Some instructors even have students score themselves based on the rubric and turn in that self-assessment with their paper. I'm planning to try that out next semester so, ask me in May how that went. The timer is seriously the key to grading efficiently. Read through one or two papers without commenting and see how long it takes you. For a 500 word paper, the answer for me is like 3 minutes. So then, I'll give myself 6-8 minutes to read, provide feedback on, and grade each paper. I'll keep an eye on the timer so that I know when I'm about to run out of time. When time is running out, it's almost always because I'm filling a paper with comments. Too many comments will actually overwhelm a student so it may not be helpful in the long run. The timer keeps me from doing that. If I finish before the timer goes off, then I give myself a break to surf the web, change the music, pet the dog, etc. Then I get right back into it. I typically grade 5 papers in a block then take a mini break before getting back into it (think pomodoro technique). It really helps, I promise.

It won't negatively affect your application to say that you've been in communication with a professor in the department about your shared interests in X and Y.

Those data are actually really interesting, especially if you think about current student protests which include calls for more diverse faculty. From these data, it's clear just how difficult that will be for political science departments!

My favorite are when students I have in more than one course send an email like "When is the final paper due again?" but don't specify which class. It only matters because they're never due on the same day (that would be cruel to myself in terms of grading). So, I totally got what you meant @VulpesZerda.

The teaching gets easier and less time consuming the more you do it. You learn to streamline things, whether that's grading more quickly or giving yourself less to grade. If you teach the same course repeatedly, the prep time required for each day of class gets shorter, especially if you make lesson plans or notes the first time and then update them after each additional time you teach that. If you haven't been writing out what you're doing in class, you should. I save things by date and also with a descriptor in the file name so I can easily find the right notes when I need them four months later for another class. For lesson plans, do NOT reinvent the wheel. There are tons of great activities and ideas out there on the internet and Google is your friend. Quite a few of the activities I do in class are based on activities I find online, whether modified or not. But, honestly, a lot of what makes getting anything else done is managing the grading. Maybe you let students correct one another's quizzes, rather than doing it yourself. Maybe you mark errors but let them redo parts of a paper/exam for additional points. Maybe you make a "cheat sheet" of common errors which you can quickly reference on assignments (I have one for papers which points out things like run-on sentences, missing citations, lack of supporting evidence, and other common undergrad writing mistakes).

I would send unofficial transcripts, rather than official ones, unless you know for sure that they're willing to consider your updated transcript.

Honestly, yes, a lot of people are more specific in their interests. I knew what specific subfield and methodological tools I wanted to use going into my PhD and only applied to work with people who could help me do that. Because, at the end of the day, while I love my discipline and all its craziness, there are a whole lot of projects which I do not want to be doing. I have a research agenda based on my interests and though the topics I investigate may be a bit diverse, they're united by the same theories and methodologies. For my master's, I was less certain but I still had a few clearly defined interests (that is, I didn't have specific tools or theories or frameworks in mind) within the broader discipline. The only way I can see your approach working out, vnatch, is if you pitch yourself as an experimental/theoretical person, rather than someone with a specific interest in molecular bio.

Okay, well now you know otherwise. Think about it from the perspective of the professors. Why would I admit LittleCritterB, whose interests don't overlap with mine and who doesn't want to work with me, over someone who actually does want to work with me?

I think the problem here is that you don't know what you want to study, you just want to go to grad school. That may work for a master's program but it's unlikely to work for a PhD program. For a PhD program, you're going to be spending 4+ years working in one lab on one type of research so, it needs to be something you're interested in and at least somewhat passionate about, otherwise you're not likely to ever finish. By fit, what they mean is how well your research interests are or can be supported by the faculty in that department and at that university. For example, if you really, really, really want to study the genetics of apples but no one at the school is doing that work or anything similar, then that school is not a good fit for you. Just applying to top tier programs or programs in the city you want to live in with no real sense of who you want to work with is not going to bode well for your applications. That said, conventional wisdom is that there are no real safety schools at the graduate level. If the fit is bad, you may not get in even if your GPA and GRE are above the median for the department.

I doubt anyone will care, especially since they may not even see the same file name on their end. Our admin puts everything into a single PDF file with only the applicant's first and last names in the file name.

I mean, why would you apply under biocultural if you didn't actually want to work with any of those profs? There's really nothing you can do but apply next fall if you still want to go there.

A lot of this depends on what you want. Are you looking to go into clinical practice? Would you be able to do the clinical work you want to do with a master's? If the answer to the second question is no, then I'm not sure what you would gain by going to a non-clinical program. It seems like you might be better off taking a leave of absence to see what it is you really want to do, rather than taking on more debt when you're unsure about the program you're in.

Yea, I have several rec letters due Jan 1 that I haven't even written yet. They'll happen around the 29/30th because that's when I have time to deal with them. DON'T PANIC just yet.

In a nutshell, the teaching, research, and service expectations differ from those at schools without doctoral programs (or with fewer PhD programs). That is, while a 2/2 teaching load or less may be the norm at R1 or RU/VH, that isn't the case at schools where there is less emphasis on research. At those schools, the teaching load will be often be somewhere between 2/3 (elite SLAC, for example) and 4/4 (regional state university). I know what the ideal teaching to research balance is for me so, I only apply to schools where that's possible. I know that, for me, the expectation of 2-3 peer-reviewed publications a year, taking in at least one new PhD student a year, and teaching large introductory (200+ students) or big elective (50-75 students) courses is completely unappealing. The designation is a shorthand way of saying what it is I'm trying to avoid.

I highly doubt you're the only one, based on the posts here.

I don't see why you wouldn't take your supervisor up on this offer.

While a separate interview day or doing the interview via Skype may not be ideal, neither is being exhausted at an interview and underperforming. That is, this is one of the most important interviews of your life to date. Do you want to show up exhausted, miss out on the chance to interact with (potentially) your future colleagues, not get to explore your (potentially) future home city, etc.? To me, the potential negatives of doing things back to back and missing out on the "optional" events is way worse than asking to reschedule one visit. This happens all the time. You are not the first nor will you be the last applicant to have a scheduling conflict. For example, see the following post:

When they say they favor PhDs, they mean people with a PhD in economics, not people with a DBA. So, I'm really not sure how your job prospects would improve by getting the DBA over the MBA. Some of the schools you've listed offer some financial aid to applicants (scholarships, fellowships, etc.), so that's something you should look into and consider. I'm not sure that any MBA is worth spending $170K unless you're sure you're going to get a solid return on your investment. I would be paying careful attention to the placement stats for those programs to see what kinds of jobs you might be able to get after graduation.

In other words, yes, there are structural problems. It sounds similar to my PhD program actually. The number of incoming grad students is the same year after year, even though there's fewer TA opportunities, fewer major grants for people to be funded on (though in theory that could change), and thus more pressure for students to find assistantships through other departments or units on campus. All of this will likely increase time to degree and decrease publications for students. In fact, current PhD students asked the dept head whether a slight reduction in the number of new students admitted this year was possible and were immediately shut down on that. It's unfortunate that you all don't tell prospective students this. There was a period of time when I didn't but, by my last two years in the program, I got over that. Basically, I'd invite a prospective student out for a one-on-one coffee meeting and then give them the real dish about funding, time to degree, etc. They would usually thank me for it and tell me that no one else had told them those things.

@Quantum Buckyball, that sounds way, way worse than most labs or PhD programs that I know of. Are there broader structural issues with the department/program which are contributing to this?