eklavya

dancing hippo

Hey all, I am thinking about updating/expanding my music collection over the Christmas break. Therefore I thought it would be neat to gather info on what kind of music you folks listen to. I am partly curious to know what genre of music us 'grad-wannabes' prefer, and if that has changed over the course of your college life. This would be not a bad idea to spend some waiting time! Lets keep the format in this way: Artist - Genre - Albums/Songs - Year Your comments Since budget comes into play, please list only those that fall into 'MUST BUY/LISTEN' category. I'll start with few: Bob Dylan - folk/blues/jazz/swing - all, i guess? BB King, Ray Charles, Muddy Waters - (Chicago) blues/jazz - all Coldplay - alt rock - all Jack Johnson - soft rock/acoustics - all ...... If you can't tell already, I am a huge fan of oldies (esp. jazz fused) and don't have much knowledge on 'modern' songs. So please contribute!!

I listed the schools I was applying to. My thought was that if I list 'better/competitive' schools than this particular school, they might be like 'hmmm, this student is applying to GOOD programs. therefore we better recruit this guy!' Although in reality, that might not be the case. I don't know if it will help/hurt/nothing the applicants, but chillax dude, they certainly won't conspire against you

nope.... don't worry about it. it means that you did the job of researching about your prospective advisors very well, and are serious about doing a particular type of research.

1. it says (should say) on the dept or main grad admission website 2. NCState, UFlorida.. but beware that rolling deadlines are subjective to departments. therefore my dept might have rolling deadline whereas yours might not 3. some schools can make you offers before the deadline, but most schools don't. you can check the 'results' page to verify this. while there, also see when the decisions were made for your program/school

excellent! thanks for sharing!

this is not uncommon for international students to happen because well, lets face it, we aren't familiar with foreign names. when i came to the US few years ago, i was shocked at how misleading names could be. i met several girls with names such as michael, aaron, even robert! it is not very common, but isn't too surprising either. so, my take on your situation is that the adcomm might be okay with the mistake on two terms: 1) you are from another culture, and therefore the confusion is justifiable & 2) the adcomm knows that we all write a common SoP first, and then plug in the name of the university, professor, program, etc when submitting the SoPs to each school. thus, few errors are bound to happen. they anticipate this. that said, if the adcomm realizes that there are pictures of faculties on their dept websites, and you should not have made a mistake, it might not go well with them during application evaluation. moreover, once and if the teacher gets your application materials and sees the mistake, she might get offended... as you said, in similar situation, you'd be offended. on the bright side though, both adcomm and your prospective prof might think that because of cross-cultural differences, your mistake actually is funny and not offensive. i would not call her (or the dept) because it's a silly mistake, and not as big of a deal as you think. i know i have made few errors in my SoP, but nothing much to worry about. just cross your finger, and wait.. it'll all be well

I did not like how Michigan State's application was set up (for my program at least). It seriously looked like the most basic webpage created by a noob. There were no 'next', 'save' buttons! Thank god the page saved the typed data automatically! The recommendations had to be sent via snail mail. Not professional! Another annoying application was Iowa State's. It was a single page form and did not have an option to upload my resume. I had to snail mail the resume to the dept.

Majestic creatures, aren't they? They've gotta be one of the prettiest land-birds that roam the Intermountain North America! Too bad their number is dwindling. It is sad to see sagebrush vegetation being invaded by cheat grass and humans (my MS work is on sagebrush molecular genetics).

Waiting is the hardest. Deciding comes second... my top 3 choices are great programs (ranked within top 5) and it's going to be very difficult to choose. Moving comes third. All schools I have applied to are at least at a distance of a day's drive from where I live. I don't mind driving, but it's not going to be very much fun in driving across the midwest. Preparing to apply. Sending the apps was pretty easy... all my apps were online.

city bus

nose out

In addition to what has been suggested above, perhaps you have an old copy of the GRE with you, and you can send that? Or, the grad school to which you applied around the time you took your GRE might have the record somewhere? This is a longshot, but is definitely worth trying than paying $$ to ETS.

is this really a common thing to do if your letter writers are (HUGELY) renowned in your field? and they are science people. i did thank them via email, and i am sure they know i am grateful for their letters. but 'thank you' card or not, i think all our LoR writers do a heck of a job in pitching in for us. they deserve a day dedicated to them!

i don't think it'd be pushy at all. it's a very good idea to keep in regular contact with the profs and exchange the updates on your applications with them. i think they would appreciate you reminding them of the upcoming deadlines and when the letters need to reach by. i actually recommend updating/reminding them every week or so, but make sure you do this on the day when their teaching load is low. for example, most profs in my school teach MWF and have the other two days sorta "off". so, reminding them on monday evening or tuesday morning is a good idea.

the traffic's been high on all application servers these past few days... i haven't been able to access ApplyYourself either. give it a day or two, and things should be back to normal.

better yet, threaten to sell the work on ebay

if you believe that your professor knows you well enough to write you strong letters vouching for your candidacy, why not waive the right? if you don't waive the rights, first off, your profs might think that you don't trust them and that you don't respect/value the relationship you two have built over the course of few months/years. the writer would feel more comfortable on elaborating your strengths by knowing that you won't be reading the letters. moreover, if the adcomms finds out that you did not waive the rights, they might assign less weight on the LoRs. because they might get the idea that you had/have something to conceal, and therefore inspected the letters before deciding to send out to the schools. i waived my rights when i asked for letters.

dude, i've gone through this too. every morning you wake up, you're like 'this will be the day when my app will be complete!' but no dice rolls, and you come home with shattered heart same thing the next day, and the next, and so on. one of my prof kept pushing it until i got sick of it and told him that the university where he got his phd (am applying there) was going to do a first-round review of the applications within a week. a couple of days later, all my LoRs were in!

your prof might be working on it, and therefore hasn't responded to your email. the hard deadlines are generally for your application materials excluding the LoRs.... because you might have noticed that the instruction on the application page says it's ok/allowed to come back and edit the recommendation providers' info. as someone said above, it's not like your application will be tossed out because the LoRs were little late.

whoa! really?

yikes! how this is going to reflect on your depends on the adcomms. my first thought is that i think they'd think that your prof is the original writer of that paragraph and think you might have plagiarize it. this definitely won't turn out well. my second thought is that perhaps they will think your professor knows you very very well and therefore, is very familiar with your research work and interest. so it shouldn't be a big deal. however, if the paragraph is copy-pasted verbatim, the consequences are quite unpredictable. my last thought is that they will think you and your prof came to an agreement on what nature of LoR should be written for you. during the discussion, perhaps you guys outline exact sentences to put on the LoR and your SoP. having a conversation about what kind of letter to write is not uncommon - i have seen in few times in my own dept. i can't imagine what you are going through, but all i can say is play it cool. perhaps the consequences won't be as dire as you are thinking. if you haven't turned in the LoRs yet, maybe you can talk to the professor?

she's devilishly flaky, that's for certain. the main thing to consider here is that do you really want to go to a program that has a teacher like her? forget her awful behavior for once. but if she's a terrible teacher, do you really think you will excel at this particular dept where (i assume) she will be teaching you? now as to why she's asking you all the schools you will be applying to, it's hard to tell. she could be plotting a devious plan man, who knows! if i were you, i'd not tell her squat. there are people who want to know what's going on in other people's lives so that they can munch on the information, and live off it... you know, those guffy/gossipy types. moreover, there are people whi want to ruin things for others because they envy the progress. in her case (and if she really is THAT terrible), she might not have good intentions regarding your future, my friend! my advice: lay low, finish the class, apply elsewhere, and get the hell outta that place. no, grad coordinators can be professors. this is how it is in most schools because the school/dept wants professors to develop those 'managerial' skills. some extremely rich schools might have grad coordinators and profs as two separate entities, but it's not very common.

i do not know much about how fulbright works. however, i do know that if you have decent enough gpa, gre scores and good LoRs, you'll get into almost any schools because you have funding. and not any type of funding, the highly acclaimed fullbright. your gpa and gre would matter more in cases where you'd be applying for fellowship or ta/ra-ship or research grant to fund your studies. and you'd be screened in the same way as they do with all other applicants, which could have altered/reduced your fate of getting into your school of choice. but that's not the case. so i don't think retaking it is necessary. if you are really worried about your low AW and Q scores, perhaps you can email some professors you want to work with, and see what they have to say. if you show enthusiasm in their work, and if the profs see that your academic record fit with what they are doing, i don't see why they'd not be interested in you. again, the important fact here is that you already have money. so the profs won't have to go around looking for money to support you. this should go very well with you imo. good luck!

cookie dough