GeoDUDE!

I think if you think graduate school isn't 100% analogous to a job you are in a rude awakening.... you would never tell a grade school teacher never to have a child because she/he only makes 30k a year. The thought that anyone is special for going to graduate school is special, or that graduate school is special just because its graduate school is really arrogant and misinformed. Its up to the individuals to make that time special, just like anything else. There is a reason why graduate students don't walk around in black and white robes like nuns.

close means being able to express these things to your advisor. If you have fear of doing this, you are not close.

National Labs, R&D in industry.

That scholarship doesnt require a 3.0 standing?

I think your only problem will be funding. if the program director wants you to appeal, you should be fine. Many places require above a 3.0 total gpa to retain RA/TA/GA

Can all 9 of these credits be research credits? If so, then I think its easily doable. Another thing you might do is ask to do an independent study that incorporates the work you are doing for the internship. For example, there was a research project that I wanted to work on during my masters that was separate from my thesis, so I proposed me writing the model as a independent study. I wrote all I would learn from it, wrote a paper, and submitted it to my advisor for credit. Perhaps there is something you can do like that with this internship? Another thing is, it depends on how long will you be doing it. If its just for 1 semester, working 60 hours a week is fine. But for longer than that, it might start to be a bit heavy. It also depends on how you work in classes. Say 9 credits is 3 classes. I only spend 2 hours a week per class, no matter what it is, and am perfectly happy getting a B in class. So 9 credits is only 6 hours a week, if you think 6 hours + 16 hours gives you 18 hours a week for dissertation work if you want to keep it at 40 hours. I think around 20 hours a week of work on dissertation is enough for someone who wants to graduate in 4-5 years as long as you are a reasonably productive researcher. Finally, have a discussion with your advisor. He/She wants what is best for your career (hopefully). If this internship is really good (and it sounds like it is) he will help you find a way to make it work. When you really want something, you can move mountains. You just need good justification to do so.

I use iCal

3.5 is not bad. I had a 3.05 graduating from undergrad and got into a T20 school in the earth sciences. You are also a rising sophomore. You have so much of your college career left to worry about GPA. Try and have some fun. If you end up graduating with a 3.5, there will be a spot for you in graduate school.

The larger capcity drives also last longer (flash has limited read/write speeds). They should all last 5+ years.

A solid state drive is a nonmechanical hard drive. On mechanical harddrives, data is stored on a metal platter and accessed physically where as on SSD it is storred on flash memory, similar to your cellphone (but much higher grade). This allows the data transfer speeds (read and write) to be much faster. A 7200 rpm harddrive can read/write ~ 80 mb/s where as SSDs can read and write up to 1 GB/s (over 10x faster than mechanical harddrives). Because of this your boot times will be faster, and load times will be faster. Saving will be faster. Basically it makes every thing you do faster with the exception of calculations. My 2011 Macbook pro hard boots in 12 seconds. WHen it had a mechanical drive, it took about 1 minute. Another benefit is that because the SSD is not mechanical (no moving parts) it is much more shock resistant. They also draw less power, so you will get a 1-3% improvement in battery life. THe reason why SSDs are expensive in general is because they are more expensive to manufacture at this point. MLC ( Multilayered flash) that is used to make these SSDs have not been manufactured as long as Mechanical Harddrives so the efficiency is down. ANother reason is there is greater demand: They also use flash for cellphones, mp3 players, RAM on computers and pretty much any electronic device that has non mechanical storage. There is actually a flash shortage, causing the prices to go up. Its important to note that when I bought my 512 SSD 3 years ago it was ~500 dollars. So getting one for ~350 is still a pretty good deal.

You should always start with a question and never a topic. Questions help you 1) Figure out what your going to do and 2) puts constraints on your project. You could ask: Does Dark Matter Exist? Then you can find all the relevant articles that attempt to answer that question. Within those articles there are probably gaps or bounds. Try and find a way to either expand what others have done, or fill in gaps that others have not been able to fill.

All of my visits were offered. Some of the bigger schools have visiting days where all the accepted students come on the same day, some do it individually. Usually its a Thurs-Sat affair, and they either book you a hotel or in the case of my dept (if you are interested in info, you should pm me) we tend to have them stay with one of the grad students on a extra bed/couch. Some departments that don't normally have students visit after being accepted still allow potential advisors to fly students out using grant money, and that is something either your potential advisor could offer or you could inquire about. If you did have to pay out of pocket to visit, I think it would be more beneficial to pay AFTER you have been accepted. Hopefully you have choices between many programs, but since graduate school admissions is not predictable (because of funding) I feel that choosing places based on interactions with potential advisors, and information you can find on the web / past experiences is more than enough to figure out where you should apply. Where you should go once you've been accepted to these programs is a different matter, and things like financial offers, location, ect should come into play. That's at least how I've seen the most successful people approach it. So a lot of Professors have many different projects they want to work on. Interactions with potential students can help shape what problems they might want to work on first. IE, I have a strong potential student who wants to do field work so I will write a field work grant instead of laboratory grant this time around. Its not so much that they will write a grant for you (although, if you really are that strong, it might be the case) but it helps them further predict how their research program will proceed in the near future and that student will be more likely to get in because of it. Maybe a better way to put it is it will not be a grant for student X, but a grant for a new graduate student who is interested in researching Y. Because that student is interested in researching Y, the student has a better chance of being picked! That being said people are gonna do what they are gonna do. I wouldn't count on something like that, but its worth it to at least contact a few POIs that you really want to work with in the middle of summer rather than at he beginning of fall. FWIW, my advisor and I weren't in contact until the end of September. I know people who met their advisor in December(AGU) when applications were due in Janurary. So none of these are absolutes... always keep looking !

few things: 1) I think july is a good time to contact them, because NSF grants are due in August-Dec and they might write one with a student like you in mind depending on your research interests ect. 2) Most good departments pay for you to come visit AFTER you have already been accepted. If they are close by it doesnt hurt to meet them in person, or meet them at AGU/GSA/ect but in general I think visiting before getting accepted is a waste of time. Of course, this is all coming from the perspective of doing a PhD in the earth sciences. A masters student is less likely to have a grant catered to their interests and also less likely to be flown out to visit (although my department does pay for MS students to visit).

Safari is by far the fastest on OSX, followed by firefox and opera. Chrome was the fastest ~5 years ago, but has slowly become more bloated as more people have added features. I still use chrome because I like some of the features, but it does have major drawbacks that safari does not have. I've contemplated switching to safari. and fwiw, my workstation runs 16 cores and 64gb of ram so its not the hardware bottlenecking my experiences. If you really want to upgrade your laptop, esotericish is right that ram is a good idea. Just note that most laptops these days only have 2 memory slots and usually have 2gb each, but a 4 gb stick of ddr3 is only ~30 bucks. I think a bigger upgrade, if you already have 4gb of ram , is a solid state drive, where you can get a 256gb one for less than 100. I haven't used a windows PC in a while (~1 year) but I know on OSX/Linux that 4gb of ram is more than enough for 99% of tasks. Unless you are using big data (10^6+ data points), 1440p+ video editing, or 16 megapixel+ raw photo editing your speed increases won't be that huge from a ram upgrade above 4 gb. OSX and Ubuntu at least have very strong ram management / trash collecting so it really shouldn't be a problem. I think 8gb of ram is more for future proofing and less about what you need now.

Chrome also kills your laptop battery (draining more means more recharging means shorter lifespan)

If you don't have an elevator pitch it is hard to take you seriously as a researcher. It means you aren't thinking enough about how to communicate your findings. No one cares if you do great research if you don't tell anyone. As many people would put it: It isn't science until you publish it. And that elevator pitch is part of publishing, indirectly (getting money/contacts).

Program deadlines should be listed on the webpage of said program. Check yourself!

Besides being against the law, it is also morally reprehensible to not report your full income.

I cannot disagree with this statement enough. If you cannot explain something to a non-specialist you have not really learned it. For many NSF grants there is a public abstract (one for the general tax payers to read) and a specialist abstract. While you might go into detail with a specialist, but I can explain my research to someone without a college education. I know because I've talked to high schoolers about it. Perhaps my research isn't as esoteric or technical as some others here.

If you don't know something, why not ask what it is? Sometimes having a conversation in a topic you dont know anything about, very little, or even not much interest in can be a point of entry into an even better conversation.

You shouldn't be nervous about calculus 3. Calculus 3 at most schools is a lower division undergraduate course (there are upper division multivariable calculus classes, but those are analysis courses that you probably shouldn't be taking). You will be fine, you probably took calc 1 and 2 very early in your undergraduate career and math always gets easier the older you get. Its pretty impossible to be a geophysicist without multivariable calculus and linear algebra. Fortunately those really aren't hard classes as long as you work at it. Also, since they are undergraduate level classes, I am betting that they won't count towards your GPA, so you can just focus on learning the ideas behind said math and not worry if you have trouble getting through the computations. Going through Coursera/ MIT might be a good idea, but the more difficult parts of completing an MS is actually doing the research, and you might want to focus on background reading instead if you want to get a head start. Do you know what kinda methods your going to be using?Read up on that!

Hey ylekyote, perhaps your question might be better answered on earthscience.stackexchange.com ?

You need to ask your advisor about this.

Bank of America. Wells Fargo. USAA.

If anyone is looking for a place to sublet (furnished or unfurnished) in a primo location this summer (july, august, with the lease being over august 31st) let me know. Note you must be a graduate student or incoming graduate student.