Adelantero

The ethical decision the rotation #2 PI should be making is to not bully graduate students. All the faculty in the department should be interested primarily in helping the students in the department to do well. I'm sorry you have to deal with ridiculous people in positions of power. I really hope that the other folks on your prelims committee are more sensible people who will be more interested in your future and less in hers. I hope your PI sticks up for you when this is all going down though. Advisers should fight their students' corners. Period.

Got the NSF GRF! I already feel more relaxed and I think I'm going to get a lot done this summer. Two of us in the lab got the fellowship, which is pretty exciting. One of us would have been a little extra disappointed if only one had won, I'm sure.

I'm in a program where we are essentially admitted to a specific adviser, so I was able to get a letter from her pretty easily, but wouldn't have felt good about asking anyone else, as I didn't really know the other faculty well. If you're in a program where you don't yet have an adviser, I bet you can still get a pretty good letter. After all, a committee of these people sat down and decided that they wanted you in their program. so they already know you well enough to think you're going to do great. If it's possible, maybe sit down with one of the faculty that shares your interests most closely in Sept., talk about your plans and your proposal, and ask that person what you would need to do to get a letter out of them. I guess that sounds like bribery, but what I mean is that they probably have an idea of how to get to know you well enough to write a letter. Alternatively, I bet you could get a professor that's teaching a course you're taking or TAing to write a letter, as long as you take time to sit down with them and chat.

I've been paging through this post since I was admitted in the spring and appreciate a lot of the suggestion! I've moved into a radically new environment - from a small liberal arts college to a large state university, and from living in relatively rural areas to the sprawl zone of an enormous city. I live in a house with three other grad students. I'm just getting started here, but I have a few insights to share for those getting started in the future: You'll have work/study space at school/in the lab, but you need dedicated study space at home - somewhere where you can leave yourself notes, have things organized for what you need to work on next, keep books and papers. Somewhere that doesn't double as anything else. If I work in bed, then I tend to end up piling up my work on the floor when I go to bed, which then gets pushed around and covered up. Keep it in the right place. So - have a desk you like, that's comfortable, and that can hold your stuff. It doesn't need to be a massive computer desk with 80 cubby holes for everything under the sun, but it does need a drawer at least. Get some sort of planner. Some of us like minimalism. Some people like a planner with lots of guidance - to do lists, goals, etc. Figure out what you like, or buy both. Spend time with schedule organization. If you use both a physical planner and an online calendar (Outlook, google) you might just end up being better organized by keeping both up to date. It forces you to look ahead at the calendar so that the other can be up-to-date too. Give yourself some comfort. Do you like to cook? I do. I brought all my kitchen gear with me, including lugging a kitchenaid mixer I don't really need half way across the country. Because time-consuming things like baking, or making a really good meal, are great opportunities to let your brain process things and to think about things outside of the normal stress-and-work context. So I have all my weird kitchen utensils and ingredients and I cook and I think. And I end up with leftovers that save money. Snapware. Tupperware. Buy it. Have some other thing you like to do? Do it. And put it in your calendar and bring the stuff you need to do it with you. Organization tools - Everyone manages their space in different ways, but if you can keep your space tidy and focused, you can have tidy and focused thoughts too. If your space is messy just because you don't have an efficient way of organizing it, get that efficient way! Get shelves, get a file cabinet, get little organization knicknacks. This stuff is cheap at goodwill. Stuff you like working with. An uncomfortable desk chair is going to kill your concentration. You don't need to spend a gazillion dollars to have a good chair, but don't settle for one that will make you not want to do work. Likewise, lighting that doesn't fatigue your eyes or cast weird shadows on your desk or workspace. Think about this stuff as you settle in and figure out what you need to change. Don't just get used to stuff that sucks! Buy notebooks that feel good to write in, and pens that don't hurt your hand. Some method of holding papers in your bag that doesn't leave them wrinkled or torn (story of my life). There's enough misery involved in the amount of work required to get a graduate degree. Don't make more by refusing address other things that make you miserable. Ask yourself why you don't like, cooking, reading at home, showering, typing at your desk, being in the office. If it's caused by something you can change or work around, make it happen! Is it the noise? The light? The feel of the space or the objects you interact with? You're all awesome, super-smart people. We don't need to have a terrible time trying to do awesome, super-smart stuff. Make your space work, or find someone with better design sense to help! Out.

Starting classes monday. The class I'm TAing has more students in it than my entire undergrad institution's students, staff, and faculty combined. Culture shock. Otherwise awesome.

Bummer. Your institution must have turned it off.

With an institutional gmail account you can do it really easily. When you compose a new email, there's a tiny triangle in the lower right corner of the message. Click it and you'll see "request read receipt" I think your gmail administrator can select whether the recipient can see that a read receipt has been requested, but I tested it out with a friend before I did it the first time. We couldn't find any indication in the email that it was there, but I still got a message saying it had been opened. Granted, having read receipts visible to my professor might have lit a fire under him if he could have seen them, so maybe it works out well both ways.

I had a professor in undergrad (my adviser actually) who would not read emails for days or weeks after I'd sent them. This seemed to be common with all his students. It got to the point that I would send read receipts with my emails to help me budget my time - ie if I knew it had been a week and was still unopened I could figure out what kind of damage control I needed to do if a deadline was approaching and he sent me edits the night before. That opened my eyes to the kind of email exchanges I like to have with other people, and I changed my own behavior accordingly. I'm considerate of what I think others want out of the exchange, but unless someone tells me that they would rather I didn't send emails saying things like "Thank you!" or "I'll get right on that" or "I'll see you at 10:30 Monday," I'll keep doing it. Because that's what I like to receive. I like to know that my email was opened, read, didn't go to the spam folder, and wasn't somehow addressed wrong or caught in some corner of the university's sprawling network. In most email programs, you can see when an email only has a short reply ("Sounds great, thanks!") without even opening it, so you can just glance through your inbox and know that the person has read your email and has agreed or what have you. It takes exactly no work. Demands on time are typically not so great that every second counts. We're not trying to disarm the doomsday device.

I'm still hunting. I'm in Washington state for the summer and can't really get out to Long Island until just before the start of term, so it's going to be a bit of a struggle.

Are you familiar with the Story Collider? This is a podcast in story format with stories told by people working in or affected by science. Sometimes it's a good listen, sometimes not. I bring this up because there's a great episode http://storycollider.org/podcast/2012-01-15 here ("Inside the Monkey Lab"). Basically the story of a guy in a somewhat similar position, and how he handles working in a lab where non-human primates are used for medical research. It's not propaganda in one direction or another, just one young biologist's very personal experiences. It's about a 13-minute listen.

I'm in a similar boat for summer work, but when I applied for the May-Sept job I've accepted, I was up-front in my cover letter about my schedule. I think the fact that you're going to graduate school is actually a plus in hiring. In my situation, there are several people covering more-or-less the same kind of work, so the other people will have the opportunity to work a little extra and make more money at the end of the season when I'm leaving. There could be arrangements like that for you. I know it's tough sending out gobs of resumes and cover letters, but surely there is someone out there that wants you bad enough to let you bail out at the end of the season. Maybe if they know right away (in the cover letter), you can even propose to set a timeline for yourself that allows you to accomplish much of the work that you would have done in September ahead of time. Be proactive and creative.

I think in most places you're supposed to get a driver's license in the state you've moved to within a few month or so. That said, you can swing it if you're a student. I moved to Maine from New Mexico and kept my NM license until it expired. My car was registered in Maine (where I bought it) but I drove with an out of state license. My partner was pulled over once in a similar license/registration situation and the cop didn't mind because she told him she was a student. The problems come when you want to open a local bank account (especially for regional credit unions) and other bureaucratic things. Still, I considered myself a resident of Maine while holding a NM license and registered to vote in ME using a local bank statement. If you want to follow the letter of the law, you change your residency. Otherwise, you do what's most convenient to you and apologize later if it becomes a problem.

In talking with a new professor in my department, there's a bus that will take you from Port Jeff to campus. The problem with living close to campus is that there really isn't a town. In other words, it's a task to get groceries and what not without a car unless you live in one of the towns nearby that actually have supermarkets. But then you need a car to get to school... catch 22.

If orientation is a week before term, then orientation starts the week of the 24th of august. Which is going to make my life hellish because I get off of my job on the other side of the country on the 17th.

This probably isn't quite what you had in mind, but I use OneNote for a lot of note-taking and personal organization. It's bundled in the microsoft office package. It has a tool that lets you send things into onenote if you want. So for example, if I take pictures with my phone and hook my phone up to my PC and open up the pictures, I can basically grab the images and export them right to one note. So no, it's not recognizing text or cleaning up images, but it is still a highly functional program

Okay - just back from the departmental retreat. Here's what I can report re: housing - Almost everyone told me that living on campus was a waste of money. Long Island is sort of a weird place covered in strip malls with few real towns in the way that most people think of them. Grad students are pretty spread out in a circle from the campus, so I think driving time factors into folks' decisions as to where to live. Port Jefferson seems to be the place that people suggested first, with the caveat that it's typically a little more expensive. Housing is expensive in general, and most of the towns nearby restrict legal rentals to 3 people who are not a family. So as you can imagine, the majority of people living off campus live illegally, either in apartments that are floors of someone's home, converted basements, or whole homes with a ton of bedrooms. I was told it's kind of hard to do the apartment shopping thing from afar, but the gang in my lab was super helpful and offered to take a look at a place for me if I found one I liked. There are also typically departmental email lists you could get in on, because other grad students are always looking to fill rooms that people have moved out of. I'm worrying less about it all now.

I'll be visiting the department next weekend and I'll talk to some of the current students about housing. I get the feeling most grad students live off campus, which is what I would want to do in any case. Still, I'm not sure I'm going to have a lot of time in August to arrive very early, see a few apartments, and make a decision, so I'm not really sure what I'll end up doing. I've been watching craigslist every couple of days, but I figure more places will open up after the end of the academic year/closer to August.

I see a few options here. I would definitely have a meeting with another professor who is something of a mentor/someone you like and can speak confidentially to. These are people who have more experience with how your department works or how your professor works than you do, and can give you good, on-the-ground advice. It can be confidential and doesn't have to be a reporting misconduct kind of thing, but rather a meeting to ask for advice. Depending on the personality of your supervisor, it can be really tricky to bring this stuff up and having another person's perspective could help you formulate your script in a better way. If your supervisor somehow flat-out denies it, then that sounds like it might be time for a formal complaint, but I wouldn't throw that around like a threat. If that comes up, it's time to schedule another meeting maybe with your department chair to discuss options. If your supervisor handles it in a better way, it might be a great time to ask (or gently demand) that you be made a co-author. In short it's not normal to paraphrase or copy - even sentences and paragraphs - without attribution. It's your work and you own it.

I'm still waiting on UCSC too, but they would have to throw money at me to keep me interested at this point.

It's not based on loans at all. As long as you're in school full time, they'll defer

I'm curious about this too. I'm going to be visiting campus to meet the department in a week or two, and I'll ask current students. Still given that Stony Brook and the surrounding towns with apartments are seasonal with regards to the student population, it's tough to know what to do.

I'm coming off of a seasonal gig that paid really well and my expenses should be low until I start school in the fall. I'm also getting a pretty good stipend. Since my seasonal job was at sea, where I had 0 expenses, I started throwing a tiny bit of money into the stock market just to get a feel for how it works and what to look for. I've done poorly. Which is a great lesson in different ways, but I think eventually it will make me some money. Again since I'm sitting on cash for the first time ever, I've been trying to figure out what to do with it to make it do work for me, and so I put a bit into a mutual fund too and am trying to look at other options. Maybe this is a good idea, maybe not. I'm probably not going to put anything in a retirement account for the time being because if things go south, I want to have access to my money until I have a stable job. But if you can afford to invest somewhere, it's probably worth it. Even if it's just a little each month or each semester. I get the feeling people rarely get wealthy by starting late.

Looks like you can defer for up to 3 years just based on employment. So if you're not employed full time or are unemployed, no problem. If you are working full time all summer, you might still qualify for deferment for "economic hardship." https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/deferment-forbearance

Give your loan bank a call. If this is a federal loan (subsidized or unsubsidized), you can also defer payment if you aren't making enough money. For recent grads, that's pretty much always the case. Basically unless you get an awesome job right out of school, you're probably not earning above that threshold, and they will let you continue to not pay. They may check in on you (this happened to me when I was deferring) and ask if you're trying to find full-time employment. They obviously want you to give them money, and they will suggest various places for you to look for jobs. Just tell them you are looking for employment, and they'll be happy. Then, when you get back into school, that deferment kicks in too. Short story, call them and tell them you're not making enough money to pay. They'll let you not pay.

Bean boots are an acquired taste to be sure. I went to undergrad in Maine, so eventually they just seemed normal to me. If you put on a flannel shirt, those boots look great. They're super comfortable and like Crucial BBQ said, you can return them for a full refund whenever. I'm on my third pair now because I wear the bejeezus out of them in Maine. Half the winter boots out there are knock-offs of the LL Bean design anyway. In general, winter boots are not fashion-forward unless they're designed to actually be useless in winter.